By: Dana Cassell

Mark 9:38-50

I learned a lot about ministry in the first congregation I served. One of the lessons was from the senior pastor, Jeff Carter. When people had reactions to something that felt outsized to everyone else, when we couldn’t figure out exactly why someone was upset about a small change in the church, or when conflict erupted over something mundane like the color of the carpet or who administered the church Facebook page, Jeff had a wise maxim: “The thing is usually not The Thing.”

In other words, when we find ourselves incensed or despairing over something that seems inconsequential to other people, when we have Big Feelings about a small situation, there is usually something else going on. We might be expressing our feelings about something Big going on in our lives over something relatively small going on at church: grieving a recent death, we might lose it over something getting left out of the announcements in worship. Struggling with a recent health diagnosis that no one else knows about yet, we might end up yelling at the person who forgot to bring in the church trashcans from the street. Upset after a big fight with our partner, we might accuse a committee chair of RUINING a beloved annual event.

In my experience, this happens ALL THE TIME. I do it myself, regularly, behaving in ways that confuse even myself and having to trace those feelings back to their actual source. And church can oftentimes be a place where people feel safe enough to feel their feelings and express them, whether or not they make sense or are at all related to the specific situation at hand.

Often, the thing is not The Thing. When people started expressing their big feelings all over the place, we called it “squirting out.” People had so many big feelings that they were overflowing into random, small interactions.

I wonder if the stories we get about Jesus and the disciples here in this section of Mark’s gospel aren’t actually stories about the thing not being The Thing. The disciples are such numbskulls, here, refusing time and time again to listen to Jesus or believe what he’s saying, that it seems to me that there HAS to be something else going on with them.

The pattern happens three times, in chapters 8, 9 and 10: Jesus attempts to explain that he is about to be betrayed, arrested, murdered and then will rise again. Three times, the disciples refuse to hear him, and each time Jesus sort of sighs and explains, again, that this is what being the Messiah means and, in fact, it is also what *following* the Messiah might look like.

Here in chapter 9, Jesus has explained to them that the Son of Man will be betrayed, murdered and will rise again, and the disciples just…ignore him. Instead of asking him what he means or allowing themselves to feel the confusion and grief that prediction must engender, they start arguing about who among them is the greatest.

Jesus tries to correct them, telling them that being the greatest actually involves being last and serving everyone. He even grabs a dirty, snotty little child and tucks it into his lap in order to make his point. And while they are still all standing there, tiny kiddo still in Jesus’ lap, disciples having just heard this teaching about humility and service that has become so famous and familiar all these years later, John pipes up:

“Oh yeah, Jesus, I’ve been meaning to tell you: there are some OTHER people casting out demons and healing people in your name, but since he’s not here following US, we tried to stop him. We knew that’s what you would want.”

The more I read the gospels, the more I marvel at Jesus’ immense stores of patience with his friends. Here he has JUST finished explaining to them – for the millionth time – how he is a Messiah of a different order, how he is flipping the world’s expectations upside down, how saving your life means losing it and being great means serving the least and they are just, like, throwing their hands over their ears and humming in order to avoid hearing it. Instead of listening, processing, feeling the feelings that these radical teachings much bring up in them, John just tries, again, to assert his greatness, their primacy, the official pecking order of “who is with us” and “who is against us.”

The thing, John, is not The Thing.

I wonder what would have happened if John and Peter and all the disciples had had the emotional wherewithal to HEAR what Jesus was saying and do the hard work of processing it in their own hearts. What if, instead of rebuking Jesus like Peter did or complaining about some random exorcist like John did, or all of them bickering about which one of them was Jesus’ favorite, they had heard Jesus’ prediction about the coming suffering and grief and paused. What if they had let it sink in? What if they had felt the horror of it, the grief of it, the unimaginable loss of it? What if the disciples had faced the reality of what their beloved friend and teacher was telling them and allowed themselves to feel those awful feelings?

This is, I think, what Jesus is trying to teach them here in this passage. After John tattles about that other exorcist and complains to Jesus about how he wasn’t following them so he wasn’t really legit, Jesus tells John and the rest of the disciples to “have salt in yourselves.” He does this whole thing about cutting off your hand if it offends, plucking out your eye if it causes you to sin, a big sermon on self-reflection and spiritual practice. And then he says “have salt in YOURSELVES.”

Salt was a purifying agent, and a preservative. It kept things from spoiling and it removed impurities. Having salt in one’s self means, in other words, to deal with your own baggage, first. In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus says it this way “you hypocrites! Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?” 

Why are you complaining about this other guy, John, when you cannot even face your own grief and confusion? Have salt in yourself.

Prentiss Hemphill is a somatic therapist. They worked as the Healing Justice Director at the Black Lives Matter Global Network and just published a book that I will be re-reading a couple of times: What It Takes to Heal. Hemphill knows what it takes to be deeply involved in social movements for change, and they also know how essential individual healing is to that work. They say:

“Healing and social change are not, in fact, unrelated. To pry them apart is to exacerbate the issue. They are inextricably linked, braided together, interdependent processes of transformation. To ask if we can heal at the same time that we engage in social change is, to me, like asking if we can love at the same time we make change, if we can make music or eat food.”

We cannot expect to be effective or fully engaged in the work required to change the world unless we are also intentional about our own processing, emotions, and healing. Hemphill says “We must first be able to feel grief, our own, before we can truly become an ally to anyone else.”

I think this is also what Jesus was trying to convey to the disciples, and to us. “Have salt in yourselves,” he says to his grasping, tattling, bickering followers, but the command doesn’t end there. Healing isn’t only for our own thriving. Having salt in ourselves isn’t just so we can be better on our own.

“Have salt in yourselves,” Jesus says, “so that you can be at peace with one another.”

Sometimes, when we find ourselves in conflict or drama, it can be helpful to remember that the thing is not always The Thing. Sometimes, we are acting in ways that keep us safe from having to confront where our feelings are coming from, from acknowledging the grief and anger we really feel. In those times, we might do well to take Jesus’ advice and have salt in ourselves, examine our own hearts, feel our own grief and confront our own Big Feelings.

I confess that I do not like this advice. I don’t like feeling feelings, and I’m not good at it. But I find that when I spend some time with anger, frustration and sadness, when I can connect those emotions to their deepest cause, I am much better able to face what’s real, to have grace for others, to work at being at peace. 

It is so much easier, and so shallowly satisfying, to point a finger at some other awful human than it is to have salt in myself and confront my own shortcomings and vulnerabilities. It is much more difficult to be honest and present with loss and fury. But Jesus never promised that following him would be easy, did he?