This gospel today has such extreme language that of course we have to conclude that we can’t really take it literally. As one great preacher pointed out about this reading, it’s not like any of us have ever seen a congregation with even a few one-eyed or one-handed Christians who clearly took Jesus’s guidance about how to deal with their sinful tendencies. And as far the idea about people who discourage people from following Jesus being better off drowned, well, I can think of several such people who drive people away from the church, and as far as I know they are unfortunately not tied to a rock at the bottom of the Delaware or anywhere else, although I can take a brief moment of sinful pleasure picturing them there.
This seems to be a Jesus that we see now and then in the gospel when clearly he is more or less at his wit’s end trying to get people to understand a simple point. Don’t let anything stand in the way of being close to God and the kingdom of God. Anything. The word that is repeated over and over again in this passage, although it’s not clear from this translation, the word that Jesus keeps repeating is obstacle. If you have an obstacle, something that is in your way, get rid of it, no matter what it is. And don’t just get rid of your own obstacles, don’t place obstacles in the way of others. Jesus wants us to realize that for us this is a matter of life and death.
We’re at the turning point in this gospel of Mark, when the whole story starts turning towards Jerusalem and the cross, and the disciples are suddenly erecting obstacles to building the kingdom the way Jesus envisions it. First, it was their ego and their ambition, where seemingly ten minutes after seeing Christ transfigured on the mountaintop they are arguing about who is the greatest. Now this week, they’re upset because someone who does not have the proper status or identity is healing people using Jesus’s name. And of course above all they’re resistant to this whole idea of Jesus’s death, his willingness to go towards this dangerous climax of his story. That change they don’t want. So the idea that he, and they, will have to suffer and change as part of their story is maybe the greatest obstacle of all.
There are plenty of things that are our obstacles, not just ego and ambition and our desire to feel more successful than others, but really anything that keeps us away from God, our discouragement and our distractions and our cynicism and our anger, or our sense that we are not the sort of person God is trying to reach,
All those beliefs and habits are hard to get rid of; the image of cutting off a hand gets the point across of just how hard it is to take a step away from what is keeping us from a relationship with God. It sounds awful, this idea of cutting away at ourselves, but hard as it is to begin, in the end it is actually a process more like finally putting down a heavy load, or taking blinders off, getting rid of what seemed like part of ourselves, but the thing we needed to cut away is actually a burden that is keeping us from real joy.
If you’ve been at all inspired or at least interested in what the pope has been saying to all of us this week, maybe that’s because so much of what he is saying is all about taking away obstacles that keep people from God or from the church, and taking away the obstacles that keep people from accepting and helping and forgiving one another. He told our bishops that the church should be like a warm fire that people can gather around and find shelter and healing. He told all of us that our whole life as individuals and as a country should be about the common good, and that we should treat everyone, even strangers, as people with faces and stories, not as people distant from us.
These things sound beautiful but they are hard to do, we have obstacles that keep us from accepting and forgiving, from being generous, from concentrating on people who are marginal and out of sight. But that’s where we want to be, that is the kingdom of God, really, and nothing should get in the way of what we are being offered, that kingdom on this earth where everyone gets what they need, where people with nothing are taken in without questions, where prisoners are given new life, where everything can be forgiven.
Only you know what kind of distractions or sadness or attachments or resistance are your obstacles keeping you from the banquet, or maybe it’s just a feeling that all this talk about what is being offered us is too good or too unrealistic or too vague. Whatever our obstacle is to being part of the kingdom, let’s ask God for the courage to perform some surgery that will take it away, and bring us closer.