Enemy or Ally of Christ?

When I was little my mother taught me to make my bed every morning.  When I asked, "Why do I have to make it when I'm just going to crawl back in tonight and mess it up again?"  Thus began a system of allowance and consequence.  Every Friday evening when I'd made my bed all week, I was handed my allowance.  Since I liked to buy candy with my allowance I learned to avoid the consequences.  As an adult the external consequence has matured into the internal satisfaction I feel when I walk into an orderly bedroom with bedspread in place and clothes hung up.  No matter the turmoil in my life, my bedroom is an intrinsic oasis of peace.

A literal or superficial reading of Mark 9: 38-50 looks as if Jesus is setting up a system of rewards and awful consequences:  offer a cup of water to those who are thirsty, or else!  Language of demons, hellfires, undying worms, and personal amputation of our limbs grabs our attention. Demons and the fires of hell are graphic descriptions that effectively describe our emotions or how we experience our situations of psychological assault or mental unrest or feeling lost, lonely, or abandoned.  But if we focus too intently on demons we give them power over us and we forget that God created all creation and called it good. Demons pose no threat to Jesus!  Remember his 40 days in the wilderness when he dismissed the power of demons and that he cast out demons from people as he healed them.

Instead I read this passage as Jesus trying to get our attention through hyperbole in order to emphasize our call to servant discipleship - to offer a cup of water to someone dying of literal thirst or the many who are parched for the presence of Jesus in their lives. There are many stumbling blocks, both internal and external, that keep us from acting as agents of healing on behalf of others.  Just one of many obstacles is our belief that we do not have the gift of healing.  WRONG!!  As Jesus might say to us, "Get behind me, Satan!"

These stumbling blocks can quench the fires of our passions to serve.  We are called to name them so that we can open our eyes to our own woundedness that equips us to be wounded healers (as Henri Nouwen points out).  We are called to cast aside those stumbling blocks that would dilute our saltiness with shame or guilt or laziness or closed hearts, so that we are useless.  Instead, Jesus says we are his agents of healing and we are to act as preservatives of peace, wellbeing, and shalom in the world.  Those deeds which we do in the name of Jesus ally us with our Savior and Lord and are thus powerful far and wide.

Grace and Peace,
Pastor Shelley