Fostering or Hindering Faith
Twenty-Sixth Sunday Scripture Readings
Today’s gospel presents us with an excellent example of how easy it is to read contemporary ideas back into Scriptural texts. We often assume that all translation does is take a word from one language and replace it with the same word from another language. Yet, as we’ve seen over and over again as we look at the Scriptures, this just isn’t the case. Meanings never carry over one-for-one, and every translation is actually an interpretation of what the original meant to say. Sometimes they get it right, often, they don’t. Such is the situation with today’s gospel. The sayings of Jesus that we read here predated Mark’s composition of his Gospel. He organized those sayings under a common theme: the fostering or hindering of faith.
In the gospel, John, the beloved disciple, is concerned about what we would today call heresy—someone who doesn’t see things the way we do, trying to do what we do. Jesus took a much more liberal approach to these matters than Christians have. We’ve been brought up to think of our faith as the “Church militant,” and we’re encouraged to think of it as a kind of war: us with the truth against them in ignorance. In that approach, we’ve often denigrated other spiritual traditions or attempted to destroy them. Think of the forced conversion of the Jewish population of Spain under Ferdinand and Isabella and the Spanish Inquisition. Or, how about the forced internment of Native American children in Church-run Indian Schools? Yet primitive Christianity wasn’t always that way. Early Christian missionaries adopted local religious customs and beliefs and integrated them into our worship. For example, the pagan celebrations of Samhain and Yule became the Christian All Saints Day (and All Hallows Eve) and Christmas.
“Do not prevent them,” Jesus said. “For whoever is not against us is for us” in the realm of the spirit. He’s speaking of those who do mighty deeds “in my name.” That’s significant. There is the faith connection. And it applies not only to the miracle workers, it also refers to those who do other, more simple good deeds “in my name.” It’s missing in English, but the text in Greek reads, “… anyone who gives you a cup of water in the name which is Christ … will surely not lose his reward.” Good deeds done in the name of Jesus are acts that foster faith.
Continuing his theme, Mark then presents the flip side. Instead of forces in play that strengthen faith, he shows the forces that can hinder it. People assume that “these little ones” are children. They’re not. They’re the anawim—God’s little ones, those of no account in the world of wealth, power, and prestige. They’re people like my grandmother Dzamba. Once, when she was visiting us, my mom suggested that she should do something other than sit in our living room praying all afternoon. She responded, “I’ll be a long time dead. I’ll pray now.”
Then we come to the sticky wicket. Here’s where we have to set aside our current translation. It says, “Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin ….” The word that they’ve translated as “sin” is σκανδαλιζειν (skandalizein), which means to stumble or to trip. No one can cause another to sin. However, it is possible to trip another up and cause them to lose faith. That’s what Jesus meant. The remainder of this gospel passage continues that thought. Using typical Hebrew hyperbole to bring his point home, Jesus counsels his followers to get rid of anything in life that could weaken their faith in God and in him. If it causes you to stumble, get rid of it.
Repeatedly, Jesus warns of the consequences of losing faith: winding up in Gehenna. He’s not referring to eternal damnation in hell. In fact, Jesus never refers to an eternal hell. Although we can’t entirely discount an eschatological, end-of-the-world, reference, what he’s describing is the conditions around a faithless life in this world. Gehenna—or Ge ben-Hinnom, the Valley of ben-Hinnom—is the valley south of Jerusalem that was used for millennia as the city’s garbage dump. We all remember when landfills used to burn. It’s the same idea. That’s what Gehenna was like. What Jesus is saying, then, is that a faithless life is wasted. It goes on the trash heap.
In the gospel, Jesus isn’t talking about scandalizing children or taking their innocence. He’s not talking about what we used to call “near occasions of sin,” especially sexual sins. Those were the least of Jesus’s concerns. The stumbling away from faith that’s contained in the gospel message has to do with the forces in our society that militate against trust in God. These are the forces of fearful self-reliance, the my-way-or-the-highway, ends-justify-the-means attitudes that lead God’s little ones into the Gehenna that James describes in our second reading.
“Come now, you rich, weep and wail over your impending miseries.
Your wealth has rotted away, your clothes have become moth-eaten,
your gold and silver have corroded,
and that corrosion will be a testimony against you;
it will devour your flesh like a fire.”
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