How can Satan cast out Satan?

Saint Augustine and the Devil, by Michael Pacher

Reflection for Morning Worship with the Community of Brendan the Navigator on Tuesday 11th June 2024

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 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. We hear of two groups of people who want him to cease his ministry – first his family, and second a party of scribes.

Back in Nazareth his family has heard how he is being mobbed. They fear that the authorities will seek to put him out of the way for being so outspoken. He must have ‘gone out of his mind’, they think – we must go to fetch him home and end this madness. But Jesus rejects their attempts. Pointing to his disciples he tells his family, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother’. From this I learn that 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. If I am certain of my call, I must be prepared to reject the well-meaning intervention even of those whom I love and who love me.

What about the scribes, who had come down from Jerusalem to oppose him? 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. Some Christians over the years have feared that they may be guilty of this unforgiveable sin, causing them great suffering. But they should take comfort, I suggest, that precisely because of their fear, they are not conscience blind, and can seek repentance and obtain forgiveness.

In this reading, Jesus has given us a tool we can use to discern whether someone we meet is motivated by a spirit of evil, as the scribes from Jerusalem were. Anyone whose conscience is so lacking that they cannot distinguish between good and evil must be motivated by a spirit of evil. When we recognise this, we must confront and overcome the evil as Jesus did, without violence. Such people 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.