NOTES for Mar 9:38-43

The Savior's words about those who cannot at the same time perform miracles in His name and immediately revile Him seem quite reasonable and understandable in human terms. Sometimes a newly appeared religious movement needs not even support, but only more or less favorable neutrality. Yet Jesus also said something else: whoever is not with Me is against Me; whoever does not gather with Me scatters. It would seem that these are two mutually exclusive statements. And if Christianity were simply one more religious movement, even a messianic one, this would be so. But the point is that Christianity is not a religious movement, but a path into the Kingdom and life in the Kingdom.

Here everything is not as it is with ordinary religious movements. The Kingdom is an objective reality. It came into the world through Jesus, and however we relate to this fact, our attitude does not change the fact itself in the least. And in order to enter the Kingdom, trust in the Savior is important. That very trust which, in the traditional language of most Christian religions, is called faith in Jesus Christ.

But even for those who remain outside the Kingdom, it is not completely closed. For now that it is in the world, its breath is felt everywhere. And anyone can feel this breath. Of course, such a breath, sensed by outsiders, is not the same as the fullness of life in the Kingdom opened by Christ. But it is still better than nothing. To sense it, one need not even be a disciple of Christ in the proper sense of the word.

The only thing that protects one completely reliably from the breath of the Kingdom is an unambiguously negative attitude toward it and toward the One who brought it into the world. This means that anyone who has not said an unambiguous "no" to Christ or to any of His disciples doing His work is not lost for the Kingdom. Of course, for a Christian this is not enough. For a disciple of Christ, another principle is in force: if you do not do Christ's work, if you do not gather with Him, then time has been lost in vain, something has been missed. But here there is already another path and another measure. The measure of one seeking the Kingdom and striving to live its life.

Usually this saying is repeated as: "Whoever is not with us is against us." In this way the overwhelming majority of people are enrolled among our enemies. Here two different sayings of Christ are confused: the one we have just read, and "Whoever is not with Me is against Me" (Matt. 12:30).

Where Jesus speaks about Himself, this is simply a statement of the fact that in relation to Christ one cannot be neutral; failure to receive Him inevitably turns into hostility. In Christian spirituality there is no state "between Christ and Belial." Jesus explains further: "Whoever does not gather with Me scatters." In Christian life there are no stops: a stone that has stopped flying upward is already falling.

But in relationships between people Jesus proposes a completely different logic. We are called to find the possibility of friendship, peace, and love with all people who do not feel unequivocal hostility toward us. Besides, we are called to love enemies too.

The motives behind our actions, even the largest ones, sometimes turn out to be secondary and insignificant things. Passing considerations distort our vision, and we are guided by what we should never have been guided by. This is exactly what Christ's words today are about: "it is better for you to enter life maimed than with two hands to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire." The point is that we violate the commandments for the sake of passing gains and pleasures. The Lord calls us to see ourselves and our whole life as a single whole.

At the end of the chapter, Mark the Evangelist gives His words about salt, without which, according to the Old Testament, no sacrifice can be offered. In the ritual context, salt serves as a symbol of faithfulness and faith, and the New Testament mentions of it with reference to the disciples give reason to think that the Lord Himself used this symbol in the same way. Therefore, as an alternative to the petty impulses that lead us into sin, the Lord gives us precisely faith and peace among ourselves.

Everything Jesus said undoubtedly makes us reflect. But some of His words, at first sight, cause nothing but bewilderment. Consider, for example, the way He proposed to combat temptations. It is not even that, had the Savior’s disciples followed their Teacher’s words literally, there would probably not have remained a single Christian with two hands, two feet, and two eyes. The point is that even if His words are understood allegorically, and even if we take them as a concise and precise artistic image, it is far from easy to carry out the advice He gave. For in essence, carrying it out means renouncing oneself, some part of one’s own being. Yet apparently this way of struggling with one’s own sin sometimes truly proves to be the only possible one. What else remains if sin so thoroughly permeates some of the principles that make us who we are that the only way to avoid sin is to renounce those principles? It is like a cancerous tumor: the operation often proves difficult, but nevertheless it is the only way to save the patient’s life. The Savior does not hesitate: if the operation is necessary, it must be performed. And as quickly as possible.

Today in the Gospel according to Mark we read Christ's words as if they were addressed especially to our time. The point is that in life there are many things that in one way or another draw us toward sin. As a rule, when faced with these temptations, we permit ourselves many unacceptable things. God told Cain long ago: "sin is crouching at the door; its desire is for you, but you must rule over it" (Gen 4:7). In today's passage the Lord says the same thing. He calls us to renounce and free ourselves from what draws us into committing sin. We are not to justify ourselves by saying that we cannot resist our "natural needs," but to be freed from them.

In the fourth century, morals in the Roman Empire were no better than they are in our world today. Most people believed it was impossible to resist the thirst for pleasures of the flesh, the thirst for wealth, and the striving for success and power in life. And the Lord called an Egyptian named Anthony to renounce all this, so that we might see that the temptations of an age can be overcome. Thus monasticism was born, bearing witness to all of us through celibacy, poverty, and obedience that the words of Christ read today are possible to fulfill.

The Saviour's words about the hand, the foot, and the eye that cause a person to stumble may seem too harsh, especially if they are understood literally. Christians, however, have never understood them literally, otherwise most sincere believers would be one-legged, one-handed, or one-eyed, or all three at once. This is an obvious and quite transparent allegory: there must be no place for sin in a Christian's life, and everything connected with it must be excluded from that life. Indeed, genuine repentance can only be like this.

The hand, the foot, and the eye merely symbolize one or another kind of human activity: they represent what we do, where we go, and what we look at. The sins that poison our lives are usually connected with these activities. Of course, a person's thoughts and imagination can also be sinful, but both thought and imagination need to be constantly fed by external impressions, and here the same eye plays a decisive role for us. Naturally, this does not mean that we should become blind, even figuratively, any more than it means a complete renunciation of all outward activity. What matters is that these impressions and this activity should not be infected by sin.

In a fallen world, one can certainly encounter sin anywhere; the only question is whether we remain where we encountered it. Do we keep looking where we saw it, going where it was found, and doing what proved to be connected with it? Here the temptation of ambiguity often arises: yes, sin is present, but there is something useful there too. Jesus has precisely such situations in mind when He speaks of the hand, the foot, and the eye: if sin is present, if temptation is evident, then we must give up whatever contains it, however useful or pleasant it may seem. Unfortunately, this is the very case in which a spoonful of tar can spoil even a whole barrel of the finest honey. Such honey, alas, has to be thrown away, however tasty and wholesome it may be in itself, as Jesus reminds His disciples.

Why does the Lord single out a child as an example of someone to welcome, when it would seem good to welcome anyone? And what does it mean to welcome someone in the Lord's name? The Lord calls us to mercy. So, first and foremost, it means welcoming without expecting anything in return. But that is precisely the case with a child. What can a child give us in return? A child has neither social standing nor money. On the contrary, children themselves need to be fed and clothed. That is exactly why the Lord shows the disciples a child. More generally, as you well know, the child becomes in the New Testament a figure of the person who belongs to the Kingdom of God (Mk 10:15, Lk 18:17, Mt 18:4). Being such a figure does not mean complete identity, for, as parents know, a child is not always a little angel; it means a likeness in certain spiritual qualities—far from all of them! But which qualities, if not all? To answer this question, let us recall that a prophecy of this is found in chapter 11 of Isaiah, where he describes the Coming Kingdom: Then the wolf will dwell with the lamb, and the leopard will lie down with the kid; the calf, the young lion and the ox will be together, and a little child will lead them. <...> And an infant will play over the asp's hole, and a child will put its hand into the snake's den (Isa 11:6, 8). When we read these lines, we usually notice first of all that the snake will not bite the child; by our earthly habit, this is precisely what concerns us. But at the same time, let us imagine an adult who has entered the Kingdom of God: even if told on entering that snakes do not bite here, that person still will not put a hand into a snake's den for anything. Because we carry this memory of evil within us; we have divided the world into those who are with us and those who are against us. And here is the point that allows us to read two different parts of today's reading alongside each other. Christ calls us to look not at those who are with us, nor at those who are against us, but at those who are not against us—and then it will turn out that they are with us. This is precisely how a child perceives things: a child does not have the idea lodged in its head that the snake is against us, because it simply does not know this. It is towards this ‘not knowing’, away from our ‘knowing’, that we must strive.

One of the main obstacles to our adequate understanding of the Kingdom is our projection onto it of the ideas and concepts of the untransfigured world. The disciples, of course, must have known something about the messianic Kingdom: traditional messianic expectations included an image of the Kingdom, which, however, was conceived as a powerful earthly state headed by the Messiah as ruler and living according to the laws of the Torah, or at least laws based on the Torah.

On the one hand, this conception has its roots in the pre-exilic age, in the early prophets' understanding of the Kingdom of God and in the preaching of the later prophets of that age, such as Isaiah of Jerusalem, who also envisioned the Messiah as an earthly king and the messianic Kingdom as an earthly state. With such an approach, the question of power—of who would be ‘in charge’ in this coming Kingdom, second only to the King—was entirely appropriate. Jesus tries to explain to the disciples that His Kingdom is organised quite differently from earthly states.

It does not reflect the reality of the untransfigured world as a mirror image, as some thought then and still think now; the principle ‘those who were nothing shall become everything’ has nothing to do with the life of the Kingdom. The Kingdom does not turn the earthly hierarchy upside down—or right side up: it simply abolishes it. And it abolishes it not by destroying it but by levelling it. The point is not that the Kingdom is hostile to all hierarchy, or to the very principle of hierarchy, but that hierarchy understood in earthly terms simply loses its meaning there. Just as, at a certain stage of a child's development, the question of status is unimportant and meaningless, so it is unimportant and meaningless for the Kingdom.

What matters to the Kingdom is something else: how much responsibility, and accordingly how much service, a person is prepared to take on. The extent of that service and the corresponding degree of responsibility determine a person's status in the Kingdom. Everything else is irrelevant: the fullness of the Kingdom's life is available to every one of its inhabitants; it does not depend on the position they hold within it.

The question of power has always been the main one for the fallen world. Whoever has more power is greater in this world in every other sense as well. The matter, of course, is power in the real meaning of the word: power over souls, over people, over human lives, which can be manipulated at one's own discretion. This is power as such. Everything else is only means, and crude coercion is not even the most terrible among them. The true goal, though the one striving for power may not know it, is always one thing: to seize for oneself another person's life. Not physical life, but what the Bible calls the soul, the stream of life given to a person by God and unique in every case.

This is what the one striving for power wants to seize. He longs to gain access to this very life of another or of others; he wants to subject it to himself so as to dispose of someone else's life force and spend it at his own discretion, just as he spends his own life. Of course, each person understands life according to the measure of his own spiritual state, but one thing turns out to be common: the one striving for power longs to dispose not only of himself but also of others, whatever that may mean for him. Of course, if a person has not yet been completely corrupted by power and has not become a finished cynic, he tries as much as possible to hide even from himself the true motives of his striving, justifying it by lofty and far-reaching goals that he will achieve once he obtains the power he desires.

In reality, however, as the whole experience of the fallen world shows, one can avoid becoming captive to acquired power only by remaining God's person first of all, and everything else second, as King David managed to do, for example. He always remained first of all a prophet, and only afterward a king and everything else he was in life. For the Kingdom, the question of power in the earthly sense does not arise at all. There, power in that quality simply does not exist; in principle it is incompatible with the Kingdom and its life. A person's place in the Kingdom is determined only by the measure of the fullness of his life, and therefore by the fullness of his action, which draws into itself those who want to participate with him in his activity.

The initiator, of course, is responsible for the work begun, but the possibility of any manipulation of others is completely excluded here, because the goal of every activity in the Kingdom is the spiritual formation of the person, which is in no way compatible with manipulation, while all other goals are secondary and derived from the main one. Therefore there can be no power in the Kingdom in the form in which it exists in the fallen world. It can exist there only insofar as in the fallen world, according to its laws, the person is never the main goal of any activity. In the Kingdom this is impossible, and this is what Jesus is trying to explain to His disciples.

Exactly so—as soon as we begin this interesting argument about who is greater, we immediately become fighters for a monopoly on possessing Christ: whoever has the more correct faith has Christ, and I have the most correct faith! This almost instinctive desire is based on the good intention of earning more of God’s love. For besides purely selfish motives—which we all resolutely condemn—we want to be greater, more important, and more exclusive, because in our world such people always receive more attention, more recognition, and more love. But God’s love is not like that. It extends to the great and the small, the righteous and the unrighteous; it cannot be earned by good behavior or by correct faith. Before it, admiring our own greatness—which is highly questionable in comparison—is absurd; we cannot put it in our pocket and declare it our property. The only way to receive it is to accept God, to accept Christ, to accept every little or grown child—for we are all children—created in God’s image and loved by Jesus.

Everyone who reads the Gospel is struck by a characteristic difference in Christ's words about those who are not with Him and about those who are not against His disciples. With regard to Himself, the Lord says: "Whoever is not with Me is against Me, and whoever does not gather with Me scatters." But when the disciples complain to Christ about a certain man who works miracles in Christ's name but does not go with them, the Lord says to them: "do not forbid him... whoever is not against you is for you."

The disciples can be understood. If this unknown man believes in Christ so much that he casts out demons in His name, how can he not follow the path of the Twelve apostles? Is their path deficient, mistaken? No, the path of the Twelve is not mistaken - but it is not the only one. For centuries, people coming into the community of Christ's disciples have tried to "forbid" those who do not go after them. Today's passage from the Gospel of Mark directly rejects such attempts.

It is characteristic that the evangelists tell us nothing about such people, who did not go after the disciples but did walk in the ways of Jesus Christ. Only occasionally, in passing, do we learn that there were not so few of them. At one moment the apostle Paul finds a community baptized with John's baptism, and by his apostolic authority passes on to them the gift of the Holy Spirit. At another, he himself testifies in a letter to the existence of more than five hundred witnesses of the Resurrection... In the end, all who have believed in Christ enter one holy catholic and apostolic Church. But people do this by following Jesus Christ, and not anyone else.

Let us consider two very similar phrases: one from today's reading, “whoever is not against you is for you,” and another, also from the Gospel of Luke but occurring a little later, “whoever is not with Me is against Me” (Lk 11:23). Both, however, have parallels: one in the Gospel of Matthew, the other in the Gospel of Mark. Yet they resemble each other only in structure; in meaning, on the contrary, they are opposites. And it is precisely this opposition, which at times even seems paradoxical, that has the deepest theological meaning.

In human society there can be disagreements, differences of opinion, and so on. This is not frightening if people do not turn against one another, if they do not wage war among themselves. In relations with God, however, there is only one true direction—toward Him; everything that does not fit this strict law is false.

We are accustomed to the fact that the Lord created us in His image and likeness. This is the only thing that justifies cataphatic theology, based on positive knowledge of the incomprehensible God: we know Him “by analogy,” as Thomas Aquinas teaches us. But here we see an example showing that this analogy has its limits, and this is what justifies apophatic theology.

Today's passage is devoted to one of the main themes of the entire New Testament: the theme of the Kingdom of God. What is especially important here is that Jesus Himself gives the explanations concerning the Kingdom. At the center of His story is the image of a child, who symbolizes those who occupy the first places in the Kingdom of God (vv. 36-37). A person who causes a child to stumble is worse than a murderer, for even a murderer deserves trial, while Jesus compares such a tempter with a person who is thrown into the sea to be drowned without any trial (v. 42). This image, of course, does not appear by accident. In a traditional, patriarchal society, in large families, children as a rule did not occupy the honorable first places they often occupy in modern families. Children were regarded as natural servants and helpers, as the younger members of a large family or patriarchal clan. They truly were younger, and therefore the position of such a "natural servant" did not wound them at all and was not perceived by them as humiliation or as a lack of attention or love. Almost any adult in such a position feels a certain second-class status and dependence, which is understandable, given how important social position and the status connected with it are in an adult's eyes. Children do not think about this, and therefore for them there is no problem here. Apparently this is exactly what Jesus has in mind when He gives a child as an example, as the model of a resident of the Kingdom of God: for those who want to be its residents, it is important to renounce traditional ideas about the importance of social position and social status. Of course, in this case there always remains the danger that nearby there may be people who want to take advantage of such a state of affairs, just as in every age there have been people ready to take advantage of a child's familiar naivete and abuse it. It is precisely this sin that Jesus says is worse than murder and unworthy even of trial, for the person who acts this way not only rejects the fullness of the life of the Kingdom of God himself, but also prevents others from receiving it. Meanwhile, in a person's life there is always something that prevents him from becoming a child in the sense in which Jesus speaks of it: it may be a "hand," or a "foot," or an "eye," in short, anything a person uses in order not to be the child who can enter the Kingdom. Jesus advises getting rid of whatever interferes without regret (vv. 43-48). Sometimes it may seem that in doing so one loses something vitally important, something without which life will become damaged; but on closer inspection it turns out that the imagined "fullness" leads somewhere very different from the place where the fullness of life can be found, while apparent impairment at the end of the road turns into the fullness of the Kingdom of God.

The closer the Crucifixion comes, the more time Jesus spends with His disciples. He speaks to them about the sufferings awaiting Him. But His disciples do not understand Him; they are thinking not about suffering and death, but about glory and privileges. This is where the argument comes from: "Who is greater? Who will receive more authority in the Kingdom of the Messiah?" John, in addition, seeks to protect the twelve disciples from competition on the part of "outsiders." At the same time, the boundary of "our own circle" is drawn by a very simple sign: "ours" are those who walk with us.

Christ rejects both attempts to build a pyramid of power and honors and the desire to turn the community of disciples into a closed club. He says directly to John: "Do not forbid him." Then He unexpectedly begins a conversation about the danger of stumbling blocks, ending it with the words: "Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another." Here one can see an echo of John's question and of the disciples' arguments about who is greater. The desire to separate "our own" from "outsiders," and to arrange "our own" by rank, destroys peace and makes people suspicious and hostile. Without peace among themselves, Christ's disciples cannot fulfill their mission in the world: to be "the salt of the earth" (Matt. 5:13). (Let us recall that every sacrifice was salted with salt before being offered to God on the altar (Lev. 2:13). Salt, as it were, made the sacrifice fit for God).

What does the word "stumbling block" mean? Other translations of this Greek word ("skandalon") are trap, snare, noose. It is everything that by deception, on the sly, pushes the simplehearted toward a fall or simply gets in the way and obstructs. Let us think about the extent to which the struggle for power, quarrels, and divisions among Christians serve as a stumbling block for "these little ones" and hinder those seeking the Truth from coming to saving faith.