Mark 10:2-16
2 Some
Pharisees came, and to test him they asked, "Is it lawful for a man to
divorce his wife?" 3 He answered them, "What did Moses command
you?" 4 They said, "Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of
dismissal and to divorce her." 5 But Jesus said to them, "Because of
your hardness of heart he wrote this commandment for you. 6 But from the
beginning of creation, "God made them male and female.' 7 "For this
reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, 8 and
the two shall become one flesh.' So they are no longer two, but one flesh. 9
Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate." 10 Then in
the house the disciples asked him again about this matter. 11 He said to them,
"Whoever divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery against
her; 12 and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits
adultery." 13 People were bringing little children to him in order that he
might touch them; and the disciples spoke sternly to them. 14 But when Jesus
saw this, he was indignant and said to them, "Let the little children come
to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God
belongs. 15 Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a
little child will never enter it." 16 And he took them up in his arms,
laid his hands on them, and blessed them.
"Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it
is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs.”
·
Let us speak today of power. Not
power and glory, but simply power.
·
I saw two instances of both power and
powerlessness this week. Neither of these examples were happy ones on their
own. Neither of them would be easy to take. Neither of them would be easy to
preach on.
·
Let me say first of all that there
are days when I’m not very proud of my background. Usually I’m proud to be what
I am, proud of where I come from, proud of what my family, my nation, and my
heritage have achieved.
·
Not today. Today I am not very proud
of myself or where I was born.
·
On Thursday, a young man entered a
number of classrooms at a college in the state of Oregon and shot and killed nine
people and wounded another ten. He later died in a gun battle with police
constables responding to emergency calls. Before this man shot his victims, he
asked them a question.
·
He asked “Are you a Christian?” If
the person said yes, he told them to stand… and he shot them in the head. If
the person said no or made no answer, he shot them in the legs. One student, a
veteran of the army, attempted to stop the shooter and was in turn shot. He
survived and is in hospital.
·
Here we see power – the power to kill
and wound. Here we see the power of one man’s sick hatred and what that could
lead to.
·
On Friday, I received a message on
the Internet telling of the death of a 40-year old man, the oldest son of a
friend of mine who is a pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.
The man who died had been institutionalized for many years because of a
debilitating disease, a disease so powerful that it required constant nursing
care, care his mother (my pastor friend) could no longer provide even though
she began her work history as a nurse.
·
The notice included reference to the
man’s love of baseball and the Philadelphia Phillies. It also included these
words, written in the fullness of faith by his mother: “While I grieve the loss of my firstborn, he is finally free from
the prison of his body. I hope they have baseball in heaven!”
·
Here we see power – the power of a
bodily disease to take the toll of more than one life. We also see the power of
faith which can permit life to go on despite the letting-go of a dear loved
one.
·
Our Gospel reading today speaks of
powerlessness. The Pharisees try to trip up Jesus with questions about divorce,
always a controversial topic. They don’t do this to reinforce marriage or
discuss what can cause a marriage to be unlivable. They want to discuss the Law
regarding marriage. The way they discuss it and tease it and dissect it, it
gives them power. For these men, it is not a gift of God to be lived and
shared; it is a token in a game, a score pad to keep track of winners and
losers, a trophy to display. It is power. Those who suffer in this are
powerless, particularly the women who can be divorced with a simple
hand-written certificate for almost any reason, and by that divorce, are
reduced to destitution and poverty.
·
When Jesus gathers the children to
him after his disciples attempted to shoo them away, he tells the disciples to
see in the children the way to the Kingdom. They are powerless and yet the
Kingdom belongs to “such as these.” (Note that I said “powerless” and not
innocent or pure or something like that.) He also says that the Kingdom must be
welcomed as one welcomes a little one, that is, without regard for your honour
or your prestige or what the one welcomed can do for you.
·
All this talk of power and
powerlessness leads us to the ultimate symbol of both power and powerlessness –
the Cross of Christ. The Most Powerful One laid aside his power and became
powerless in the face of those who would see themselves as powerful.
·
The writer of the letter to the
Hebrews wrote this: we do see Jesus, who for a little while was made lower than the
angels, now crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death, so
that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.
·
This is the power we depend upon, for
if we see ourselves as powerful, we have not yet known ourselves as Jesus knows
us. If we know him, we know ourselves to be powerless in the ways of salvation,
the ultimate truths of life, and of the Spirit, despite all the power we may
have accrued in so many areas of human endeavour.
·
The Kingdom of God is ours, not
because we are powerful and have achieved it for ourselves, but because we have
been given it in grace and mercy, in our powerlessness, by the power of God
seen particularly in the powerlessness of the birth of Christ and the cross of
Christ.
"Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it
is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs.”
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