October 6, 2024
“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.
If your hand causes you to
stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life maimed than to have two
hands and to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire. And if your foot
causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life lame than
to have two feet and to be thrown into hell., And if your eye
causes you to stumble, tear it out; it is better for you to enter the kingdom
of God with one eye than to have two eyes and to be thrown into
hell, where their worm never dies, and the fire is never quenched.
‘For everyone will be salted with fire. Salt is good; but if salt has lost its saltiness, how can you season it? Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another.”
By this point in the Gospel of Mark, the Lord has been working on his disciples for some time. He has shown them signs and wonders, evidence that God has come close to us. He displayed acts of compassion and fed huge crowds from their own limited resources. He stepped over the invisible boundaries of fear and prejudice and cure frightening disorders that afflict innocent people. And he punctured the religious hierarchies and unjust rules that diminish those who want to believe. He has been making a difference. He has been showing the twelve how to do it.
Now he pauses long enough to say, “Don’t trip up anybody else who wants to believe. Especially the little ones.” Apparently, there are things we can do that provoke others to stumble and fall. Can you think of anything? I can.
I heard a true story about a church like this one. It was a communion Sunday. The prayers were offered, the bread was broken, the elders took the trays down the aisle. One of the elders worked his way to the back of the church. As he approached the back of the sanctuary, he saw what he had not noticed. His daughter’s ex-husband was seated in the last row. So, what did he do? He skipped over him. Didn’t serve him the bread.
The former son-in-law gave him a pass, thinking his presence had unsettled the guy. But when the elder brought the tray full of the blood of Christ and skipped over him again, worship was over for the son in law. As he said to the pastor on the way out, “I am done with this. I will not be back.”
Wow. Did you know that it is possible for religious people to sin? That some of them can sin so extravagantly that the sin damages the hearts of those still growing in their faith? In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus calls it “a scandal.” The Greek word is translated for us as “stumbling block.” The original word is “scandal.” To offend on that level is to “scandalize.”
Think of the lost opportunity. If you’re in church, and you see somebody your daughter came to despise, and you have trays of holy communion in your hands, you could witness to the grace and forgiveness of Jesus by leaning forward to say, “The body and blood of Christ for you, too.” Whatever you have done or neglected to do, it’s forgiven. It is canceled by Christ whose grace is bigger than the both of us. You are free, I am free, let’s begin again.
Instead, we could choose to stay citizens of a fallen world. Withhold grace from one another. Hang on to old grudges. Stick it to one another. Make it hurt. Keep it broken. And that, says Jesus, is the scandal. It declares the Gospel does not matter.
In the instruction he offers today, he says scandals can come in three ways: the hand, the foot, the eye. Fortunately for modest people, he doesn’t mention any other appendages. No, these three are suggestive enough.
The hand: the hand can slap, the hand can pinch, the hand can punch. All are expressions of violence. Yet there is more. The hand can type poison e-mails. It can inscribe anonymous letters. The hand can clinch and withhold affection. And the hand can take. It can grab and steal. I have been around the church long enough to know there are a whole lot of scandals caused by hands.
Some don’t seem like much. Like the two little girls who attended church for the very first time. It was overwhelming to them. Everybody singing, or being quiet, and standing up and sitting down. It was a lot to process. Finally, something else happened. Some nice people came down the aisle with plates full of money. They passed the trays back and forth. Afterward, one kid says to the other, “How much did you get?”
Funny story, but I will tell you I have seen Christian people scandalized when other Christian people take what is not theirs. A congregation can thin out after a significant theft. Even after the loss is remediated, those who left in disgust will not come back. The loss of trust is too much for them. “If your hand leads you astray,” he says….
And then, the foot. What could the foot do to scandalize somebody else? I suppose it could give somebody the boot. Or you could hurt someone if you gave them a swift kick. You could tear the fabric of the fellowship if you stomped on somebody for any reason.
But what I have noticed about feet is that they take us places. I suppose they could take us to dens of iniquity, although most of us are most people; scandals are not our currency. Yet feet can carry us to places of inconsistency. They can expose our hypocrisy, especially to those more innocent or naïve.
Like that night at the Hershey Lodge when my father tried to sneak our family into a small hotel room. There were six of us, but he was only going to pay for two. It really shook me up. I was thirteen or fourteen, back when I still saw everything in black and white. Here was my dad, trying to cheat the clerk out of twenty or thirty bucks.
It was the only time my father ever sinned. I sat on the curb, broke into tears. Teenage righteousness will do that to you. As I recall, my mother gave him a look, and he walked back inside to the desk and made it right. If he had not have done that, I would have lost some respect for him. Or worse, I might have grown up thinking it was OK for me to cheat others too. The feet took us there.
And don’t forget the eye. “If your eye causes you to sin,” says Jesus, “pluck it out.” What is he talking about? Fortunately, we have an idea. Back in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said, “The eye is the lamp of the body.” It is the portal by which we see what we want. It opens us to the possibility of acquisition. If we see it, we will want to walk to it on our feet and grab it with our hands.
As he goes on to say, “If your eye
is healthy, your whole body will be full of light; but if your eye is
unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness.”[1] So, he is talking about
health. He’s talking about sufficiency. He’s talking about satisfaction. And if
we give in to our hungers, if we pursue what we see but is not ours, it can
lead us down the road to destruction. “If your eye causes you to sin,” he says,
“pluck it out!”
Now, please do not take that literally. Through the ages of Christian history, a few people have done so. No, do not take it literally, take it seriously. For the point is to not lead others astray. To not scandalize the faith of others by our bad choices. To care so much for the rest of the Christian household that we will not willfully embarrass them. Or demean them. Or to live and behave in such a way that they begin to think that the Gospel is not true.
It will take self-discipline for each of us. It will require patience with one another and perseverance for ourselves. This is why Jesus concludes with the admonition, “Have salt in yourselves.” He is calling us to be the seasoning of a bland world. He invites us to live with the same generosity and grace that he has brought us from God. There is something distinctive about loving others as God has loved us.
Will we get it perfect? No. Yet we do not stop trying to become more like Christ. He is our model for living and our example for loving. He is the One who calls us together as strangers and equips us to become friends. He can lift us up when we fall down and take us down a few pegs when we get too big for our britches.
He is the One who stays with us, in
life, in death, in life beyond death. Something happens to us as we stay with
him. We change. We deepen. We extend ourselves. So deep is his transforming
love that we can believe it is possible to embrace the final invitation of
today’s text, “Have salt in yourselves and be at peace with one another.”
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