This sermon is available in audio form through Mixcloud below. For a transcript (not word perfect, I never read direct from my notes) see below.
The Gospel reading today (Mark 9:38-50) makes me a little uncomfortable, I hope it made you uncomfortable, that it made you shuffle in your seat slightly because it’s an incredibly uncomfortable passage. The Jesus who we are used to speaking of God’s mercy and love is speaking in incredibly violent terms. Cut off your hand, gouge out your eye, flinging people into the sea with a millstone around their neck; those things are huge! But it’s an important reminder that the Jesus who calls us to love one another also calls us to keep His commandments. And thankfully He is not being literal, but He is being serious.
Jesus in this passage is talking about sin and He is setting the stakes high for us in how we should respond to sin. Why? Because the reality of sin has set the stakes high. These days we can often downplay sin in the Church, it is after all washed away by Jesus on the Cross, the slate is clean so it can be tempting to just gloss over it and play it down. But Jesus doesn’t give us that option, neither does James in his letter today (James 5:13-20). Christ’s sacrifice sets us free from sin but does not shield us from costly obedience. Sin is everything that damages our relationship with God and with one another. It’s everything that we do that prevents us from living the best life that God has for us. Now it’s important to note that sin is an action, it’s not something that has happened to us or something we are. It’s the stuff we do of our own free will that means when God comes knocking we hide like Adam and Eve in the garden. And God takes this stuff seriously because it means that we are not getting the best that God has for us, it means that others are not getting the best that God has for them. That the harmony that God placed in the Garden at the beginning is obscured and twisted and damaged. So what does Jesus tell us to do? If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. In other words, if what you are doing is causing you to sin, or causing you to be vulnerable to sinning, cut it out, stop doing it. The stakes are high, what’s better, to keep doing that thing and to keep sinning and the result be our destruction or to cut it out. He says, what would you prefer, to lose a hand and have life or to destroy your life but keep the hand? And if our foot, where we are going, is causing us to stumble, cut it out. And if our eye, what we are looking at, is causing us to stumble, stop looking at it, gouge out your eye if you must so that you cannot see it anymore, not that I would advocate actually doing the latter. Jesus’ violent language causes us to flinch and we flinch at this language for multiple reasons, it’s drastic, it’s painful, it’s permanent and life changing, and it’s self-inflicted. It’s a gruesome image. But the image is a helpful lens to understand what Jesus is saying. It’s painful; cutting off a limb or gouging out an eye is painful. And giving up things which we may well quite like or enjoy is painful, because God says no to us sometimes. We so often assume that God will only ever say yes to us that it hurts when sometimes the answer is no. When God convicts us of our sin, when He points us to that thing we’ve been saying or doing or thinking that is in our blind-spot and we hadn’t realised was a problem, it hurts. You’ve been complaining about a friend with some other friends behind their back or commenting on their life in not so flattering terms and God calls you out on it, it hurts. And our instant response is to stop the pain immediately. You’ve broken the skin to cut off your foot and it hurts and you change your mind. There’s nothing wrong with what I’m doing, I’m just bonding with my friends, how else are we meant to bond, I’ve not been that nasty, it’s fine. And we pull back, make our excuses and carry on as normal. Whilst Jesus calls us to cut it out. And the process itself of cutting it out can be painful, we know what we are doing is wrong, but we keep stumbling into it and that hurts because we know we should be doing better. As Paul writes to the Romans ‘I do not understand what I do, for I do not do what I want, and I do what I hate’. You can sense the pain in his voice, but we must press on, we must complete what we have started. The image Jesus uses is uncomfortable because it’s permanent. Jesus doesn’t say ‘cut off your hand and I’ll give you a new hand, a better hand’. No, He says ‘better to enter life maimed’. This is life-changing. But isn’t God in the business of changing lives? It means we have to avoid certain places and certain actions, it means taking real responsibility for what we are doing. It might mean finding new friends. I wonder how many of how many of you are on Facebook, and you sit there scrolling through a friends holiday snaps, rather envious of their holiday and slightly hating them for the fact that they got a great holiday while you had to stay at home. Maybe that means we spend less time on Facebook. This stuff involves sacrifice, giving up things or avoiding things that aren’t necessarily bad in themselves but will lead us down a road which God isn’t calling us down. A hand isn’t a bad thing, neither is a foot or an eye, neither were the cucumbers or the melons in the Old Testament reading this morning (Numbers 11:4-6, 10-16, 24-29). It’s what we do with those things, and if we struggle to control our thoughts, actions and words around those things then God calls us to sacrifice those things. The image Jesus uses is uncomfortable because we have to do it ourselves, we’re not asking our friend or priest to chop off our hand, we are the ones who have to do it. That’s not to say we cannot seek their support, James writes this morning that we are to confess our failings to each other, to pray for one another, to lovingly bring back our brothers and sisters when they go astray. But at the end of the day if we aren’t willing to be brought back, if we aren’t willing to change, there’s nothing they can do. It’s down to us, with God’s help, and the support of those around us, to live in such a way that glorifies God and to take responsibility for our actions and their consequences. But this is why I think it is most uncomfortable. In cutting off our hand or our foot or gouging out our eye there is no guarantee that we will survive. We take an axe to our foot and there will be a lot of blood and that stuff is better in us that out of us. Without medical attention we will bleed out and die. In cutting these things out we are trusting that God has this in hand, that He wants what is truly best for us and all we can do is throw ourselves on Him and trust that that is indeed the case, that our sacrifice won’t be in vain and that He won’t leave us to bleed out. And that takes deep faith in God, in who He is and His love for us. In the pain of God revealing our sin to us we have to trust that He is telling us out of love, that we might have a better life, a more fulfilling life, that He isn’t doing it to shame us or hurt us. That in the pain of cutting those things out, when we fall back into sin again and again that He is beside us, carrying us through it, willing us on and assisting us by His Spirit. Knowing that He doesn’t leave us alone to face these things. We need to trust that what God has for us is worth the sacrifice, even of good things, that the permanent change will be worth it for what He has in store for us. And we trust that in time, healing will come. As James writes ‘Therefore confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, so that you may be healed.’ The wounds may scar but they will heal, and we can continue our lives in the fullness that God intended for us. This Gospel reading makes us uncomfortable but let us not flee from it. Instead let us throw ourselves upon the mercy and the grace of God, trusting that whatever He asks of us will bring life, even if it seems like death at the beginning, and that He will bring us through the pain into the joy of resurrection. Amen
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AuthorAn Anglican Curate in my 20's I was raised in an Anglican Church, went to a Youth Club run by an Evangelical Church, attended a Baptist Church while at Uni and was a member of a New Monastic Community after graduating. As such my faith has been influenced by these experiences and traditions into what I hope is a more rounded viewpoint. Archives
September 2022
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