June 9, 2024
Genesis 3:8-15
Mark 3:20-35
I think we would have to describe these events in the Gospel of Mark as a bad day for Jesus. That is, a day that would have been hard on him. He’d returned home from a teaching tour around Galilee, he’d appointed his inner circle of twelve disciples – and Mark helpfully reminded us that one of them betrayed him – and I’m pretty sure that he hoped to get a little bit of down time – Sabbath, now where have we heard that idea before? – in his own house. But no. The crowds assembled once again, and he and his friends couldn’t even get out of the building to find food to eat.
Not good.
Then Jesus’ family turned up. Why? They’d heard about his new activities. He’d clearly made a big shift from what he’d been doing, because they thought he was crazy. It’s something of an open secret that my grandmother didn’t want me to become a minister. She lived her life in a small town in the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts, and the pastors of her small church were overburdened, poorly paid, and sometimes the targets of ill-defined anger. She didn’t want that for her grandson. Jesus’ family didn’t want it for their son, their brother. With the streets full of people, they couldn’t even get in to see him.
Not good.
And then we’ve got the Investigating Committee of scribes from the Temple in Jerusalem. Jesus must have developed a reputation pretty quickly to get Temple scholars interested in the goings-on of Galilee. They clearly arrived suspicious. I would guess they thought they’d find that the reports of healings and demon-banishings were exaggerated or erroneous. But no, they weren’t. So there must be another explanation. Satan vs. Satan, perhaps?
Not good.
David Schnasa Johnson writes at Working Preacher, “His family is up in arms and the authorities are raising questions about him. Jesus’ family is attempting to rein him in because they are worried about his eccentric ministry of healing, exorcism, and forgiveness in Galilee. Along come the authorities who wish to delegitimize Jesus with the damning diagnosis of Beelzebul-itus.”
Not good.
Do you recognize the impulse behind these two reactions, that of Jesus’ family and that of the scribes? It’s the one that drives conspiracy theories. Something has happened that you don’t like, and not only don’t like but don’t understand, or something so contrary to what you want that even if you do understand how it might have happened you can’t accept that explanation. So it’s got to be a conspiracy.
Jesus’ family adopted the most innocuous form: He was ill. He couldn’t make decisions properly. He wasn’t responsible for his actions. I can hear them telling themselves and others, “Calm down. Don’t wind him up. We’ll get him settled. We’ll take care of him. It will be all right.”
The scribes, however, went further down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole. Jesus was clearly doing extraordinary things. But they couldn’t accept that the source of his extraordinary power was God, because… well… “Give us a minute. There are reasons why a completely unauthorized self-appointed preacher with no training in the proper teachings shouldn’t go running around doing this. It’s got to be Satan.”
As is typical of conspiracy thinking, Jesus was able to demolish the flawed logic in a sentence. “If a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand.” Satan vs. Satan makes a nice title for a sermon, but it’s a dreadful explanation for extraordinary things.
As Matt Skinner writes at Working Preacher, “Those scribes have dismissed the possibility of God’s restoration, for they write it off as a satanic deception. They show themselves devoid of hope and openly contemptuous of God’s work. Around them, people are being set free from their demons. People are experiencing wholeness and life. People’s dignity is acknowledged. Jesus promises that sins and ‘whatever blasphemies’ may occur will prove no obstacle to people’s renewal (Mark 3:28)! And yet the scribes scoff and denounce all of this as false or dangerous.”
Not good.
These bizarre accusations remind Dan Clendenin, writing at JourneyWithJesus.net, of an old saying by the 3rd century desert hermit St. Anthony the Great, who said, “A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him saying, ‘You are mad, you are not like us.'”
Not to contradict St. Anthony, but it had already happened. To Jesus.
Not good.
It would have been nice if Mark’s telling of this story had made the followers of Jesus more resistant to conspiracy stories and theories. I suppose it might have, but certainly not enough. Contemporary Christians have created abundant ways to delude themselves that are no more logical and no more open-minded than those suspicious scribes two millennia ago. My personal favorite is the accusation that Christians are oppressed in contemporary Western societies. Well, it takes a particular definition of oppression to conclude that. You have to believe that oppression is the same thing as not exerting complete control over everybody in a society, forcing them to do the things you want them to do or not to do the things you don’t want them to do. If I’m not given the power to make you do exactly what I say, then I am oppressed.
Um. No. Not even close.
Not good.
Now our text returns to Jesus’ family. This was a favorite writing technique of the gospel writer Mark, by the way. He loved to embed one story within another, so that one would comment on the other, and the two combined would strengthen the message.
They told him his mother and brothers were calling him. He said something deeply unsettling: “Who are my mother and my brothers?” I mean, ouch. I grant you that I’d be prickly if my family was outside telling people I was crazy, even though I also grant you that we should all consider that possibility. Still, “Who are my mother and my brothers?” They’re the ones who were worried about you, Jesus. They’re the ones who cared enough to brave the crowds to see you.
But that wasn’t Jesus’ final word. “Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother,” Jesus said. In a culture in which family was even more important than ‘ohana in Hawai’i – and that’s really important – Jesus extended his family. He opened it up and invited others in. He expanded it beyond what anyone might expect.
“Then here perhaps are we,” writes Meda Stamper at Working Preacher, “the crowd pressing in to see him and touch him, maybe urgently and desperately, but as the tale turns we find that our desperate desire has been more than met. We also are claimed by him as his sisters and brothers and mother, no longer outsiders at a distance, but holders of the secrets of the kingdom, drawn into the inner circle of the mystery and love of God.”
I think I’d have to call this one: Good.
We have the option to adopt the conspiracy theory mindset if we like. We can believe that the world is exactly what we want it to be and when it isn’t, then there’s an organized evil force working against what we want. We can decide that leaps in logic are perfectly acceptable if it confirms what we want.
Not so good.
Or – and this isn’t precisely an either-or choice, but let’s go with it for now – we can accept that we don’t know everything, that God has more light and truth to spring forth into the world, that the possibilities of grace are beyond what we’ve considered. As Sara Wilhelm Garbers has written in her blog, “When we are caught up in the limitations of our human conceptions of kingdom, it means that we will perpetually struggle to remember that the whole reason that we say ‘Jesus is Lord,’ is because by doing so it means Caesar is not. And if we forget this and forget that the gospel invitation is into a family then we will keep on ordering our lives in response to earthly powers and imaginations and will give away our power to the kings of this earth who promise to fortify our egos and keep us from having to awaken to the seashore kin-dom family. For God’s kingdom is a kin-dom where we’re invited to take up the responsibility to love and lay down our lives.”
Like Jesus did. Which I’d have to call good.
Let the conspiracies, let the distrust, let Satan vs. Satan go. It was never worth it.
Jesus has invited you into the ‘ohana. That is worth everything.
Amen.
by Eric Anderson
Watch the Recorded Sermon
Pastor Eric makes changes while preaching. Often.
The image is Christ Teaching at Capernaum by Maurycy Gottlieb (1878) – Public Domain, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=76412193.