Mark 3:20-35
Question: What do Katy Perry, Kris Kristofferson, Florence Nightingale, Edouard Manet, Miles Davis, Alfred Nobel, Edgar Allen Poe and Robert Zemeckis have in common? Answer: Their parents objected to the careers they chose.
Family can have a profound influence on the path we follow in life. Alex Haley said that in every conceivable way, the family is a link to our past and a bridge to our future. Your family can inspire, you, guide you, and cheer you on as you find and pursue your vocation, or they can misguide, misdirect, discourage and just plain thwart you.
I first felt called to become a pastor when I was fifteen years old. My parents did not like the idea, and that is one of the main reasons I didn’t begin seminary until I was almost forty. They loved me. But they had a different future in mind for me than the future that chose me.
In today’s gospel reading from Mark we find two groups who would be happier if Jesus were to pursue a different career. They would like nothing better than for him to stop the healings and exorcisms and the preaching and teaching and go do something more normal. Like be a carpenter, maybe. On the face of it, these two groups wouldn’t seem to have much to do with each other, but the one big thing they have in common is that Jesus scares them.
Jesus had been busy traveling around the Galilee, announcing the arrival of the Reign of God, or, as Diana Butler Bass calls it, the Commonwealth of God’s Justice and Mercy. In his preaching and teaching he had been describing a very different way of life that comes with God’s reign, and he had been demonstrating what this Commonwealth of Kindness looks like with healings and exorcisms and other acts that restore people to community. In doing all this, he had also butted heads with the religious establishment because he was continuously reinterpreting Torah in ways that undermined the hierarchical authority of the scribes and the piety of the Pharisees.
Mark tells us that the crowd following him had become so large that it was almost unmanageable. People were coming from as far away as Jerusalem, Idumea, Tyre and Sidon. And then one day his family showed up, lingering somewhere at the edge of that great crowd that was following Jesus everywhere he went.
The NRSV translation says that his family had come to restrain him. That’s a fair enough translation, but it doesn’t really capture the force of krateo, the Greek word that Mark uses, unless you imagine them using actual restraints. To be clear, they had come to seize him and take him home by force if necessary because they thought he had lost his mind.
They were afraid for him. They were afraid for him because they didn’t understand him. They were afraid for him because it was hard for them to believe that this kid who grew up in their house had turned out to be so much more than the kid who grew up in their house. They were probably a little bit afraid for themselves, too. After all, having a crazy, radical preacher in the family can be hard on a family’s reputation.
But mostly they were afraid for him because they loved him. He was family, after all. So they worried about him, especially when they overheard this other group that wanted to rein him in. Or worse.
Some scribes had come down from Jerusalem to see Jesus for themselves and to begin to form some kind of official opinion of him and his actions. And their official opinion was that he made them nervous. They wouldn’t have said it in so many words, but they were afraid him. They were afraid because he called their privilege—their role and status and authority into question. But mostly they were afraid of him because the crowd loved him. And the crowd kept growing. Big crowds would make their Roman overlords pay attention, and the things Jesus was saying, his language about “the Kingdom of God,” might sound like a call for revolution. . . which, to be fair, it was. And is.
“It is by Beelzebul, the ruler of the demons, that he casts out demons,” said the scribes. “Well how does that make any sense?” asked Jesus. “How can Satan cast out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand!” He may have had his family in mind when he added, “And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand. And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but his end has come.”
Finally, to make it crystal clear just what his mission was all about he said, “No one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his property without first tying up the strong man; then indeed the house may be plundered.”
But Jesus wasn’t finished. In one last note of caution for the scribes, Jesus said something that should give all of us pause, especially when we are about to speak judgmentally about people or things happening in our world that we don’t like or that make us uncomfortable. “Truly I tell you,” he said, “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.”
He said this because the scribes had accused him of being possessed by Beelzebul. But Jesus, of course, was actually intimately connected with the Holy Spirit.
I have thought of this passage often over the years when I have heard others say that something they are opposed to is evil or demonic. During the years when our denomination was debating whether it was okay or not to ordain lesbian and gay and trans people, I more than a few times heard people describe our efforts at being more inclusive as being evil when it seemed clear to me and others that it was the work of the Spirit.
How many times in history have we been trying to hold a door shut that the Holy Spirit is trying to open? How many times in history has the Church called something demonic only to realize in retrospect that it was the work of the Spirit trying to broaden our minds and horizons? God’s embrace is always bigger than ours and God’s vision always sees farther than ours.
God’s perspective is broader than ours. Jesus sees things differently than we do, and sometimes that can be unsettling. I still find the last segment of this episode with the scribes and his family disconcerting.
Jesus’ mother, Mary, stood outside the house with his brothers and sisters, calling out to him. The crowd that surrounded him made sure he knew they were there. Someone spoke up and said, “Your mother and your brothers and sisters are outside asking for you.”
The way Jesus responded can sound cold and heartless, but it’s important to remember that everything Jesus said or did in this Gospel of Mark was calculated to reveal the values and vision of the Reign of God—the Commonwealth of God’s justice and mercy.
Jesus posed a rhetorical question: “Who are my mother and my brothers?” he asked. Then, looking at all those people who were crowded around him, he gave the Reign of God answer to that question. “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and my sister and my mother.”
In one sentence, Jesus undermined the coercive and restrictive potential of the biological family and at the same time expanded the definition of family. As cold as his answer might sound to us, Jesus did not actually disown or repudiate his biological family, but he wanted to make it clear that in God’s eyes family goes far beyond being biologically related. In the Commonwealth of God’s justice and kindness, family is whoever does the will of God.
Sometimes the imagery in the gospels can be confusing or opaque. More often, though, I suspect that the problem isn’t so much that the words of scripture are puzzling as that they make us uncomfortable, so we move past the troubling parts without taking time to really deal with them. As Mark Twain once said, “It ain’t those parts of the Bible that I can’t understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.”
According to Ched Myers, author of Binding the Strong Man, which has become pretty much the go-to commentary on the Gospel of Mark, this gospel was probably written somewhere in Palestine between 68 and 71 CE during the height of the Jewish revolt against the Roman occupation. Myers tells us that this gospel, in which Jesus is gritty, uncompromising, down-to-earth, and scathingly direct—this Gospel of Mark is, in fact, a manifesto for nonviolent revolution, written to serve as an alternative path for the followers of Jesus who are being pulled into the violence of the uprising against Rome.
In Mark, the followers of Jesus, then and now, are truly being called to subvert the dominant paradigm—to challenge and deconstruct and then reconstruct the systems by which our world operates until there truly is liberty and justice and peace and health and wholeness for all. Anywhere there is coercion, the followers of Jesus are called to stand up to it with nonviolence.
In other words, the gospel that Jesus proclaims, the living and uncompromising assertion of the Commonwealth of God’s justice and kindness, is nothing short of a nonviolent revolution.
Almost every pastor I know has stories about times we have been accused of being too political. I have had people say to me that they come to church to hear about spirituality and not politics. I get it. We humans have this very unfortunate tendency to compartmentalize our lives. We organize our hearts and minds in little boxes: spirituality in this box, politics in this box, everyday life in this box over here. The problem is that that these things really are not separate. Our politics and economics are a barometer for our spirituality. Our everyday life and the way we conduct our business puts our real beliefs on display.
If we are sincere about following Jesus, then we can’t avoid politics because the gospel that Jesus proclaims is a kind of revolution and revolution is political. Jesus wasn’t crucified for being a spiritual teacher. He was crucified at the intersection of religion and politics because he was proclaiming a revolution that seeks to transform and restructure the entire world, to unite and unify all of life, and to redefine what it means to be human. But before you can do that, you have to undo life as it is. You have to take apart coercive systems and deconstruct business as usual.
Jürgen Moltmann, the great German Lutheran theologian who died this past week wrote, “Those who hope in Christ can no longer put up with reality as it is, but begin to suffer under it, to contradict it. Peace with God means conflict with the world, for the goad of the promised future stabs inexorably into the flesh of every unfulfilled present.”[1] God calls us to take up the tools of Christ to bring that promised future into the unfulfilled present. But our tools are nonviolent tools. Following the model set by Jesus, we use logic and common sense instead of violence. Our first tool for reshaping the world is a stubborn resistance rooted in love and compassion and kindness and truth and hope. And our hope is rooted in a vision of a healthy world where we all live in peace and cooperation with each other and with our God-beloved, God-made planet in a harmonious and generous balance.
Jesus came to bind the strong man, to take down all the human, religious and demonic forces that bully and constrict God’s children and crush our souls. Empire. Coercive religion. Even family when it becomes too rigid and authoritarian. People who are deeply vested in unhealthy systems don’t like to read the gospel this way. They prefer to keep things “spiritual” which, in the end, means that neither Jesus nor his words ever touch the ground. Or the depths of the heart. And they certainly don’t change the world.
Jesus came to plunder the house of the strong man, to liberate every person who will follow his Way so that together we can build the Commonwealth of God’s justice and kindness and make it as visible on earth as it is in heaven.
[1] Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope: On the Ground and the Implications of a Christian Eschatology
Thoughts Along the Way 