Salted with Fire

Mark 9:38-50

Rev. Monte Marshall

This morning’s scripture reading begins with an issue that all of us understand:  The dynamics between insiders and outsiders, inclusiveness and exclusiveness.

Mark opens his story with the focus on John.  John, along with Peter and James, form an inner circle of disciples who are especially close to Jesus.   John reports to Jesus about a recent encounter between the disciples and “a maverick exorcist.”[1]  John says:  “‘Teacher, we saw someone using your name to expel demons, and we tried to stop it since this person was not part of our group.’”

And immediately we confront the problem, exclusivity, “this person was not part of our group.”  Now to the disciples of Jesus, it didn’t matter that this “maverick exorcist” was helping people, or that he used the name of Jesus, or that he was aligned with the mission of Jesus.  To them, he was nothing more than an outsider—an interloper—a usurper of power not rightfully his.

Ched Meyers offers this comment:  “The arrogance in John’s objection lies in its attempt to erect boundaries around the exercise of compassionate ministry ‘in Jesus’ name.’  He equates exorcism with the accrual of status and power, and wishes to maintain a monopoly over it…..On top of all of this, John’s censure is based on the fact that the stranger ‘was not following us.’  The disciples want to be followed, not followers.  Never was a ‘royal we’ less appropriate!”[2]

This is how Jesus responds:  “’Don’t try to stop it.  No one who performs a miracle using my name can speak ill of me soon thereafter!  Anyone who is not against us is with us.  The truth is, anyone who gives you a cup of water in my name because you belong to the Messiah will certainly not go without a reward.’”

Well, so much for the disciple’s concern for exclusivity and maintaining the boundary between insiders and outsiders!  Meyers writes:  “Not only is Jesus willing to endorse the redemptive practice of ‘outsiders,’ but also the simplest act of hospitality (‘a cup of water’) shown to anyone ‘who bears the name of Messiah.’  John is worried about those with competing power, but Jesus is welcoming all who do the works of mercy and justice.  John is entertaining ‘holier than thou’ delusions, but Jesus points out [that] his followers will often find themselves on the receiving end of healing and liberation, and therefore should without prejudice work alongside those whose practice is redemptive.  Conversely, those who minister in any way to Christians receive due recognition in the kingdom.”[3]

It’s at this point in Mark’s story that Jesus makes a point about “little ones:”  Jesus says, “Rather than make one of these little ones who believe in me stumble, it would be better to be thrown into the sea with a large millstone hung around your neck.” 

The “little ones” are those followers of Jesus who are “on the lower end of the social hierarchy.”[4]  Apparently, when the disciples of Jesus resist the reign of God by drawing boundaries to separate insiders and outsiders, and act in the arrogant and inhospitable manner that John describes, they are causing “little ones” who believe in Jesus to stumble.  The Greek word translated stumble is skandalon from which we get the word scandal.  It refers to “an obstacle that people trip over.”[5]  Jesus underscores the seriousness of causing “little ones” to stumble by using the shocking language of exaggeration when he says:  “it would be better to be thrown into the sea with a large millstone hung around your neck.”

The exaggerated language continues and intensifies as Jesus speaks about various forms of self-mutilation—hand-chopping, foot-whacking, and eye-plucking—none of which are to be taken literally.  These gruesome recommendations are intended to highlight how vitally important it is to deal with the root causes of our resistance to God and God’s way in the world that this text calls “sin.” 

So to take this text seriously, questions about root causes need to be asked:  What is it that causes our arrogance?  What is it that motivates our exclusiveness, our need to define ourselves as insiders and others as outsiders?  What is it that blinds us to the good that others do?  What lies at the heart of our inhospitality to others?  What is that inclines us to be so unloving, unmerciful and so lacking in compassion?  This morning’s text urges us to seek these sources of our resistance and to root them out so that our lives and the world might be transformed.

If we don’t, then the life we’re left with, in the exaggerated, metaphorical language of Jesus, looks like Gehenna—a place in Hebrew lore associated with fiery destruction and judgment.  And yes, Gehenna is understood by many to be a reference to hell.  But it’s important to note, as one commentator observes, that Jesus doesn’t use the word Gehenna in this story “to seal anyone’s eternal destiny, but to motivate his audience to pay attention to the ‘little ones’ and not to impede their path.”[6]

For me, Gehenna is not about eternal damnation, but it is about a hell on earth that’s created when we fail to embody the reign of God.  In fact, Gehenna is a place where we live in opposition to God.  Gehenna is a place of torment and suffering.  Gehenna is a place of exclusion, inhospitality, oppression and injustice.  Gehenna is a place of addiction.  Gehenna is a place of grinding, life-destroying poverty.  Gehenna is a place where love, mercy and compassion are lacking.  Gehenna is a place of war, violence and abuse.  Gehenna is a place where little ones stumble and fall.  Gehenna is a place of despair.  Gehenna is a hell on earth.

Now as I mentioned, Gehenna is associated with fiery destruction and judgment, but Jesus takes the image of fire in a different direction.  Jesus says:  “Everyone will be salted with fire.” In the time of Jesus, salt and fire were used to heal wounds.[7]  So the image of being “salted with fire” suggests that God’s intention is not to inflict torment and suffering, but to bring about healing—especially when we find ourselves living in one of those Gehenna-like places that is for us a hell on earth.  So new questions come to mind:  Do we know what it’s like to have our wounds salted with fire and thereby healed?  Can we imagine ourselves as instruments of healing to others?

Jesus says:  “Salt is good.  But if salt loses its flavor, how can you make it salty again?”  As the followers of Jesus, we’re like salt.  In doing good we flavor the world around us.  But when we fail to do good, we lose our saltiness.  When we continue to do good, we maintain our saltiness! 

Jesus says:  “Have salt in yourselves, and live in peace with one another.”  A commentator notes that to “’Have salt’ is parallel to ‘be at peace.’”[8]  Salt was also a traditional symbol of hospitality among the Jews of Jesus’ day and among all the peoples of the Mediterranean world.”[9]  So in this context, the way to peace is through hospitality.

And here we come full circle.  As Pastor Patrick Willson puts it:  “Slowly, slowly, the images [in the text build up].”  It’s about welcoming, not hindering the outsider; it’s about a cup of water; it’s about not “tripping” people who are coming to Jesus; and it’s about having salt—having hospitality—in ourselves.[10]

 Pastor Willson then provides a powerful illustration of what it means to take this morning’s text seriously and to be salted with fire.  He tells the story of a philosophy professor named Philip Hallie who wrote a book entitled Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed. 

According to Pastor Willson,  “Philip Hallie….possessed a very troubled character after years of studying the Holocaust.  He read of Nazi concentration camps:  How could people do that to other men and women?  How could mere human beings conceive such monstrous evil?  The questions oppressed him to despair.  He writes:

“Reading about the damned I was damned myself, as damned as the murderers, and as damned as their forgotten victims.  Somehow over the years I had dug myself into Hell, and I had forgotten redemption, had forgotten the possibility of escape.”  (It sounds to me as if Professor Hallie was living in Gehenna.)

“One night, as he continued his studies, he was reading about how the Jews were hunted down in France.  There was this one place, however, a little French Protestant [village] call Le Chambon, where not only did the villagers refuse to cooperate with the authorities but they hid Jews and smuggled them into Switzerland, even at the risk of their own lives and the lives of their families.  As he read, Hallie became aware, he says, of ‘a strange sensation on my cheeks’ and as he lifted his hand to his face he realized that he was weeping.  For a while he wondered if he was losing his sanity but finally he decided he would have to go to Le Chambon to interview anyone who remembered what had happened during the war and to try for the sake of his own soul to come to some accounting of ‘how goodness happened there.’

“What happened was that the villagers, through study of the scriptures and their worship together, had decided that their village was ever to be a place of hospitality.  The way they accomplished this was simplicity itself.  Years after the war, a woman of the village…explained to Hallie how it had been:

“A German woman knocked at my door.  It was in the evening, and she said she was a German Jew, coming from northern France, that she was in danger, and that she had heard that in Le Chambon somebody could help her.  Could she come into my house?  I said, ‘Naturally, come in, and come in.’

“It happened that simply.  ‘Naturally,’ she said—at the cost of her life, her family’s lives, perhaps even the whole village’s life.  ‘Naurally, come in, and come in.’

“The journey to Le Chambon changed Philip Hallie.  I do not think he would retreat from saying it redeemed him.  At the conclusion of his study he writes:

“I know what I want to have the power to be.  I know that I want to have a door in the depths of my being, a door that is not locked against the face of all other human beings.  I know that I want to be able to say, from those depths, ‘Naturally, come in, and come in.’”[11]

Above the doorway of a church in London a prayer has been carved into the stone.  It captures well, I think, the meaning of Mark’s story:

“O God, make the door of this house wide enough to receive all who need human love and fellowship; narrow enough to shut out all envy, pride and strife.

Make its threshold smooth enough to be no stumbling-block to children, nor to straying feet, but rugged and strong enough to turn back the tempter’s power.  God make this door of this house the gateway to thine eternal kingdom.”[12] 

A community of faith living this prayer is salted with fire.  Members of a community of faith living this prayer, have salt within themselves, and they know how to live in peace with one another.  May it be so for us.  Thanks be to God.  Amen.