Mark 9:38-50
Lectionary 26 Pentecost 19
“’If your hand or your foot gets in God’s way, chop it off and throw it away” Jesus says. “You’re better off maimed or lame and alive than the proud owner of two hands and two feet, godless in a furnace of eternal fire. And if your eye distracts you from God, pull it out and throw it away. You’re better off one-eyed and alive than exercising your twenty-twenty vision from inside the fire of hell where their worm never dies, and the fire is never quenched.’”[1] Four times, Jesus says, “It would be better if you get rid of any body part that causes someone to stumble.
Jesus sounds a little harsh, don’t you think? Chop off my hands and feet and pluck out my eyes? I have great concern for those who take the Bible literally! This passage has me longing for the Jesus who says, “Be healed!” and “Oh, are you hungry? Here, have some bread.” I cling to Jesus’ pronouncement, “Your sins are forgiven.”
The thing about hands and feet and eyes is that Jesus tells us to use them for God’s work. But our eyes spy things that we want, both objects and people. Our feet can be used to walk away from those who are hungry and take us to places we should not be. Our hands touch things they should not touch and hold on to things they should let go. It’s surprising that Jesus does not tell us to cut out our tongues, for it seems that tongues are often involved in our sin.
Jesus expresses himself this way, not because he wants to boost the prosthetic industry, but because he wants us to know how important what we do is. Causing someone who is growing in their faith to stumble, to fall a step away from God, is serious. Ask someone why they don’t go to church, and chances are good that they will tell you that Christians are hypocrites. Our walk doesn’t always match our talk. There’s a gap between who are, and who we claim to be. Those who are uncomfortable with Christians and church will say we are judgmental, which goes along with being hypocritical. We profess to love others as we do ourselves, yet we judge people for their sexual orientation, or their political affiliations, or their ethnicity. You can’t judge someone and love them at the same time.
Barbara Brown Taylor reflects on these things, writing:
I have spent a lot of time thinking about stumbling: how we do it, how we cause others to do it. Talking one way and acting another. Talking about how we are all God’s children and then treating some of those children like…orphans, putting them away somewhere and then forgetting to visit. Talking about God’s good gifts to us and then hoarding those gifts like misers, refusing to share ourselves, refusing to share what we have with others. Talking about God’s amazing grace and then saving up our own old hurts …–the time he did this, the time she said that—a catalog of griefs that collect bitterness like dust.[2]
Chop off my hands and feet and pluck out my eyes? What part of yourself needs to be pruned? What is it that keeps you from trusting in God completely? The disciples needed to hear Jesus’ admonishment. First, they were fighting with each other over who was the greatest. Now they come tattling to Jesus that someone was healing people in Jesus’ name. “We tried to stop him,” they said, “because he was not following us.” Not Jesus. The disciples were focused on themselves, their own importance, and their own accomplishments. Where is Jesus in their ordering of priorities and relationships? One of the definitions of sin is missing the mark. Sin is that which separates us from God.
Out of all the body parts engaged in sin, the one that is really responsible is our heart. After all, our feet and our hands and our eyes don’t act on their own. They follow our heart. God wants to be first in our hearts. You shall have no other gods before me, not ego, not money, not status, God tells us. This is the first commandment, from which all the others flow. It’s a matter of heart.
In explaining this commandment, Luther writes:
You can easily understand what and how much this commandment requires, namely, that one’s whole heart and confidence be place in God alone, and no one else. To have a God…does not mean to grasp him with your fingers, or to put him into a purse, or to shut him up in a box. Rather, you lay hold of God when your heart grasps him and clings to him. To cling to him with your heart is nothing else than to entrust yourself to him completely.[3] What more could you want or desire than God’s gracious promise that he wants to be yours with every blessing, to protect you, and to help you in every need?[4]
Jesus came to love us. It sounds like a cliche to say “Jesus loves you,” But even as he told the disciples to sharpen their axe, he was on his way to Jerusalem. There he would be betrayed, beaten, hung on a cross to die, and abandoned. This is how much God loves us. It transcends what we do for a living, our race, and our gender, and even our sin. There is nothing that can make God stop loving us, not death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation.[5] In the waters of baptism, God says, “You are my child. I promise to love you, and care for you as if you are the most precious thing on earth. See that person over there, and there, and there? I want you to love them just as I love you.” Isn’t that what love is for, to give it away?
~Pastor Cheryl Ann Griffin
[1]Peterson, Eugene. The Message Bible. Colorado Springs: NavPress, 2002. 1828.
[2]Taylor, Barabra Brown. Shock Therapy. 115.
[3]Kolb, Robert and Wengert, Timothy, eds. The Book of Concord. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000. 388.
[4]Kolb, Robert and Wengert, Timothy, eds. 391.
[5]Romans 8:38-39