So this is only a little like the sermon I actually preached today. Close enough, though.
Mark 9:38-50; James 5:13-20; Psalm 19:7-14; Numbers 11:4-29
You’ve heard the expression, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend”? It’s a pretty common thing. It’s the basis for all sorts of national alliances, and, in a particularly dark span of Lutheran history, it’s a principle that led Lutherans and Catholics to stop killing each other in the 16th Century in order to focus on killing the Anabaptists — I did warn you it’s a dark period in Lutheran history. But this idea that the enemy of one’s enemy is a friend is something that Jesus brings up in today’s gospel.
After Jesus called the disciples out as they tried to figure out who was the greatest, John tells Jesus (note that he didn’t ask Jesus, but told), “Teacher … we saw a man driving out demons in your name and we told him to stop, because he was not one of us.” I can kind of see where John is coming from. He wants to make sure that the “insiders” are “inside” and the “outsiders” are “outside”. He wants to protect Jesus from people doing things in his name that they shouldn’t.
On the other hand, Jesus sees things differently. He can protect himself quite well. So he responds, “Do not stop him. No one who does a miracle in my name can in the next moment say anything bad about me, for whoever is not against us is for us.” Then in what appears to be the same breath, Jesus says, “If anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to be thrown into the sea with a large millstone around his neck.” That’s kind of a severe image, but it doesn’t hold a candle to the other imagery Jesus uses about cutting off your own hand and gouging out your own eye. But it does show just how seriously Jesus takes sin.
We sometimes forget that with all the talk about forgiveness and grace, sin is a really big deal to Jesus, and avoiding sin so much more. That’s what a good deal of his teaching comes down to. But, then we read something like we do in James, and we remember that, while sin is a big deal, it also isn’t.
As James is wrapping up his letter, he starts with: Is anyone in trouble? Tell God. Happy? Tell God. Sick? Tell God. Sinning? Tell God. For if anyone wanders from the truth (in other words, sins), and someone should bring him back, remember this: “Whoever turns a sinner from the error of his ways will save him from death and cover over a multitude of sins.” There’s two sides to this, the first that a sinner has a multitude of sins and in danger of “perma-death”, and the second that forgiveness covers those sins and saves the sinner from death.
This is James encouraging us to reach out to those who don’t know Jesus, but we also can’t get it into our heads that we’re “God’s police force”, because the Holy Spirit already has that job. Sometimes the Holy Spirit will use us, but we need to be careful.
In a way, when he talks to Jesus about the man driving out demons, John thinks he’s turning a sinner from the error of his way. He sees a problem that doesn’t fit into the box he’s created regarding what Jesus is like, and corrects it, never asking Jesus about it, instead giving a report later. It’s kind of silly. Imagine telling your boss you fired someone in another department for doing your job.
John is so concerned with making sure Jesus looks good and keeping someone else from doing bad that he stopped a good thing. It makes me think of a ministry in either Los Angeles or Las Vegas that seeks to share the Gospel with employees of the pornography industry. Now, you’d think that Christians would find this a good and wonderful thing, right? They are seeking to “turn a sinner from the error of their way”, to put it in James’s words? Nope. They get some pretty brutal hate mail for this, because their ministry doesn’t fit what people think is “appropriate”.
We can’t let our hatred of sin get in the way of forgiveness, and we can’t let forgiveness get in the way of our hatred of sin, either. That’s why sin is a big deal, but at the same time it isn’t. Just like light is both a particle and wave, sin is at the same time something that should concern us deeply and not concern us at all. We ought to avoid sin, in fact we pray in the Lord’s Prayer for God to “lead us not into temptation”, but we shouldn’t get so caught up in what sin is that we forget we follow a God who forgives sin — ours and everyone else’s.