NOTES for Mar 9:35

The Lord, astonishingly, does not reject in the disciples the natural, innate desire to be first. One might expect that an ordinary person would condemn this desire for primacy as unworthy and say that one must not exalt oneself. The Lord does say this, for example, in the parable of the tax collector and the Pharisee.

But in wanting to free the disciples from arrogance, He does not limit Himself at all to pointing out that wanting primacy is bad. He proposes using this natural desire, as we would say now, "for peaceful purposes." In Christ's words, the path to primacy turns out to be the path of service to others, the path of making oneself small. This is the very path He Himself follows. In the apostle's words, He took the form of a servant and was obedient unto death on a cross, so that He might have first place in everything.

We all strive for primacy among people like ourselves, and Christ offers us a radical way to seek it without betraying Him, but by following Him.

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.

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.

Let us look at two very similar phrases. One is from today’s reading: “whoever is not against you is for you,” and the other is also from the Gospel of Luke, but comes a little later: “whoever is not with Me is against Me” (Luke 11:23). Both, moreover, have parallels, one in the Gospel of Matthew and the other in the Gospel of Mark. But they are similar only in structure; in meaning they are, on the contrary, opposites. And it is precisely this opposition, which sometimes even appears paradoxical, that has the deepest theological meaning. In human society there may be disagreements, differences of opinion, and so on. This is not terrible if people are not against one another, if they are not at war with one another. In our relationship with God, however, there is only one true direction: the direction toward God; 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 alone justifies cataphatic theology, that is, theology based on positive knowledge of the incomprehensible God: we know Him “by analogy,” as Thomas Aquinas teaches us. But here is an example showing that this analogy does not extend very far, and this 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.