Fire and Salt
29 September 2024
Proper 21B
Homily preached at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church
Grants Pass, Oregon
The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, Ph.D, SCP
9:00 a.m. Sung Mass
Numbers 11:4-6, 10-16, 24-29; Psalm 19:7-14; James 5:13-20; Mark 9:38-50
God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh. Amen
Yikes! “Hack off your foot, poke out your eye, chop off your hand—if any of these cause you to stumble!” How in the world to preach this saying of Jesus? It is not only harsh—insanely so!—but doesn’t even make sense. The imagery here is deliberately grotesque: If your hand makes your feet stumble, maybe you should walk upright or lift your arms, not cut off the hand!. Of course, stumble here is simply a metaphor for moral failing, for sin. But even as a metaphor, this is one of most macabre “hard sayings” of Jesus. The image is so grotesque that Matthew (18:8-9), who normally follows Mark when he uses his material, reduces Mark's seven verses to two, while gentle Saint Luke omits it altogether (17:1-4).
Taken literally, this saying actually led third century Church father Origen to cut off body parts that had gotten in the way of his efforts at chastity. As a result, Origen—one of the age’s best preachers and scholars of scripture—was never named a saint or a doctor of the Church. In fact, one of the first canons of the Council of Nicaea was to ban such self-mutilators from the priesthood.
The saying thus is not an announcement of divine law, but a vivid and sarcastic reply to the disciples’ complaint that starts the reading: “Jesus, look at that guy there! He is not one of us, but he uses your name to heal people. He is ruining our brand, infringing on our trademark! We told him to stop but he won’t. You make him stop. Punish him!”
They have just failed to drive out an evil spirit from a boy afflicted since childhood (Mark 9: 14-28), but this interloper seems to be succeeding just fine. Jesus replies, “Don't stop him. Just using my name might bring him closer to the kingdom. Whoever is not against us is for us.”
Clearly, not all of Jesus’ followers agreed. The oral tradition turned the saying into its opposite “whoever is not with me is against me,” and this twisted Q form of the saying shows up in both Matthew (12:30) and Luke (Luke 9:49-50; but cf. 11:23).
The historical Jesus was more welcoming and inclusive, less controlling and hierarchical than his followers. I just saw a great Brazilian movie about a religious man falling in love with a younger man who tries to save himself and his friend both by telling him how much Jesus hates same-sex love. “Don’t you believe in God?” he asks his friend. The young man replies, “I do. But I think God isn’t an uptight nasty piece of work. I think he’s like my mother, and is pretty chill about stuff.” “Pretty chill.” I think that’s what the Bible is trying to say when it says “God is slow to anger and of great patience.” “Pretty chill.” That describes Jesus too, except for when he faces the one thing he can’t abide: using religion and God to abuse people, especially the vulnerable,
“Punish that competitor!” the disciples say. Jesus replies the strange exorcist is actually on their team! Even a simple kindness like giving someone a sip of water advances the kingdom. And petty nastiness, sticking out your leg to trip up any of Jesus’ “little ones” can lead to worse things than being drowned in the ocean. This is a warning to keep Jesus’ own over-zealous followers from running roughshod over people like the unnamed healer.
My son Charlie, when he was in 8th grade and suffering all the slights and insults an insular and clique-ridden group of American middle schoolers could dish out to a stranger who had grown up in China and Africa, hung a poster in his room given to him by an older sibling. It declared, simply, “Mean People Suck.”
That’s what Jesus is saying here. “Mean people suck. Especially when they’re mean in my name. That strange healer is one of my little ones whether you like it or not, whether he recognizes it or not. And doing harm to him is worse than being drowned in the ocean. You want me to stop him, to control him, cut him off? Wellif it’s cutting off you want, you should start cutting off your own body parts.” Elsewhere he says it less gruesomely, but still in vivid, grotesque imagery: “If you see a speck in someone’s eye, don’t try to remove it until you have removed the log stuck into your own eye!” If you want to give someone hellfire and punishment, think about what you just might be attracting for yourself by being mean!” “Judge not, lest you yourself be judged.”
Jesus concludes, “Everyone will be salted with fire.” The two great means in the ancient world of purification and preservation, salt and fire, are going to be the lot of us all. How to be saved from suffering in that fire or drying up by that salt? You yourself must be salt for the world, leaven for the loaf, light in darkness. “Have salt in yourselves, by being at peace with one another.”
He is saying, We need to live in peace with each other, and not constantly go about seeking the punishment or correction of others. Purification is a serious business, getting rid of faults is too. The only way we can do it without being destroyed by it is by gently caring for others. Be a light, not a judge.
For Jesus, God is not a mere tribal deity, not a petty partisan. God blesses both the righteous and the wicked by making the sun rise on both and sending the clouds to rain on both (Matt. 5:45). He is Israel’s God, to be sure, but only so that Israel can be a city on a hill, a light on a candlestick, salt to give flavor to and preserve the world (Matt. 5:14-16). God is not just for Jews, not just for the “righteous,” not just for Jesus’ authorized franchise-holders, but for all. Because we are all in God’s hand, we must embrace the tensions implicit in diversity.
That ultimately is what the parable of the wheat and the weeds is all about—don’t worry about which plants are good or bad, because if you pull up the bad you’ll surely kill good ones as well. Wait until the harvest comes, and God will sort it out (Matt. 13: 24-30).
It is also what today’s Hebrew scripture is about: Moses’ deputies come to him and ask him to silence the two commoners prophesying in the camp. They do not know that the two were part of the 70 chosen to have God’s spirit but who failed to show up to meeting. “Silence them?” replies Moses, “Oh I wish that all of the people were prophets like these two!”
Jesus urges solidarity among all God’s creatures. That’s why even unbelievers’ offers of glasses of water build the Kingdom. That’s why Jesus here says the strange exorcist is one of his own “little ones” in need of protection from being tripped up.
Living peace doesn’t mean making nice, papering over evil, or thickening our conscience with an amoral detachment. Ask any marriage or family counselor, any labor mediator, or any mediator or negotiator in international or inter-ethnic conflict. They’ll all tell you that truly seeking peace is not easy, and not harmonious. It is not a hold hands and sing kumbaya, a false “let’s all just try to get along.” It is about honestly addressing real problems. It is about doing so in a spirit of shared endeavor, of mutual effort to let shared desires and aspirations force us to listen carefully to the other party.
I think one of the reasons that the current Bishop of Rome holds so powerful a grip on our imaginations, why he speaks to many who have not listened to anything from a Pope in decades, is this: Francis is a gentle soul, who leads by example. His words have special power because he tries to model them in his life. He is careful not to assault or berate those who may have differing views. I think he would understand Charlie’s poster: “Mean people suck.” So would the four Americans he regularly holds up as the leading spiritual lights of the American Experience: Lincoln, Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, and Martin Luther King Jr. All were stalwart lights who did not shy away from honest difference and controversy in proclaiming the truth, but all were careful to not condemn and demonize others, even those who persecuted them. They too, lived as examples of their message of peace. They were unexpected prophets running within the camp, strange off-brand exorcists healing people all the same.
Jesus calls us to be good yeast leavening, bright fires enlightening, and tasty salt enriching and preserving, the world. He calls us to be prophets running through the camp alight with the flame of God’s word. He does not call us to demonize, exclude, judge, or ostracize.
God alone will bring this world right. We all will be purified and healed, rubbed through and through with God’s salt. We all will be put through God’s fire. I firmly believe that—all of God’s creatures will one day fulfill the measure of their creation. And because of this, we must live humbly and simply, praying for each other, including our enemies, and seek to help each other, work for justice, and live in peace.
In the name of God, Amen
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