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.
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