The ABC of Sunday Matters

Numbers 11:25–29; James 5:1–6; Mark 9:38–43, 45, 47–48

It’s always a challenge when an outsider disturbs our carefully constructed and stable world in some way. Today’s readings provide some examples and outline right and wrong ways of responding to them. The first reading from Numbers invites us to look at the motives behind a hostile attitude to the outsider. Moses has complained to God about the burden of ‘bearing’ the people of Israel and so God arranges to take a portion (just a bit) of Moses’ spirit and distribute it among the elders. It will show Moses just how much spirit God has given him to bear his burdens. But, in the perception of Joshua, things have not gone according to the script. Eldad and Medad, the outsiders in this story, have received the spirit too and he asks Moses to stop them. Moses’ reply ‘are you jealous on my account’ is the crunch line. It invites Joshua, Moses’ deputy, to ask ‘am I anxious on my account’? A further implication in Moses’ question is: Joshua, if you are in this for my sake or your own sake, then get out while the going is good. We are not here for our sakes but God’s. In our terminology, it’s the difference between vocation and career. Vocation, God’s call, is to learn to do things God’s way whereas career tends to mean I do it my way. As the scene ends, Moses trudges back to the camp to bear the burden of God’s people.

The Gospel passage provides a different response by shifting the focus from the objecting disciples to the outsider. And as so often in the Gospels, Jesus uses a crisis or a problem as an opportunity to teach. He provides the disciples with a criterion for assessing an outsider who appears to be doing what a group thinks is their prerogative. His ‘anyone who is not against us is for us’ is an amazingly generous and trusting criterion. His next piece of instruction pushes the boundaries even further by challenging the disciples to think how far they are prepared to go with this criterion. Would they see the presence of God and attribute a like importance to ‘anyone’ who gave them a cup of water simply because they are his disciples? ‘Anyone’, even their enemies? Like the reading in Numbers but in a somewhat different way, Jesus seeks to challenge horizons and expand them, to get his listeners to see where their priorities lie and to question them.

Having provided a criterion by which the disciples can judge or assess the outsider he then turns the focus on them (‘if any of you … ’). What follows is a graphic text that is not easy to interpret. For me context is almost everything and so I read it as a way of reinforcing Jesus’ rejection of their negative judgement of the outsider. If you set yourself up as a judge of others, the text implies, then why not apply the same criteria to yourself. If you do then of course you would agree with what should be done to anyone who damages ‘one of these little ones’. And who are the little ones that Jesus has in mind: the child in v 36 and/or the outsider condemned by the disciples?

He then pushes the envelope even further. If your hand sins cut it off—and who could claim that he or she has never sinned by touch? The same goes for the rest of the senses. If you sin by them they must be cut off, excluded from participation in the ‘body’, just as the outsider must be excluded from participation in the community and its work. In order to enter heaven according to these criteria we would have to self-destruct because we all sin in all our senses. Instead of judging others therefore and deciding their fate in God’s scheme of things, we need to look at ourselves first and we will find that we are more in need of God’s mercy than they are.

The letter of James deals with the worst example of all and that is why I have left it to last. A redeeming feature about Joshua and the disciples’ complaint is that at least they are paying some attention to the other and there is a concern about the welfare of the community. But with those against whom the letter of James rails there does not seem to be one redeeming feature. They are completely absorbed in themselves and couldn’t give a hoot about the other, in particular the deprived or persecuted (‘in the time of slaughter you went on eating to your heat’s content’). What is worse, they condemned and killed the innocent to get them out of the way. What seems in particular to distress James is that all he can do is preach and write against them; they carry on oblivious and die in ripe old age while the poor die too soon and in great misery. One can see why Judaism, Christianity and Islam developed the notion of a final judgement. There has to be some accountability for such shameless evil.