FINDINGS II

Proper 21- B - September 27, 2009
Mark 9: 38-50
(Numbers 11: 4-6, 10-16, 24-29; Psalm 19: 7-14; James 5: 13-20)



Harry T. CookBy Harry T. Cook
9/21/09


RUBRIC

From time to time philosophers and theologians argue the question of whether or not religion in any form is necessary to morality, whether or not morality or ethics requires belief in a transcendent deity. Agnostics, atheists and humanists alike fend off such a notion with as much vigor as religionists press it.
 
Robert Wright, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and author of the recently issued book The Evolution of God, seems to insist that even evolution by the process of natural selection involves an ongoing development of moral sensibility. Wright leans on the work of William James who held that belief in an unseen order involves understanding that each part of that order needed to adjust itself "harmoniously" to all others parts. Of that process, Wright seems to be saying, morality with roots in divinity is an ascendant part.
 
A next step in such thinking is to say that what is good and moral is said or done because of one's belief in one deity or another or even in the name of that deity. That is the issue in the Marcan passage at hand in this proper. It goes farther to the question of efficacy. If a good thing is done in a name other than the deity of choice, is it really good, and does it really work? Or is the thing itself and its effect and affect that matter, regardless of who does it and why?


 

WORKSHOP

At the center of the gospel passage of this proper is a person depicted as doing what Mark's Jesus is said to have been doing, viz., exorcising evil spirits and thus restoring people to society, taking them from marginalization toward the center. The problem was not that the exorcisms were being performed but rather that the one doing them had no apparent connection to the party of Jesus and yet was using Jesus' "name" in doing so.
 
This would be analogous in our day to using someone else's registered brand-name to sell your knock-offs. But Mark's Jesus was made to see it differently. "Don't try to stop him," Jesus is depicted as saying (9:39) because it was the freeing and restoring to wholeness of marginalized people that was important, not who might be effecting it. Mark has Jesus say that "anyone who does such a powerful thing in my name will not be able thereafter to speak ill of me."
 
It helps to understand that the fundamental biblical concept that one's name is one's nature or basic identity. Thus did the angel with whom Jacob wrestled balk at being asked his "name." "Why do you ask me name?" (Genesis 32:29) The "name" of the angel or his true identity was his power.
 
Once can infer from Mark 9:38-39 that it is the purpose to which any power is put that matters, and that, in fact, the deed is the power itself, and so it doesn't matter who accomplishes it or why. Therefore, in Mark's eyes, whoever was doing what he imagined Jesus had done was as much a liberator (or savior) as he, whence the sentiment of 9:40: "He who is not against us is for us," not in the sense of choosing up sides so much as working separate sides of the street for the same ends. It is an obvious truth, but it is so often subverted.
 
The competition among the world's various religions and among the various expressions of individual religions is a scandal. If -- and it is a big IF --  the intention of a given religion or religious community is to work for the effecting of human liberation, how can it matter how and to whom credit for it is given or by whom it is claimed? That may be in a circuitous way the meaning of the statement: "For truly I tell you, whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you bear the name (nature) of the anointed one will by no means lose the reward." What reward? In other words, ministry is a two-way street. What you give, you get. A spin, perhaps on the Hillel-Jesus principle we call "the golden rule."
 
We run into a manuscript anomaly in the passage running from 9: 42-50. Vv. 44 and 46 are identical to v. 48 and so have been omitted from the narrative in manuscripts considered by some to be more authentic. The issue that characterizes the passage at this point seems to be how those perceived by Jesus' inner circle (as Mark imagined it) as less significant are to be dealt with -- those "little ones," from which term we may infer vulnerability and fragility with a disposition to regress.
 
It helps to remember that the communities of Jesus Judaism in the early stages of the last third of the First Century C.E. were anything but firmly fixed. Their boundaries were porous, and history suggests that people went to and fro across such boundaries as post-70 C.E. Judaism reorganized and re-imagined itself under the twin pressures of change from within and persecution from without.
 
For that reason, perhaps, what we might call a "quantum ministry" is not to be sniffed at. In the cause of liberation, no one is a "mikrōn" (as in "micron/little one") or little to the point of insignificance. And if some intended or even unintended slight of such a one brings him to "skandal�sāy" (snare, trap, stumbling block) not of his own making, the one who occasions the incident will be held accountable.
 
To make his point, Mark goes somewhat overboard in his concern to assure equal justice for one and all. The punishment for the neglect of "a little one" is, variously, drowning by millstone, amputation of limbs -- all to escape the always smoldering fires of Jerusalem's subterranean garbage pits known as "Gehenna," a handy image for eternal punishment. The idea is that those who line up behind Mark's image of Jesus and would share his "name" and thus his liberating power must measure up to an exacting standard.
 
The accompanying reading from Numbers is helpful to Mark's idea that it doesn't matter who is doing the good thing. Joshua is depicted as being upset that Eldad and Medad are doing the work of prophecy instead of a duly ordained prophet. Moses says, in essence, "Pish tosh, my boy. Why are you jealous for my sake? Would that more people would prophecy?" The work of a prophet, by the way, was (and is) to name a thing for what it is, to tell the truth about it.
 
The reading from James that goes with the Numbers and Mark passages mentions the appointed work of the church's "presbyteroi" (elders or priests), which is to minister to the people, no doubt without discrimination among the supposed greatest and the supposed least.





HOMILETIC COMMENTARY

The Marcan passage could be the basic text of a practical theology class in a seminary that trains men and women to be pastors. It fixes the mission in plain letters: free those who are in any way imprisoned by outdated traditions (one of Mark's overriding themes). The hint is not to cling to the power or privilege of such a ministry but to spread it far and wide and to make allies of those who are doing it under a different or similar aegis. Freedom is freedom, not whoever the agent of freedom happens to be.
 
Institutional religion spends an inordinate amount of time and energy guarding its supposed power, meting it out to the chosen with the clear message that, as Cyprian of Carthage declared as long ago as the mid-Third Century C.E., "Extra ecclesiam nulla salas: Outside the church there is no salvation." -- A big "phooey" to that, as Mark's Jesus might say.
 
I spent some of the earlier days on my ordained ministry work in two Detroit parishes -- from 1967 to 1979, a time of great tribulation in that city. It was rent asunder by the so-called "riots" in July, 1967 and has never yet been wholly mended. A good many congregations answered that message by moving to the suburbs. Others wouldn't or couldn't make the move. Those that stayed took one of two paths. Either they hunkered down amongst their ecclesiastical antiques and kept on doing what they had always done, preferring to restrict their ministry to those within the church's walls. Or they threw open their doors and windows to life on the street where they were and became transformed, often paying a dear price for their involvement in the city.
 
I worked at one of the latter churches for a time and found allies for the cause of liberation not so much in the connections of my own denomination or in ecumenical ones, but in the community in which the church was located, in its political and civic life. We partnered with what some would consider unlikely parties to get done what needed to be done. It didn't and it couldn't matter to us who was doing the work of liberation -- whether we ourselves or others of whom we knew or maybe didn't know at all.
 
A "Black Power" big shot emerged from the community around us, scaring the hell out of white folks in general, wearing the dashiki and the other accoutrements of the then-Look. He spoke in a spit-fire way, lauding pan-African nationalism, blaming "whitey" for all the ills that had been visited upon him and his race. He once told me in my own church to "shut the f_ _ k up or the brothers will be waitin' for your white a_ _ outside." But he was a prophet in the tradition of Eldad and Medad. He was "those other people" casting out demons after the "nature" of Jesus. We didn't see it at the time, but as liberation of one kind and another began to be realized in a damned city, we saw that the guy had been the real thing, not because of what he said or how he said it, but because of what he was able to effect.



� Copyright 2009, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.

Readers Write

Richard Howard, Independence, MO: Your exposition of Mark 9:30-37 can be a vital resource to those who have leadership roles in social groups. The flames of the current health care inter-party warfare in the USA, for example, have been and are fed by fears of a lost economic, corporate "power over" advantage. The mutuality implied in "power with" is foreign to political despots determined to win and keep power over us all at any cost to the nation's personal and collective health. Rowan Williams" recent essay against ordination of GLBT persons to any leadership position in the Anglican world wide Communion relates to this matter of the proper use of power. He strives to preserve the status quo as the only route to consensus in matters of human sexuality and church polity. If Williams gets his way, the causes of mutuality and justice will fade from view.  Thanks for your essay. It is an incisive reminder of the dangers of power in the hands of those who feel they must control the lives of others, no matter the outcome. They probably never suspect that any policy they pursue could be anything other than benevolent.

 

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

I'd like to hear from you. E-mail your comments to me: [email protected].



ARCHIVES NOW AVAILABLE
To read previously published essays and sermons, click  on the link below.





Email Newsletter icon, E-mail Newsletter icon, Email List icon, E-mail List icon Add your name to our mailing list
For Email Marketing you can trust