Satan versus Satan (Mark 3:20 - 35)

Last week, we discussed Jesus’ early ministry, and saw that it was almost all healing, all the time: healing demoniacs—aka casting out demons—healing lepers, healing the disabled . . . and because of it, he began to draw huge crowds, so huge that they mobbed his house, and that they had to lower the man with leprosy down through the roof, because they couldn’t get in the door. We also saw him attract the attention of the religious authorities, who didn’t like what he was doing for a number of reasons, not least of all that he was breaking the law. Not to mention that he challenged their authority, always a dangerous thing with an entrenched, hierarchical administration.

We also saw that Jesus wasn’t exactly subtleabout it, either. He declared sins forgiven, he healed on the Sabbath, he even healed on the Sabbath in the synagogue, for Pete’s sake. Talk about rubbing their noses in it . . . and don’t think they didn’t understand, the religious authorities, don’t think they didn’t know what he was doing, that he was deliberately provoking them, and they couldn’t help themselves: they began to plot against him.

And by this week, we can see that things have escalated; not only are the religious authorities criticizing him on theological grounds—how dare he forgive sins!—but they’re calling him demon possessed, a very dangerous escalation indeed. As our passage opens, we’ve skipped over some stuff—healing some more folks by the sea, commissioning the twelve—and now he’s back at the house, snowed in by people again; nobody can even eat, there are so many. And you can just imagine what kind of people are out there: all the unclean in the world. The crazies, the addicts and the differently abled. The sexually diverse, the disfigured, and those whose bodies had been whittled away by war. It looks like a great, seething mass of unclean, a great writhing sea of outsiders, and every one of them is clamoring to get in the house.

Is it any wonder Jesus’ family is concerned? Is it any wonder that they are worried? They think he’s gone round the bend, that he’s become the leader of a demented parade, the ring-master of a dark circus of other. They try to restrain him, to hold him back—for his own good, of course—because the neighbors are beginning to talk, they’re beginning to say “This guy is out of his ever-loving’ mind!”

And that’s when the religious authorities pounce, just at the moment they might get the most support—nobody said they were stupid—and they say “He has Beelzebul and by the power of that leader of demons he’s casting out demons.” Noticed that by the first century the figure of Satan had evolved from the adversary to the king of the demons, and here they are claiming Jesus was under his sway.

Now, this is more than enough to get him strung up, but Jesus makes a pretty clever argument in defense: “How can Satan cast out Satan? I mean, think about it: if a kingdom is divided against itself, it can’t stand. Just like if a house is divided against itself, it won’t be able to stand, either. So, if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but his end has come.” And you can see just how Jesus got ‘em, can’t you? If he’s not a minion of Satan, the have no case. But if he is, then Satan’s rule is surely coming to an end. Gotcha!

And I’d be remiss in my pastorly duties if I didn’t point out the dead-on applicability of this particular parable to today. As a nation, it’s well-attested that we’re more divided than ever; our elections have become as close as a razor’s edge. Our national discourse has devolved into mud-slinging and fist fights, so partisan that we all seem to be lurking behind barricaded gun emplacements, lobbing fire at one another without thought to what’s best for the country. And what’s that Jesus is saying about what happens to divided houses?

And take the church—please!  (apologies to Henny Youngman). In the good old PCUSA, we’re already not standing. We’re shedding churches like fleas and losing missions like a house afire. And contrary to what the conservatives, say, it’s not about the liberals, and contrary to what the liberals say it’s not about the conservatives. It’s what happens when a house is divided. Funds begin to dry up and energy is diverted away from doing the legitimate work of God. It’s no wonder that Paul agreed with Jesus that unity is much more important than purity.

Well. Jesus finishes the parable up by explaining just why he’s casting out all those demons: nobody can enter a strong man’s house—that’s Satan—without first tying him up, and that means tying up his power, which is is contained in all those possessed people, all those people running around doing Satan’s will. You need to hit ‘em where it hurts, and in this case that’s cutting off Satan’s power on earth, manifested in all those possessed souls. Only unlike earthly rulers, unlike Kings and Princes and Presidents, Jesus doesn’t destroy human beings who are opposed to him, he doesn’t kill the folks possessed by powers they cannot oppose, he doesn’t slaughter soldiers caught up in the power struggles of their rulers. Instead, he sets them free, he gives back their will and self determination.

Finally, he manages to get in a swipe at the all the religious authorities calling him the devil: Every kind of blasphemy can be forgiven but one, he says, and that’s blaspheming the Holy Spirit. And the way Mark has structured this passage makes it clear that for him at least, for the Mark, this means mistaking the work of the Holy Spirit for that of demons, for the work of the forces of darkness. Which is what the scribes are doing with him: the Holy Spirit was working through Jesus, and they’re saying it’s the work of the devil. And in case we doubt what he’s talking about, Mark even adds an explanation of why he said it: “because they’d said, ‘He has an unclean spirit.’”

And from the very beginning, this has been a problem passage, maybe because it’s been taken out of context so much. It even worried the early Christians, enough that some fifteen years later, Matthew felt he had to “clarify” the issue, modifying the statement and it’s content to fit what he thought it meant. Today, this is certainly in the top five of anxiety-producing Jesus quotes: people worry about what it means, and wonder if they’ll inadvertently do it some day and be consigned to points down below, where there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth. They make lists of the things that might be the unforgivable sin so they can avoid even getting near doing them because, you know . . . crackle, crackle, crackle.

And the problem may be our tendency to elevate every little saying of Jesus into the doctrinal stratosphere, as if we need to build a pillar of theology every time hen opens his mouth. I swear, if one of our gospels mentioned that he was hungry, we’d construct a theology about Holy Hunger, or something. And while that is not a bad impulse—one that Mark and Matthew apparently shared—maybe the saying Mark remembered was just a jab at the authorities. After all, in those early days of his ministry he was doing plenty of that.

But Mark’s explanation—that of ascribing to the devil the work of the Spirit— does kind of fit into the overall theme of house divided, especially if we take into account the revelation over in John that the Holy Spirit resides within each one of us. If we deny the work of the Holy Spirit within ourselves, if our ego, or false self, or id, or whatever you want to call it, blasphemes the Holy Spirit, if it refuses to acknowledge it or work with it, if we claim all of what we are is because of ourself and not the Sprit within, then well. We certainly are a house divided, we certainly are cruising for a fall.

Well. His family shows up, his mothers and brothers (without Joseph: is it after his death?) and the folks sitting around him—who are inside the house with him—tell him they’re outsider, and he gestures to those who are inside, to those who are insiders, that they are his family, because they are with him, because they are doing the will of the God. And of course, the situation is graphically represented by inside and out, his biological family is outside and his followers are in.

And this pretty much blasts all those Christian family values views out of the water, with their emphasis the supremacy of a “traditional family with a mother and father,” when they make the biological family into a moral fetish which politicians can cynically use to divide us even further. Jesus’ family—by his ownnwords is about as untraditional as it comes, consisting of everyone who does God’s will, everyone. There’s no requirement of race, creed, color, sexual orientation, gender identity or even religion. There’s only one criterion—that they do the will of the creator.

Wow. Family . . . whether you know it or not, whether you believe it or not. And Jesus didn’t even say you have to believe that he’s God incarnate, that he will rise from the dead, or except him into your heart or anything like that. You just have to do the work of God. Mother Theresa, family. Mahatma Gandhi, family. Elie Wiesel, Martin Luther King, Gautama Siddhartha, Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī, anyone who feeds the hungry, anyone who heals the sick, anyone who clothes the naked: family. Anyone who does the will of God is Jesus’ family, and therefore oursm as well.

I’m not talking about salvation, I’m not talking about where you go when you die. I am talking about who’s in and who’s out, but not of heaven or the country club or the church. I’m talking about the family of humanity, siblings of the Son of Humanity, who is Jesus the Christ. And everyone who does the will of God is in that family, no exceptions, no ifs ands or buts. If that’s not good news, I don’t know what is. Amen.

Jesus Put the Rad into Radical (Mark 2:23 - 3:6)

     Several years ago, on National Public Radio, a Jewish man remembered being on a train to a Nazi death camp as a young child. He and his siblings are hungry, so his mother buys them food, but all that’s available is non-kosher meat. Her son asks her why she’s crying; she tells him that she has kept kosher all of her life but now she’s going to die, and she’s crying because her children are young and have not had a chance to live. His mother was a devout Jew, but nevertheless knew that, kosher or no, it was her duty and right to feed them what she could. In fact, Jews have never permitted Torah observance to override decisions to save life.

And you’ll notice that in today’s passage, in neither case is the situation dire. The disciples aren’t presented as starving, or as even particularly hungry: they’re just wandering through a field, idly plucking cobs along the way. Neither was there anything urgent about the man with the withered hand. As far as we know, he’d had one for a long time; it surely wouldn’t have hurt anything to wait until after the sun went down to heal him, until after the Sabbath was over. These stories are not about emergencies overriding Torah observance: there was no necessity for Jesus to break Sabbath rules.

But that’s how I’ve heard it preached, as a way of distinguishing between compassionate, life-giving Christianity and lifeless, heartless, rule-bound Judaism. In fact, it’s pretty clear that Jesus is deliberately provoking the religious authorities in this story—he even has the gall to compare himself to David, that greatest of Jewish kings, whose glorious return every good Jew awaited. And he doesn’t just heal the guy on the Sabbath, he does it in the synagogue, the local center of Jewish life. Taken together, the whole episode—the Sabbath corn-picking and healing—seems designed to say to the Pharisees “Put that in your (corn-cob) pipe and smoke it!”

It helps to understand that these are the final episodes in a series of conflict-stories that begin Jesus’ ministry. After calling his first disciples, he hit the road, healing the sick and casting out demons. In the Capernaum synagogue, he cast an unclean spirit out of a guy, then healed Simon’s mother-in-law at her own house, along with a whole bunch of other Capernaum-ites. And after embarking on a preaching and healing tour, his fame spread, so that by the time he returned to Capernaum, people were coming from far and wide to be healed.

His fame began to catch the attention of people other than those in need; in particular, the local religious authorities. And as he holed up in Capernaum, the place he’s staying was mobbed by desperate people and a few synagogue employees—scribes—to boot. And as they lowered a paralyzed man down through the roof, Jesus casually said “Son, your sins are forgiven.” And the scribes were thinking “how dare he! Only God can forgive sins” and Jesus, in a perfect state of non-dual oneness, knew exactly what they’re thinking, and healed the guy anyway.

Then, on a pleasant lakeside stroll, Jesus came across Levi and said “Follow me.” Now, Levi was a tax-collector, a Roman collaborator, and therefore unclean, and don’t think the lurking religious authorities didn’t notice that, and don’t think they didn’t notice when he sat down for supper at Levi’s house and broke bread with other unclean people—sinners, in the parlance of the times—as well. And Jesus just looks at them and says: “I’ve come to heal sick folks, not those who are well.”

Finally, some religious types noticed that although John the Baptizer’s people were fasting, Jesus and his people weren’t. “Why do John’s and the Pharisees’ disciples fast, but your’s don’t?” And he answered them with a wedding metaphor—you only fast after the bridegroom (that’s him) has left—and one about new wine in old wineskins, a sure sign that he didn’t think that the old religious rules didn’t fit the new stuff he was teaching.

And it’s clear that none of these things are forced errors, none of them are things he had to do. He didn’t have to throw in that incendiary comment—Son, your sins are forgiven—that threatened the scribes’ power. He didn’t have to eat at Levi ’s house, stuffed to the gills with tax collectors and other miscreants just guaranteed to make pharasitical blood boil. He didn’t have to give up fasting . . . it certainly wouldn’t have hurt him, and everybody knows it’s good for the soul.

And now, as we’ve seen, he doesn’t have to let his disciples pick that corn or heal that guy—in the synagogue, for Pete’s sake—on the Sabbath. It’s almost an in-your-face kind of thing, designed to catch the religious authorities attention. It’s almost like . . . a demonstration.

Mahatma Gandhi, the famous leader of Indian independence, was well known for his philosophy of non-violent resistance, What is perhaps less well-known is that he based it largely on the teachings and actions of Jesus Christ. And in the past, when I’ve thought of this, I’ve thought of the usual suspects: turn the other cheek, which Gandhi particularly quoted, which forces your attacker to treat you as an equal. Go the extra mile, which causes the oppressors to break their own laws. And give your undergarments up as well as your coat, to embarrass oppressive lenders.

But I’ve slowly come to realize that almost every public action he did amounted to non-violent resistance. Healing the twelve lepers. Feeding the five thousand. Even turning over the tables in the Temple, which hurt no one, freed a bunch of innocent creatures, and made his point that the sacrificial system was coming to an end. All of these episodes went against the grain, against the religious and secular powers that be.

And the last one, with the tables, underscores an important point: although Jesus—and Gandhi’s—resistance was non-violent, it most certainly wasn’t passive. It always involved doing, it always involved action. Turning the other cheek. Going the extra mile. Turning over the tables. All things you have to do, actions you have to take. That’s one reason Gandhi called his philosophy satyagraha which can be translated “truth action” or “truth force.”

And there’s one other thing: many of Jesus’ actions, including sabbath corn-picking and healing, were against the Jewish law called Torah, especially as interpreted by the religious authorities. It was against the law for anyone other than a priest—as the duly constituted representative of God—to forgive sins (aka declare someone clean). Associating with sinners—aka those who were unclean—made ones own self unclean, a cast out from society. And before you say these are religious rules, not civil, so it’s not the same thing, remember: everything was civil in those days, there was no separation of state and religion. Jewish laws were civil laws, and vice versa. What Jesus was engaged in was civil disobedience, as Henry David Thoreau called it: breaking a law to demonstrate or prove a point.

Well. If Jesus was demonstrating, if he was actively—but non-violently—resisting, what was he demonstrating against? What was he resisting? His famous statement “The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath” gives us a clue, but it’s more broad than that. Look at the pattern of his first days in ministry. He heals Simon’s mama and a bunch of others at her house, and tours the countryside, curing people of their demon possession and leprosy. He establishes his home base in Capernaum, then heals some more.

And what are the religious authorities doing during this time? They’re griping about Jesus usurping their priestly authority by declaring the forgiveness of sins. About him associating with people they—and their religion—don’t want him to associate with. About him doing—and not doing—what their religion would have him do and not do. While Jesus is healing, the religious authorities are worried about their religion.

Part of this is the very human desire to hang onto authority. In a real sense, they are trying to keep their jobs. After all, even scribes and Pharisees have to eat. But underlying all that, there is the matter of what they actually worship. The great theologian Jiddu Krishnamurti put it this way: “You use a typewriter to write letters, but you do not put it on an altar and worship it. But that is what you are doing when organizations become your chief concern.”

We Christians have a name for that, don’t we? We call it idolatry, the worship as if it were God of something that is not. And we Presbyterians are really good at doing that. Take it from me, as someone who has served on sessions and Presbytery committees for a very long time, we Presbyterians are second to none in worshiping their religion—and our local churches—rather than God, right up there with Roman Catholics and Orthodox Jews.

Sisters and brothers, we often divide our strivings into content versus process, into what we do versus how we do it. In his public ministry, Jesus showed us how to fuse the two. He was a rabble rouser, a demonstrator, using tactics, using processes copied and used to great effect by folks like Gandhi and Martin Luther King. He knew that without pressure, and public pressure at that, nothing ever changes.

But at the same time, he embodied what he preached, he demonstrated—in his acts of resistance—the very thing that he was advocating. His public actions—against the powers that be—embodied the message he was sending. Healing the sick, feeding the poor, forgiving the sins is what religion is for, not the other way around. Religion is the typewriter, not the one who is doing the typing. Religion is for humanity not humanity for religion. Amen.