He was not one of us

The ninth chapter of the Gospel of Mark tells of an exorcist who was not a follower of Jesus, but he does a deed of power in Jesus’ name. Later that day, the disciple John tells Jesus, “Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not one of us.” Not one of us.

Mark was the first recorded Gospel. Matthew copied, reworked and embellished Mark when he wrote his own Gospel. And Matthew copied this section of Mark almost verbatim, except for the record of the unknown exorcist. Why?

In 1959, a Black missionary from Africa addressed a Christian church in north Texas. Her young daughter had asked her mother about the feelings in America between Whites and Blacks. Her mother had answered honestly. Dismayed, her daughter asked: “But they’re not the Christian people, too, are they?”

“Yes, Honey; they’re also the Christian people.” I wonder, would Matthew have included this story as part of the history of the church? Some ten years later, a Sunday School class in central Texas was discussing the lack of fellowship between their own congregation and that of the Black church of their denomination in the same city. One class member responded: “I wouldn’t feel comfortable going there to worship. Besides, they wouldn’t come to our church to worship.” That very Sunday morning, as the organ played the prelude, the Black chaplain of the Temple V.A. walked in with his family and took a pew at the front of the sanctuary.

Do you think Matthew would have shared this story? Mark tells the truth about the disciples: the disciples rebuked and isolated a powerful witness and worker for the cause of Christ because “he was not one of us.” Was Matthew just naive or was it something else?

Let me share with you one more story from 2019 by Kerry Breen of Today. It was already after 8 p.m. when Britney Tankersley’s kindergarten son, Myles, told her about his plan to match with a classmate for his school’s “Twin Day.” Any parent who has ever received such a last-minute request from a school child can imagine her annoyance. She didn’t know the parents of her son’s friend and didn’t have matching clothes for either child. But Myles was adamant, “We both have brown eyes and we both have dark hair; we look just like each other!”

“I’m too old for this,” thought Britney, but after about an hour, she was able to track down the classmate’s mother. At Walmart she was finally able to find two small, plaid shirts that matched and two dark pants.

The next morning as she sent Myles to kindergarten, she asked his teacher to please take a photo of the two: She was curious to see the resemblance of Myle’s “twin” since he had declared they were identical. The photo she received brought her to tears. She had expected to get a picture of another White child with brown hair. However, Tanner, Myle’s “twin,” was Black. None the less, with arms around each other’s shoulders, they surely did have identical smiles. “The sweetest thing in the whole world,” was Britney’s reaction.

In the Book of Genesis, when Cain asks God of Abel, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” You can almost hear God answering, “No, Abel, you are your brother’s brother.” There is a question we must ask of ourselves and the answer will tell us a lot about our relationship not only to one another, but also to God: If any one of the Gospel writers had included this story about Myles and Tanner, would he have been one of us?