The shape of failure

Six failures of discipleship in one chapter, after the transfiguration. Mark's most concentrated portrait of the disciples getting it wrong, and his closing answer: have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another.

Pre-session video

Down off the mountain. The transfiguration has just happened on the high mountain with Peter, James, and John; now Jesus and the three come down to find the other nine surrounded by a crowd, arguing with scribes, and unable to cast out a spirit from a boy. From there, through the rest of chapter 9, Mark gives us six failures of discipleship in a row, and closes the chapter with a single corrective.

The six: the boy they could not heal; the second passion prediction they could not hear; the argument about greatness they could not own; the maverick exorcist they tried to stop; the little ones they were not to scandalise; and the loss of saltiness that closes the cycle. Six failures. One answer. Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another.

Three things to watch for

The first is the demon the disciples could not cast out. Mark tells us the spirit has been with the boy since childhood. The demon is not a sudden visitation; it is what has shaped him. Mark's wider reading of demons treats them as personifications of evil — the cultural patterns that get inside a person (greed, fear, prejudice, exploitation, rigidity) and rob the freedom to be loving, gracious, giving. The boy has been raised inside a rigidity that has thrown him down and tried to destroy him. The disciples, the chapter quietly suggests, have begun to host the same rigidity themselves — the rigidity that argues about who is greatest, polices the boundary against the outside exorcist, fails to welcome the child. They cannot cast out of the boy what they have not first asked Jesus to cast out of themselves.

The second is the maverick exorcist. John comes to Jesus and says we saw someone casting out demons in your name and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us. Listen to that: not following us, not not following you. The disciples have begun to think of themselves as a faction with a clear boundary. Jesus refuses: whoever is not against us is for us. The maverick is inside the kingdom; the disciples were trying to keep him out. This is the most painful of the failures.

The third is Gehenna. The English word hell, which most translations use at 9v43, 9v45, 9v47, is — in current scholarship — a mistranslation. The Greek is geenna, which transliterates the Hebrew Gei Hinnom: the Valley of Hinnom, a real geographic place, the ravine on the south-west side of Jerusalem. In the time of the kings it had been a site of child sacrifice; in Jesus' day it was the city's rubbish dump, perpetually burning. Mark's first hearers heard a real place outside their city walls before they heard a theological one. Our translation reads Gehenna, not hell, and the course treats Mark's saying as rhetoric about the seriousness of leading others astray, not as a doctrine of post-mortem torment.

Exegetical key video

Practice for the week

Three to choose from, or write your own. Sit with the six failures and ask which one is closest to your own life this week; do not rush the answer. Or: notice one place where you have drawn a faction-boundary and tried to stop someone outside it who is doing the work; consider what widening it would cost. Or: pray about a rigidity you have inherited — a culture, a family pattern, a way of being you did not choose but have not chosen against — and ask for the freedom to be gentle, kind, gracious, giving instead.

Materials for this session

Facilitator brief, participant workbook, and slides are available to facilitators and pilot participants on request; final downloadable versions will appear here once permissions on the scripture text settle.