The idea that if you are not with us, you are against us, that you have to pick a side and failure to pick my side means you are my enemy, goes way back. There is something like that in the Book of Joshua, some of which dates to 1400 B.C. Politicians from Lenin to Mussolini to Hillary Clinton and George W. Bush have said as much. Even Jesus says "whoever is not with me is against me" in Matthew's Gospel (Matthew 12: 30). Perhaps that is why Jesus' statement in today's reading from Mark's Gospel (Mk 9: 38- 40) is so startling. Jesus states the contrapositive of the common expression-- "Whoever is not against us is for us," He says. He says this in the context of a person driving out demons in Jesus' name, even though he was not one of Jesus' followers. Apparently he was being successful-- the disciples don't say he was trying to drive out demons, but that he was actually doing so. And the disciples want him stopped because, well, because he wasn't one of them. Jesus tells them to let him go ahead with what he is doing, for the perfectly logical reason that anyone who is using Jesus' name to accomplish miracles will not speak ill of Jesus. But then Jesus goes on to say that all those people out there who have no view about Jesus, who have taken no position, who may not even know Him-- those folks who "are not against us"-- those people are "for us." How can He say that? How can someone who is clueless about Jesus possibly be "for" Him? Don't we have to know Jesus to love Him and have a relationship with Him? Sure, is the answer to that last question. But maybe Jesus is challenging us to something deeper, something with which the Church still struggles but which the Church made very clear at the Second Vatican Council: salvation does not belong only to followers of Christ. An article in the most recent edition of the Jesuit magazine, America, makes this point very well. The title of the article, but Peter Schineller, S.J., provocatively says it all : "Without love of neighbor, there is no salvation." The title plays with the old expression that "outside the Church there is no salvation" to point out that salvation depends less on being in the Church than it does on not being "against" Jesus. Fr. Schineller notes that in the Dogmatic Constitution of the Church, at No. 16, the Council said: "Nor shall divine providence deny the assistance necessary for salvation to those who, without any fault of theirs, have not yet arrived at an explicit knowledge of God, and who, not without grace, strive to live a good life." Those folks are certainly not "against" Jesus. How that works was explained in "The Church in the Modern World" (No. 22) where the Council wrote that because Christ died for everyone, and all are called to one and the same destiny, which is divine, "the Holy Spirit offers to all the possibility of being made partners, in a way known to God, in the paschal mystery." These days I think there are a lot of people who are neither for nor against Christ. They are the "nones," the people who have no particular religion, who probably believe in God in some sense but have rejected a formal church affiliation. After all, the second largest group in terms of religion in the U.S., after Catholics, is those who call themselves "former Catholics." Is that a shame? Yes. Should we do what we can to try to bring those folks who have left the Church back into a relationship with us? Of course, just as we should try to bring into the Catholic faith those who never were Catholic. But let's not use scare tactics to do that. Those don't work anyway, and our Gospel today reminds us that, as the Church teaches, people outside the Church can still be saved. What we need for salvation is love, not necessarily a particular kind of religion. We can have that love regardless of our faith tradition, and those who love are always "for" Jesus, even if they, like the one casting out demons, are exercising that love in a way we might not. Let's work on helping others be "for" Jesus by being people who, in these troubled times in the Church, show love, compassion and joy. Nothing can turn a person into someone who is "against" Jesus more quickly than beating that person up with the Gospel, and nothing attracts someone to Christ more profoundly than joy. One of the foundational tenets of medicine is: "First of all, do no harm." For us as those trying to spread the good news, we might say: "First of all, don't turn people against Jesus."