Better for you to enter into the kingdom of God with one eye
than with two eyes to be thrown into Gehenna
Mk 9:38-43, 45, 47-48
From D. E. Nineham
v. 39. Jesus replied, “Do not prevent him.
There is no one who performs a mighty deed in my name who can at the same time
speak ill of me.
It throws an interesting light on the
contemporary outlook that Jesus is not represented as shocked or incredulous at
the suggestion that his name could be used to effect cures in a semi-magical
way unrelated to any personal knowledge of, or faith in, him.
v. 41. Anyone who gives you a cup of water
to drink because you belong to Christ, amen, I say to you, will surely not lose
his reward.
Because you belong to Christ:
Or “because you bear the name of Christ”
and literally “in (the) name that you are Christ's” - a phrase as odd in Greek
as it is in English. Because you are Christ's is Pauline terminology (cf. Rom.
8:9; 1 Cor. 1:12, 3:23; 2 Cor. 10:7). The word ‘Christ’ is nowhere else in the
Gospels or Acts used as a proper name without the article. So it seems clear
that in its present form the phrase must be the work of the early Church.
v. 42. “Whoever causes one of these little
ones who believe [in me] to sin, it would be better for him if a great
millstone were put around his neck and he were thrown into the sea.”
A Roman form of punishment, though not
quite unknown among the Jews. Great millstone is literally 'donkey millstone'
and is usually explained as meaning a millstone turned by a donkey, as distinct
from the lighter handmill served by a woman.
v. 43. If your hand causes you to sin, cut
it off. It is better for you to enter into life maimed than with two hands to
go into Gehenna, into the unquenchable fire.
Gehenna (Hell):
Hell is a word with so many irrelevant
associations that it is probably better to keep to the original word, ‘Gehenna’.
This was a valley west of Jerusalem where at one time children were sacrificed
to the god Moloch (2 Kings 23:10, Jer. 7:31, 19:5f, 32:35). After being
desecrated by Josiah it came to be used as a refuse dump for Jerusalem, a fact
which explains the imagery of worm and fire borrowed from Is. 66:24 in v. 48.
The suggestion is of maggots preying on offal and fires perpetually smoldering
for the destruction of refuse.
Because of all its bad associations, the
Jewish imagination had come to picture Gehenna as the place of future torment
for the wicked.
v. 48. Where ‘their worm does not die, and
the fire is not quenched’
Whether, as many commentators believe, this
addition to v. 47 is the work of St Mark or of the first compiler of the
passage, or whether it goes back to Jesus himself, it is important to remember
that it is not an original saying expressly designed to convey the Christian
view about the fate of the 'lost' but a quotation of traditional language (Is.
66:24 - itself based on the imagery of the earthly Gehenna) designed to call up
an image of utter horror.
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