Jesus is being mobbed like a rock star in today’s reading from Mark’s
Gospel (Mark 3:20-35)
He has been travelling around Galilee proclaiming the
Good News and healing those who came to him, followed by crowds thronging to
see this celebrity. Now he has returned home to the fishing village of
Capernaum on the Sea of Galilee. Even there the crowds still press in on him,
so that he and his disciples don’t have time even to eat, we are told.
But not all in the crowds support Jesus. In the
reading we hear of two groups of people who want him to cease his ministry – first
his family, and second a party of scribes from Jerusalem. Mark interweaves the
stories of how Jesus responds to these two groups – a favourite device of his,
sometimes described as a ‘Markian sandwich’.
The bread in the sandwich concerns his family. Back in
Nazareth they were hearing news of what he was up to. He had given up the
security of his family, and the carpenters business, for the life of a
wandering preacher. They had heard how he was being mobbed, and no doubt feared
that the authorities would seek to put him out of the way. He must have ‘gone out of his mind’, they thought – we must go
to fetch him home and end this madness. So they set off to Capernaum, around
50km, say a 2 day’s journey on foot. We will hear what happens when they get
there later.
The filling of the sandwich concerns the scribes from Jerusalem,
members of the religious and civic establishment, which is threatened by
Jesus’s popularity
The scribes are determined to undermine Jesus.
They cannot deny he has been healing the sick, since
so many people have seen it. In those days it was believed that illness was
caused by evil spirits – by demons. So they start to spread rumours about the
source of Jesus’s healing power: ‘He has Beelzebul’ – the chief demon – ‘and by the
ruler of the demons he casts out demons’.
Jesus understands very well what the scribes are
about. He confronts them directly to their faces, dismissing their argument as
a logical impossibility. ‘How can Satan
cast out Satan?’, he asks. ‘If a kingdom is
divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand … If Satan has risen up
against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but his end has come’.
Look at it this way, he says, ‘No
one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his property without first tying
up the strong man’. Jesus turns the tables on the scribes by pointing
out, ‘I
am stronger than Satan because I have cast out Satan’.
Jesus has refuted the scribes’ claim that he is
possessed by ‘an unclean spirit’, not the Holy Spirit from God. Now he turns
their words back on them. For the scribes to say that a spirit that comes from
God is not good but evil is a blasphemy, an insult to God. It is the scribes
whose spirits are unclean, not Jesus. ‘Truly I tell you’, he says, ‘people will be forgiven for their sins and whatever blasphemies
they utter; but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit can never have
forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin’.
Over the centuries many Christians have been confused
by this unforgiveable blasphemy, ‘the sin against the Holy Spirit’. I
understand it in this way. Our God-given conscience enables us to distinguish
good from evil. People who cannot tell good from evil are conscience-blind.
They are unable to recognise what is evil in themselves, so they cannot repent
it. And without repentance they cannot be forgiven.
Sometimes Christians worry, fearing that they may be guilty of the sin against the Holy Spirit and so can never
be forgiven. But they worry unnecessarily, I believe - their very worry proves they
are able to repent, so they aren’t guilty and can be forgiven.
So what happens when Jesus’s family reach Capernaum?
When his mother Mary and his brothers and sisters arrive,
Jesus is inside the house teaching his disciples. His family sends a message
for him to come out to them. He must have had a fair idea why they had come –
perhaps they had previously sent messages from Nazareth asking him to come
home.
Jesus asks rhetorically, ‘Who
are my mother and my brothers?’ And then looking about at his
disciples, he says, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers!
Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother’.
I wonder how his family felt when they heard what he
had said. Did they feel hurt, spurned in favour of his disreputable band of
disciples? The truth is that however much they loved him, and he loved them,
his family had no right to try to make him forsake his mission.
We are not told what the family did then, but
presumably they returned home to Nazareth, feeling chastened. Perhaps Mary
remembered Jesus’s words recorded by Luke (2:49) when she and Joseph lost him
as a child of 12 in Jerusalem, and found him after 3 days in the Temple: ‘Why were you looking for me? Didn’t you know that I must
be about my Father’s business?’. But we do know that his mother
Mary and his brother James did not cut themselves off from Jesus, but were
faithful to him to the end, and perhaps the others too.
Mark’s sandwich story is about discernment, I think. I take two things
from it.
First, Jesus has given us a tool to help us discern whether
someone we encounter is motivated by a spirit of evil, as the scribes from
Jerusalem were, so that we may confront and overcome the evil, as Jesus did,
without violence. Any person whose conscience is so lacking that they cannot
distinguish between good and evil must be motivated by a spirit of evil. They
will not be able to repent the evil they do, and so they cannot be forgiven - their
sin can only be eternal. Unless God intervenes, that is, because all things are
possible with God - as St Paul, the persecutor of the Church, discovered on the
road to Damascus.
Second, each one of us has the freedom in Christ to
follow what we discern to be God’s call to us, our vocation, even if others
including family and friends oppose it and say we are mad to do so. If I am
certain of my call, I should be prepared to reject the intervention even of
those whom I love and who love me. Equally, I should be very cautious of pressing
others, even family members or a friends, not to follow what they believe is
their vocation, as it may invite their rejection of me. This is not only good
psychology, but acknowledges their right to hear and act on God’s call to them.
Let me finish in prayer with a Collect of the Word
Almighty
and eternal God,
your
Son Jesus triumphed over the prince of demons
and
freed us from bondage to sin.
Help us
to stand firm against every assault of Satan,
and
enable us always to do Your will;
through
Jesus Christ, our Lord,
who
lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one
God, now and for ever. Amen