Setting an Example
Twenty-sixth Sunday of the Year. Fr Peter Harries preaches on some surprising teaching of Christ.
On Sundays we hear the gospel read in small chunks, not as a whole as Saint Mark probably intended. So sometimes we miss the setting. Today’s passage follows the transfiguration, when Jesus is revealed as fully divine, the true son of God, but also that he was destined to die in Jerusalem; we then hear part of Jesus’s final teaching before he heads to Jericho and Jerusalem, for his passion, death and resurrection.
The lines are sharpening between those who venerate Jesus as the long-awaited messiah and those who reject him. The boundaries of the community of Jesus’s disciples – the nascent church – are hardening. John, perhaps the youngest apostle, like many enthusiastic youngsters, wants the security of firm boundaries. If this strange exorcist magician is not with us, he is against us and must be stopped. This exorcist was probably like other recorded characters on the fringes of Judaism, who made a living of claimed healing, supposed exorcisms, and alleged miracles. We have similar people today, mixing religion and self-promotion, often advertising themselves on social media. Jesus, perhaps unexpectedly, teaches that if someone is speaking well of Jesus himself, even without firm faith, they such a person is not against us. They are for us, for if they speak well of Jesus they are open to the Holy Spirit. Hopefully they will join us in full communion.
This openness to the Spirit outside the chosen band is the theme of the first reading. Moses had chosen seventy elders, but these otherwise unknown characters Eldad and Medad also prophesy – whatever prophesying meant. The Spirit was given to them as well, Joshua, young and keen like the later youngster apostle John, wanted to stop them, to limit the Spirit, but Moses who is the wise teacher, is happy.
This positive theme about outsiders continues in when Jesus tells the disciples that if an outsider gives even as little as a cup of water to the little ones, any disciple, they will be rewarded. If instead we create obstacles and disparage the little ones, those who trust in God’s mercy, then things will go very badly for those creating scandal. They can look forward to having a large millstone (the type hauled by a donkey) tied round their neck and being drowned.
Jesus then warns us about following the part of virtue and not that of vice. If our hand causes us to sin, cut it off. Many sins we commit with our hands, stealing, hitting someone, gluttony, or these days using our mobile phones to access pornography. If our foot cause us to sin, cut it off. In those days people went by foot to get to the place to sin, although these days me might drive or use a bus, or access the internet to take us to fake-news and hate-filled content. If our eyes cause us to sin, cut it out. Our eyes, like their eyes, draw us to that which is apparently good, stimulate our undisciplined appetite, and lead us, like the people of Jesus’ time, to sins of lust or gluttony. Some commentators have suggested that in this whole passage Jesus in coded language, is telling us to avoid sexual sins, of child sex-abuse and of sexual license, both with others and ourselves. Both interpretations are true, whichever Mark intended.
There is a colourful exaggeration in Jesus’ language, cut our eye out, cut our hand off and throw it away. Jesus says that it is better to enter life crippled or one-eyed rather than going to hell, where the fire does not go out and the worm does not die. We are not to take these suggested surgical amputations literally, but rather to encourage us to discipline our hands, our feet and our eyes. Our hands are to do good deeds, so we grow in virtue. Our feet should take us to places, physically or virtually, where we learn to do good. Our eyes, our desires are to be orientated to virtue, and not to self-indulgent and ultimately self-destructive habits which are vices. As disciples we must choose the path of virtue.
But the Spirit is given unexpectedly to people outside the community. Let our lives of virtue help win them to a fuller faith.
Readings: Numbers 11:25-29 | James 5:1-6 | Mark 9:38-43,45,47-48
Image: detail from a painted ceiling over the High Altar in St Godehard Basilica, Hildesheim, photographed by Fr Lawrence Lew OP
