A sermon on Mark 9:38-50 by Nathan Nettleton

Mark Twain once said that the parts of the Bible that disturbed him most were not the parts he couldn’t understand, but the parts he could. Some of the teachings of Jesus are so radical that most people can’t imagine any way to put them into practice. And near the top of the list when people are discussing such things is part of today’s gospel reading — the bit about cutting off parts of your body if they lead you into sin. But in fact, I reckon that part is far from the most radical teaching in this section of Mark’s gospel, or even in this passage. The thing that is most radical is perhaps so radical that we can’t even begin to believe it or even imagine it and so we overlook it entirely. We just don’t notice it. And actually, the gospel writer seems to predict that by telling us that the first disciples were similarly oblivious to it. No matter how many times Jesus told them, they just kept right on making the same mistake over and over and over. And part of the disaster of our continued incomprehension is that, as a result, we have read the gruesome bit about self-mutilation being better than ending up burning in hellfire as meaning almost the polar opposite of what Jesus was actually saying in it.

Let me show you how Mark portrays this in his gospel account, because to see it we have to look at what comes before and after tonight’s extract. We’re working through a section over several weeks in which, right at the mid point of his story, Mark depicts the disciples repeatedly showing how much they just don’t get it. The section tellingly begins and ends with stories of Jesus opening the eyes of blind people, and as if that wasn’t an obvious enough metaphor for what is going on in the stories in between, in the first one, Jesus has trouble healing the man’s eyes. On his first attempt the man can only see people looking like trees walking, and Jesus has to have another go before man can see clearly. It’s hard work getting people to see clearly, as the stories in between show. Here’s how they progress.

First, as we heard two weeks ago, Simon Peter identified Jesus as the long awaited messiah, and Jesus commended him for that, but then within minutes Jesus was having to tell him off for completely misunderstanding what being the messiah meant and trying to argue Jesus into a more powerful and impressive approach to messiahship. Next three of the disciples witness Jesus transfigured on the mountain, and then when they come down they encounter the rest of their group trying unsuccessfully to cast a demon out of a demonised boy. Then last week, we heard how the disciples were completely missing the point when they started arguing with one another over which of them was the greatest. In response, Jesus took a small child in his arms and said that the true measure of greatness was the ability to welcome those who were small and seemingly unimportant as though they were Jesus himself. Now tonight we hear that the very next thing that happens is that one of the disciples, John, reports that they came across a bloke casting out demons in Jesus name, but “don’t worry”, says John, “we stopped him because he wasn’t one of us.” And Jesus has to tell them off again. Notice the irony in Mark’s development of the story here. The disciples have just tired to cast demons out in Jesus name and they couldn’t do it. Here is a bloke who doing it successfully, actually healing demonised people, and the disciples think he should be stopped because he’s not one of them! Jesus’s response includes these difficult words about amputations being better than hellfire. Now looking ahead another dozen or so verses we find, believe it or not, that the disciples are trying to stop people from bringing their children to Jesus, as though Jesus hadn’t just told them that welcoming children was a sign of greatness in his community. Then we’ve got the story of the rich young man choosing not to follow Jesus, and the disciples expressing bewilderment when Jesus says that the rich will find it hard to get in. Then James and John ask Jesus if they can sit on his right and left in glory so, once again, we’ve got disciples trying to one-up each other and be recognised as the greatest. They just don’t get it. And that brings us back to the second story of healing a blind man, and Mark hints that, unlike the disciples the blind man gets it. So Mark is trying hard to warn us just how hard it is, even as followers of Jesus, to get our heads around the importance of what Jesus is saying here. And he emphasises it by structuring the story with this series of frames: two stories of opening the eyes of the blind, enclosing two stories of disciples trying to establish themselves as the greatest, enclosing two stories of welcoming children as the model of kingdom life, and the central story, in the middle of all these frames, is tonight’s extract. So there is no question that Mark not only wants us to really tune in to this story, but that he wants us to read it in the context of all these framing stories.

So let’s tune in to it now. Most of the attention usually falls on the meaning of verse 42: “If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea.” That verse then leads into the stuff about cutting off body parts being preferable to burning in hellfire, so causing a little one to stumble is what we are being so strongly warned against. Better a millstone tied round your neck or your body chopped to bits than you put a stumbling block in front of a little one. I’ve had this verse pointed at me many times, usually because of my allegedly lax and heretical attitudes to homosexuality and pre-marital co-habitation. Supposedly, by allowing people to think that their “sins” are okay, I’m causing them to stumble and so I’m destined to burn in hellfire. But such an interpretation, although understandable, ignores all the context and framing that Mark builds around it. Mark does his best to make it clear. There is another sort of framing here too. It is Mark’s other signature technique, called sandwiching, where he interrupts one story by inserting another one into it. This is important here. The story about John trying to stop an unauthorised exorcist from healing demonised people in Jesus’s name because he wasn’t one of their group is sandwiched into Jesus’s comments about the little children. Listen to how naturally it flows if you take it back out.
“Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me. If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea.”
It makes perfect sense like that, and makes it clearer that the ones we better not cause to stumble are firstly the children Jesus is welcoming. But when Mark inserts the story of the unauthorised exorcist into it, the two are supposed to be interpreted in relation to each other. They each shed light on the other. So what are they saying to each other here?

The story of stopping the unauthorised exorcist, being framed by the comments about welcoming children and by the incidents of the disciples jockeying for recognition as the greatest, begins to be clearly about a failure to welcome an outsider the way Jesus would wish the outsider to be welcomed, and that failure is seen as a consequence of the desire to protect and promote our own position and status as the most privileged of “insiders”. And, in light of that story, the image of putting a stumbling block before the little ones begins to be seen not so much as causing them to sin, but putting obstacles in their path when they seek to approach Jesus and gain the sort of access to Jesus that we insiders have. So why do I say this is so radical?

Let me illustrate. On Friday, I went to the Royal Melbourne Show. I go most years; not as often as Lindsay who lives just across the road from it and usually goes every day, but I usually go for at least one day. But this year was different. For the first time I went as an exhibitor or an entrant. I had one of my dogs entered in the action dogs obedience competition. The whole experience of being at the show felt entirely different. I got to enter by a special gate. I had a special badge to wear. I got to walk round in areas that I have never been previously allowed to go. I was treated differently by many people. I was now treated as “one of us” instead of “one of them”. If I walked through a public area with my dog, members of the public stopped and looked as us admiringly. Our actual performance in the ring was less than admirable, but most of the day, that didn’t matter. I was one of the privileged ones; an insider. I’ve had something of the same feeling at this time of year when the team I follow made the Grand Final, and as a “member”, one of the “real supporters”, I got to go to the game.

It is a very seductive feeling. Everybody loves to feel accepted and special. Everybody loves to feel like an insider of a special and worthwhile group. But one of the almost universal human reactions to that feeling is to try to protect it by ensuring that it remains sufficiently exclusive. After all, if everyone is a privileged insider, there no longer seems to be anything special about it. If everyone at the show has the special badge, I’m back to just being one of the ordinary crowd. So we want to define and defend the boundaries. You are only allowed in if you measure up to these expectations and are approved by us. So the disciples want to stop people bringing children to Jesus because access to Jesus is their special privilege, not something mere children can share. And they want to stop the unauthorised exorcist healing people in Jesus’s name because he’s not “one of us” and you have to be one of us to be allowed to do anything in Jesus’s name (even if we’re not much good at doing it ourselves). And soon even just being accepted as “in” by Jesus is not enough for them; they have to start fighting over who is the most in, who is the closest to Jesus, the inner sanctum, the insiders of the insiders.

And on and on we go, down through the centuries, defining our boundaries and protecting our privileged insider status. Nearly every church has lists of criteria by which certain people are excluded, if not from church membership, then certainly from holding positions of leadership. Every church has people who want to police the membership roll and decide when people should no longer be allowed to remain on it. This privilege is ours, and we can’t bear to cheapen it by allowing those who don’t deserve it to share it. And we see the same impulses at play in nearly every issue that causes any controversy. Endeavours to keep homosexual people out of the church have been an obvious example, but you can hear it in the debates over same-sex marriage too. Many argue that you can’t change the definition of marriage to include “those” people. Let them come up with a different word, their own label. Don’t let “them” be seen as the same as “us”. So we have to “defend” marriage and keep “them” out of “our” privileged club. This is so universal that it is almost impossible for us to imagine the world without it. We certainly can’t imagine the church without it. It seems to be something essential to the very nature of religion. Some people are part of this religion and some people aren’t and it’s all pretty clear. It is a clear and fundamental matter of identity, and if you were to take it away, the whole concept of becoming a committed member of a particular religion seems to fall apart. That’s certainly what the disciples of Jesus thought. That’s certainly what pretty much every one of us thinks. That’s completely normal. But it is also something that Jesus says is hellishly wrong. It is precisely what Jesus calls “putting a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me”, putting obstacles in front of those who want to draw close to Jesus. We see ourselves as courageously maintaining the standards of holiness and commitment, but Jesus sees us as narrowing our eyes and looking for excuses to shut people out so that we can keep the privileged status of insiders to ourselves. And Jesus takes this so seriously, that he resorts to the sort of wildly apocalyptic language that he usually rejects or tones down to describe his horror at such boundary policing being done in his name. You’d be better off with a millstone tied round your neck and thrown into the sea. You’d be better off with your hands and feet cut off and your eyes cut out. Suddenly the only image of hellfire that Jesus uses is not for sinners outside the church at all, but those inside the church who try to keep other people out by putting obstacles in their path. In one of the most extreme things he ever says, Jesus basically says “Open the doors to all comers, or burn.”

Actually, before I finish, I need to admit that I may have overdone it a bit in dismissing the idea of this stumbling block having anything to do with causing others to sin. That implication is still there as well. But it is most clearly about the children, and it is still in this same context and on this same subject. So it seems that the sort of “causing the little ones to sin” that Jesus is talking about is probably best understood as a fierce reminder that our exclusionary policing of our insider and outsider group boundaries moulds the behaviour of our children. If they observe us constantly treating outsiders with suspicion and hostility, they are likely to grow up doing the same. That’s why hardly any of us can even begin to imagine the world without these categories and boundaries. We’ve inherited that worldview and we are in the process of passing it on again. But we’ve got it all hellishly wrong, says Jesus. And when you stop to think about it, it may just be a statement of the bleeding obvious that we’d be better off drowning in the sea with millstones tied around our necks than drowning in the sea of hatreds and suspicions and hostilities and wars that we have created for ourselves with our excluding and divisiveness and religious competitiveness.

When we come to this table in a few minutes, it is fundamentally important that we remember that it is not our table; it is the Lord’s table. It is the table of the one who rebukes our every impulse to fence it, to decide on his behalf who can and can’t come to it, who is and isn’t saved, or worthy, or acceptable, or sufficiently spiritual. We always use the words here, “Whosoever will may come, not because you are worthy, nor because any church gives permission, but simply because Jesus offers himself to you and you want to offer yourself in return.” I hope that tonight we will all hear the challenge of those words more clearly. Because not only does it imply that nobody needs our permission to share at this table, but that sharing at this table constitutes who we are. Whosoever will may come, may be an insider, may be one of us, because “us” has no other meaning. There is no them who may not also be us, because there is no limited supply of the love and mercy and acceptance that Jesus shares here. It is all probably too radical for us to get our heads around anytime soon — the first followers of Jesus kept getting it all hellishly wrong too — but maybe it will only be by practising it, starting here at this table where our risen Lord models it for us, that we will ever begin to get it.