Kick It To The Curb: Mark 9:43-50
Through the repentance and forgiveness that comes through God’s judgment, we can be at peace with one another. Nobody is perfect. We will all make mistakes. We will all rub one another the wrong way. Through God’s Word, through conversations with others, through our prayer life with God in the Spirit, God will test us and reveal our sinfulness. Through the humbleness that comes with repentance, we can be at peace.
Jesus once more taps into a dark side in His teaching. Much of today’s verses invoke images of maiming. To be clear, Jesus is not advocating self-mutilation. Instead, He is using the vicious nature of the imagery to make a point. Jesus wants this teaching to sound harsh and dark so it gets our attention.
Cut off your hand, cut off your foot, gouge out your eye. For each of those, Jesus makes the claim that it is better to enter heaven partly intact than to not enter heaven at all. In other words, a small temporal sacrifice is nothing compared to an eternity spent in the glory of God. Now, spin that the other way. The omission of a small temporal sacrifice is not worth an eternity of decay and judgment.
Jesus is not in the management game. Jesus doesn’t want us thinking we can manage the sin or confine it to small aspects of our life where it doesn’t seem to affect us. Jesus teaches us to get rid of it. If something causes you to sin, get rid of its influence. If someone causes you to sin, get rid of their influence. This isn’t about mitigating our way into making sure the scales of judgment tip in our favor; Jesus is talking about an all-or-nothing no-holds-barred look at the consequences of sin.
Jesus does ask us to forgive one another. No matter how much we desire it, sin will enter our life and that sinfulness will rub off on one another. God doesn’t kick the repentant one to the curb, nor would He ask us to do the same. He wants us to live at peace with one another. There is a difference, though, between the repentant influence and the unrepentant one. The repentant influence, when confronted with their sinfulness, will acknowledge their role and change. The unrepentant one will continue to pull you down into sin. It is this second category that is the focus for Jesus.
This is why Jesus closes with the final two verses. We will all be tested. So long as in our testing we allow the bad to fall away in repentance, then the testing is good. We remain salty. When we hold onto the bad and avoid repentance, then we lose our saltiness and are no longer useful for God’s ways. None of us are perfect, but we are all capable of acknowledging and repenting of our sinfulness. Through the repentance and forgiveness that comes through God’s judgment, we can be at peace with one another.
