Sermon for June 9, 2024 - The Third Sunday after Pentecost
One way to read our gospel story this morning is as a drama portraying the difficulty of the discernment between good and evil. What the story seems to say is that this discernment is not easy and that we may find ourselves siding with Satan when we think we are being faithful to God.
The setting for our story today is a house in which Jesus is attempting to eat dinner after a long day. The reading begins mid-sentence, recalling the huge, frenzied crowd of Jews and Gentiles desperate to get close to the man reported to possess power over sickness and demons. Jesus’ family is on the way to the house in order to bring him home because they are afraid he is mad. The scribes from Jerusalem are also after him, not believing that Jesus was doing the will of God, and so must be in league with Satan to perform such works. Jesus responds to this accusation with a series of short images. The first set shows that something divided against itself cannot stand: a kingdom, a house, even Satan himself. A second image, perhaps more opaque than the first, is about tying up a strong man in order to plunder his house. Jesus condemns his detractors in very strong terms. At this point, a message is conveyed that Jesus’, mother and brothers are outside. Jesus responds with a rather unexpected and chilling rejection: they are not my family. Looking around him at the crowd of misfits, crazies, and others deemed unclean and unworthy, along with his relentlessly undiscerning disciples he says, “This is my family.” We should note that in Mark’s Gospel the disciples almost always get it wrong up to the last sentence of the gospel when the women, who alone have seemed to understand Jesus, run away in terror.
It is perhaps easy for us to identify with the family and the scribes. Jesus’ rejection of his family seems rather harsh, and cuts against the pious picture of Jesus that we often craft in our imaginations. We rarely hear or reflect upon the full array of Jesus emotions. Being fully human, he would have felt all of the high and lows, and everything in between. So, to hear him reject his family adds another layer to Jesus for us to consider, especially when we see his mother at the cross. It is also natural for us to identify with the religious authorities. By serving in various ministries in and through this community, we are part of the church authority, the stewards of tradition. Christianity usually puts Christ at the base of these structures and uses his authority to bolster their own. But this story demands a different perspective, because it is these very people that are condemned for failing to recognize who Jesus is.
It can be rather disturbing to consider that these authorities were not evil. They were committed to maintaining domestic and religious life in the midst of troubled times. They, like Jesus, wanted to live a life committed to God, only they did not see eye to eye on what that looks like and how it is lived out. Another odd feature of the time that rubbed people the wrong way was that Jesus’ ministry is open to everybody: Gentiles, Jews, the poor, the mentally and physically ill, the working class, women, tax collectors, and sexual outcasts. The only people who provoke Jesus’ intolerance are his family and the normal law-abiding scribes. The ones closest to him, his family and those who are like him, dedicated to a life of piety, are those that are also the farthest from him. They are least able to make the leap from dedication to religion to openhearted love of God’s beloved, disfigured humanity. For these people, Jesus’ disordered love of humanity feels like recklessly falling off a cliff into chaos best symbolized by the demonic or insanity. This tension serves a harsh reminder and warning from Jesus that the ones we love the most, our families, our friends, may be the ones unknowingly leading us further and further away from the will of God, and we may not even be aware of it.
The passage displays the difficulties in telling madness and evil from the in-breaking of the Holy Spirit and implies that it is especially difficult for domestic and ecclesial authorities. Though the text does not give many clues about what precisely the good news is, it is embedded in a series of stories about healing, like last week’s healing on the Sabbath. These healings generate hostility towards Jesus, which in turn creates anger and frustration in Jesus over this hostility. What compounds this is that both ardently believe they are doing the work of God.
If we transpose this theological vision into our own time, instead of lepers and demoniacs crowding around Jesus, we might see the disabled. We might see soldiers struggling to come to terms with the horrors they witnessed and committed. We might see Palestinian and Ukrainian women and children missing limbs. We might see a group of men and women reeking of cigarettes and coffee at an AA meeting. We might even see those are trapped in the downward spirals of addiction. When we think about who is near Jesus, it is nor the morally perfect. It is just the diverse mess of humanity, with all of its more, physical, spiritual beauty and imperfection. Jesus sees beyond our rough edges and our perfect imperfections to see the image of God worthy of love and care. The only ones not in the picture, the ones nor pressing in at the doors and windows, desperate and aching to be near Jesus, are the ones who think they know what religion and family life are supposed to look like. Jesus, infinitely patient with the crowd, blasts away at these people. Everyone will be forgiven Jesus says, except people who blaspheme the Holy Spirit. The inability to tell the difference between the power of the Holy Spirit and the demonic is an unforgivable sin.
For most of us this seems like pretty bad news if we find ourselves aligned with Jesus’ family and the scribes. Like the Jews of the first century, we live in troubled times and try our best to figure out how to be faithful. The Holy Spirit is wild and disturbing and comes to us in unfamiliar and unexpected forms. Are feminine images of the divine crazy, demonic, or healing? What if we make the wrong discernment? Perhaps if we pay attention to the themes of healing that run through these stories, we might find a way to orient ourselves. It was the desire for healing that drew people to Jesus. The question we can reflect upon this week is who is coming here looking for healing? They may not look like we expect as we are all seeking healing in our own ways. Are we opening our doors and welcoming in those who wish to encounter the transformative power of Jesus that flows through us? If we can have compassion for our own wounds and those of others, welcoming all of seek God, then we will find ourselves in the crowd devoted to Jesus.
