Family dynamics (Mark 3)

“Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.” From today’s Gospel, the Gospel according to Mark, chapter 3, verse 25.
     In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
     There are some interesting family dynamics in today’s Gospel story. To begin with, we have Jesus’s family dragging him away from a crowd, admittedly, in this case, probably to protect him, since people were saying that “He has gone out of his mind.” And it seems to me that someone (perhaps someone in the family?) also called in the authorities, the scribes, to have him officially declared demon-possessed, to what end, exactly, is not clear, but probably to have Jesus locked up somewhere. After all, he is giving the family a bad name, and endangering himself and them. And to round out the summary of family conflict, we have the final scene, in which Jesus refuses to acknowledge his blood relatives, when they come to extract him from his encounter with the scribes. All in all, we have a story full of tension and dispute and anxiety. But my brief summary is only a surface reading of the story. How Jesus manages these tensions, what he says about them, and how he resolves them, is one theme of today’s Gospel. Another theme is: Jesus’s power over the demons, and the argument he has with the scribes about it.
     Let’s put the story in context. In the first half of chapter 3, Jesus, on the Sabbath, heals a man with a withered hand. This prompts the Pharisees to begin plotting against him. He continues to heal and drive out demons, and spends some time in a boat, likely teaching the crowds on the shore who are following him. The demons recognize him as Son of God. Then Jesus goes up a mountain, where he appoints the twelve apostles, and gives them authority to proclaim the message of the Kingdom, and to cast out demons.
     So, at the beginning of today’s reading, the crowd is still following Jesus, and they prevent Jesus and the Twelve even from having a meal. It is at this point that the family tries to stop Jesus. They go so far, as I have surmised already, to call in the scribes to help them. And the scribes say, “He has Beelzebul, and by the ruler of the demons he casts out demons.”
     Jesus is having none of it. “And he called them to him, and spoke to them in parables.” Notice that Jesus takes his authority over the scribes for granted, just as he takes his authority over the demons for granted. Apparently the scribes don’t protest, so Jesus is able to continue with his teaching. He points out that the reasoning of the scribes is contradictory. Satan can’t cast out Satan, and so on. Jesus goes on to say that Satan “cannot stand, but his end has come.” This is not just a clever bit of argument, but is a proclamation of the end of Satan’s power. It seems that this statement is just slipped into the discussion obliquely, but I think that it is a clue to the meaning of the whole reading.
     The verse about plundering the strong man’s house after tying him up is also rather curious. It appears to have been dropped into this reading from somewhere else, taken from some other narrative. But it fits into our story fairly well, I think. The “strong man” of course is Satan; Jesus is saying that he is tying him up, and plundering his property – that is, he is driving out the demons, who, of course, are Satan’s “property.” This is another way of saying that the end of Satan’s power has come.
     “Whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit can never have forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin.” When I was in my first parish in Newfoundland, people would occasionally ask me, “So, what is the sin against the Holy Spirit?” Either they had never heard an answer to this question, or they were trying to expose my ignorance, or they had some answer of their own that they were waiting to spring on me. In fact, there was a Pentecostal preacher in the community, who was determined to show that he and his following knew the Scriptures far better than I did, and so one or another of them would set me this question as an opener to a debate in which their superiority would be revealed. But, alas, it was not that easy. Today’s Gospel makes it clear what the eternal sin against the Holy Spirit is, at least in today’s reading: the scribes are plainly ascribing Jesus’s healing power to Satan, to an “unclean spirit,” as the text says. Jesus has already shown that this is impossible, and that such an idea, that Satan and the demons can overcome their own evil, is blasphemy, since it makes Satan more powerful than God, and claims that it is really Satan, and not God, who heals. This is contrary to the known truth, which the scribes know full well. While no sin is beyond the reach of the saving power of God, to persist deliberately in stating an obvious falsehood about Satan, as the scribes are apparently doing, is to put them at risk of putting themselves outside the reach of God’s power (if I may dare such a statement), and so making their sin “eternal,” making it the sin against the Holy Spirit. I realize that this could be the beginning of a long and rather technical discussion of sin and God’s power over it, but I will save that discussion for Lent or some other appropriate time. We remember that in the first chapter of Mark’s Gospel, the Spirit descends upon Jesus at his baptism in the Jordan, so Mark is making a clear identification between the power of Jesus over the demons, and the presence of the Holy Spirit in him. Mark is suggesting that to question the power of Jesus over the demons is to question the power of the Holy Spirit, which of course is blasphemy.
      “Your mother and your brothers and sisters are outside, asking for you.” The family is back again, looking for Jesus and trying to get him out of the way of the crowd. It says in verse 19, that Jesus is at home. I take this to mean Nazareth, so Jesus is in or near his family home. The passage seems to be saying that the crowd is in the house, and that the family is outside, where they went at the beginning of the reading, “to restrain him,” as it says. The crowd is reminding Jesus that his family is still outside, asking for him. So the family, and the crowd, have heard and seen Jesus’s interaction with the scribes, and his teaching about Satan and the Holy Spirit. I dare to suggest that Mark is making a distinction between the family and the crowd: the crowd are sitting and listening to Jesus, apparently not arguing with him as the scribes are, but the family, while not siding with the scribes, is at least very nervous about what he is saying to them, and want to get him out of the way. This reminds me of something I have said in other talks, about the obtuseness of those closest to Jesus, in understanding him and his mission. The family, who, you would think, know him best and have been with him the longest, are actually slower to get the point about Jesus and his teaching than the crowd is. The crowd is listening and watching and learning; the family is wandering around “outside,” that is, they are not really listening and watching and learning…they are stumbling around trying to find a way to get Jesus away from the crowd and the scribes. That is, the family wants him back safe with them. They want him for themselves alone.
     Jesus, of course, sees this and does not allow himself to be carried off by his family. Rather, in true rabbinical fashion, he asks a question: “Who are my mother and my brothers?” Apparently he doesn’t get an answer, so he goes on to say, “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.” His family is not merely his blood relations, but the whole community of those who are listening and watching and learning from him. And we are in that community, that family which Jesus has brought into being.
     So Jesus refuses to allow himself to be limited by his immediate family. Rather, he extends the meaning of family to include everyone who does the will of God. This is addressed to the people around him, including his blood relatives, but it is not limited to those present at the time.
     So now we see how the two themes of the Gospel come together: the family of Jesus is that crowd, that community, which does the will of God. That will includes recognizing God’s power over Satan and the demons. We are reminded, by the behavior of Jesus’s immediate family, that we are not to allow our supposed closeness to Jesus to blind us to the power of the Holy Spirit in him. Jesus’s family are inadvertently putting themselves on the side of Satan and the scribes. This can happen to us too, when we think we know what is best for our family members, in this case, the Church, and we cease to listen and watch and learn from Jesus, when perhaps we deny the power of the Spirit, when we cease to be attentive to the will of God. Which family do we belong to? We can, if we don’t watch ourselves, find ourselves acting like obtuse close relatives, and fail to see what God is requiring of us.
     “Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.”
     In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.