Divided
Mark 3:20-35
Click here to view the full sermon video for June 6, 2021, entitled "Divided."
Last Sunday I was in Richmond, Virginia with my daughter, Grace, to attend the second wedding of my niece- my brother’s first born. It was her second wedding because after two years abroad in the Peace Corps, separated from her fiancé they did not want to wait for the pandemic to pass to get married. So, their first wedding was this past September in their backyard with just their immediate family. Last weekend was the second service, with all the bells and whistles and a whole compliment of bridesmaids, groomsmen and extended family to celebrate this wonderful couple. But the big event wasn’t until 4 in the afternoon. So, with some time to kill, we did what Grace loves to do, we hit a couple of thrift stores to see what treasures had been hiding from her across the country in Virginia. Thoughtful woman that she is, she always sets aside some t-shirts that she thinks I might like- logos of my favorite sports teams, one of the Avengers. The best one, that I now regret not getting, had a classic picture of Jesus on it with his benedictory pose. Beneath the picture were the words, “that’s not what I said.”
Now, it can be argued that if a person has a bible and can read it, then we can easily look to see how Jesus is quoted by four different writers who share their accounts of the good news. Even so, when we come across passages like this one- a passage in which Jesus is said to speak to his critics in parables- things aren’t so clear cut. On the one hand it can get a little frustrating to have Jesus speak in parables. Just say what you mean, already, Jesus. Tell it like it is. Give it to us straight. Jesus doesn’t do that. He answers questions with his own questions. He answers inquiries with stories. And here he answers accusation by laying bare the absurdity of what he’s accused of. Only he does it sideways. He takes the approach described by Emily Dickinson centuries later in her poetry. “Tell all the truth,” she writes, “but tell it slant.” “The truth must dazzle gradually,” she concludes, “or every man be blind.” So, on the other hand, the parables that Jesus speaks are a gift precisely because they do dazzle gradually. They don’t really lend themselves to the kind of oversimplified slogans that would lead a t-shirt Jesus to admonish, “that’s not what I said.” As it is, the things he’s done and things he’s said are already a bit much for the folks closest to him, his family and neighbors. They think he’s gone out of his mind and are saying so. Here in this passage we have a snapshot of something we’re all to familiar with. Nowadays we blame this sort of thing on the media. They say he’s gone out of his mind. Who’s they? Oh, you know, them. We can’t say for certain who “they” are, but “they” always have a lot to say. They say the weather’s going to be nice tomorrow. Great. They say you shouldn’t swim for at least an hour after you eat. What? Who says that? What made them the boss? They seem to say so much, but it’s almost impossible for us to figure out just who they are. Nevertheless, they seem to have a lot of influence. If what happens to Jesus is any indication, it appears as though they always have. They can also do a lot of damage and it can be difficult to hold them accountable. Jesus’ family hear what they have to say and they try to restrain him, stop him from continuing on the path he’s on. People are saying he’s lost his mind. And if they are saying that about him, well that reflects badly on them.
Just when you think things can’t get any worse, some religious scholars from Jerusalem show up and offer their two cents. At this point we know who they are. They are the ones who hold a certain amount of clout because of their status in the religious life of the people. They have studied. They write. They are highly esteemed as those who speak with authority about things of God. In short they are the religious professionals of their day, the trained theologians of first century Judaism. And they aren’t at all happy about some free-lance rabbi who is making a name for himself by going around healing people and casting out demons. They’re especially disturbed by what they’ve heard about his doing so in ways that challenge their understanding of something like the sabbath. Because it isn’t about the sabbath as much as it is their own authority to say what can and can’t be done on the sabbath. How dare he subvert their authority to tell people what to do? In response, they pull out one of the oldest tricks in the book; one that continues to this day and has found a particular home in the world of political discourse. They demonize him. They don’t just pile on with the faceless, nameless they who tell him he’s out of his mind. They go one step further and say that in order to do such things he himself must be possessed, or even the devil himself. Whether it’s scribes from Jerusalem, or a political action committee, demonization has to be about the lowest form of discourse there is. Its use says far more about the fear and insecurity of the person wielding it than it does about the person it’s directed at. Jesus wastes no time pointing out the logical absurdity of this tactic. Why would Satan, why would the one who has the most to gain from the ongoing captivity of the world to demonic forces, cast those forces out? How does that possibly make any sense? With all due respect to Abraham Lincoln, the idea of a house divided isn’t about civil war. As t-shirt Jesus might suggest, “that isn’t what I said.” It’s really quite the opposite. It’s a critique of the kind of logic that drives demonization of our perceived enemies. Of course, demonization isn’t about logic. It isn’t about reason. It is driven by fear. It is driven by the threat posed to someone’s authority, their privileged place of power. What Jesus says is that not only is the house, that is the world, not divided by someone who would cast out the demons that hold people captive; the demons of racism, fascism, sexism, poverty, addiction, and more. His words also suggest, in light of what they are saying about him, that what truly divides us, what holds us captive, and prevents us from standing is the very practice of labeling the liberating power of God’s spirit as demonic.
In J.K. Rowling’s books about the wizarding world of Harry Potter, there are three curses so terrible that they are deemed ‘unforgivable’ and are punishable by a lifetime sentence to the wizard prison, Azkaban. They are torture, mind control and murder. What Jesus says is that every sin can and will be forgiven, that there is only one thing that is unforgiveable- blaspheming the Holy Spirit. Lutheran pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber recalls how a while back there was a trend on YouTube where people would film themselves blaspheming against the Holy Spirit and then leave the camera rolling to prove that they were not struck down for doing so; that they remained un-smote, as it were. Now, everything that Jesus has been doing- restoring outcast lepers by cleansing them, curing the sick, casting out what holds people captive, all of it- he’s been doing by the power of the Holy Spirit; the very same Spirit that descended upon him from the heavens when he was baptized. The unforgivable sin isn’t people on YouTube saying the Holy Spirit doesn’t exist. The unforgivable sin is denying the power of the Holy. It’s seeing people set free from systemic forms of oppression and trying to discredit it as demonic. It’s preferring one’s own comfort that comes at the expense of another’s oppression over that person’s liberation from all that enslaves them. Only the Holy has the power to liberate people in that way. Because what sets them free is the forgiveness that comes from God’s unearned grace. To oppose that, to misname that is to oppose and misname the Holy at work. It is to see the very instrument of our salvation and to suggest it is of the devil, not God. In doing so we opt out of God’s economy of grace and forgiveness altogether. Either consciously, or unconsciously, when we decide that forgiveness and liberation is not for others, we have decided that it is not for us. If there are limits on what God can do, who God can redeem and set free, then what exactly is it that we are doing here? What exactly is the point?
I feel kind of bad for Jesus’ mother and his siblings here. They probably think that they just want what’s best for him, when in reality what they want is what’s best for them. They want him to stop doing the things that have people questioning his sanity. They want him to stop doing the things that have the religious authorities trying to demonize him. Because they might be next. People might start questioning their sanity. The scribes might suggest that they themselves are somehow demonic.