Mark 3:20-35
Today’s Gospel
passage comes from just the third chapter of Mark’s Gospel, but a lot has
already happened. Let me give you a brief recap: Jesus has driven an unclean
spirit out of a man and cured a woman’s fever, which led to him healing many
people in Capernaum and casting out many demons. He has cleansed a leper and
made a paralyzed man walk after forgiving him his sins. He has restored a man’s
withered arm. He has gathered around him close disciples. He has taught with
authority and power. He has proclaimed the Good News of God’s Kingdom, and has
drawn large crowds to himself, so much so that it is hard for him to to find
time and space even to eat. He is changing many lives for the better. So there
is much rejoicing, right? Wrong. The Pharisees hate him; the Herodians are
already plotting to destroy him. In today’s passage, his family comes to
restrain him because they think he has lost his mind. Scribes from Jerusalem
also arrive: they don’t just think he’s crazy — they think he’s demonic,
possessed by Satan.
I need all of us
to pause for a moment and let this percolate in our brains. How can anyone who
does so much good possibly be accused of being so messed up and so evil? At
stake here is more than just the tragedy of Jesus’ own life: this gets at a tragic
feature of all human life, one which the Gospel seeks to expose and to change.
As Mark presents
it, the people who despise Jesus are the people with power. It’s their job to
enforce the rules, and Jesus breaks the rules by doing things like healing on
the Sabbath. They are the people with authority, but Jesus speaks and acts with
an authority that does not come from them but with a divine authority, as when
he forgives people. They are the people who control access to God, a control
which they use to try to limit such access as much as they can, but Jesus makes
God fully accessible to everyone, even eating and drinking with tax collectors,
traitors, and all sorts of sinners. They are deeply threatened by everything he
does, and when they try to call him on it, he always gets the best of them. So
in the Gospel today, when they say he must be acting with demonic power when he
drives out demons, Jesus easily refutes that by pointing out the obvious: the
devil is not going to fight against himself. And then he says something that is
crucial: No one can enter a strong man’s
house without first tying up the strong man; then indeed the house can be
plundered. The strong man in that metaphor is Satan, and Jesus is the one
who has come to tie Satan up and plunder Satan’s house, which is the world
under demonic oppression. Jesus, in short, has come to set people free from the
power of evil.
Some commentators
over the years have noted that “binding the strong man” may be the best
possible tagline for Mark’s Gospel. All the Gospels show Jesus casting out
demons, but Mark especially emphasizes all the ways Jesus has come to free
people from demonic oppression. And that means more than just exorcising some
individuals who are demon-possessed. It means changing the whole way we are in
this world, a world in which, unfortunately, so many people have become so used
to oppression of all types, so inured to it,
that they often fail to even see it.
So here’s the
crux of the matter: Jesus comes to set people free from all that oppresses
them. When they’re sick, he heals them. When they’re hungry, he feeds them.
When they are ignorant, he teaches them. When they are demon-possessed, he
delivers them. This, Jesus shows, is what God is doing in the world. And when
things get in the way of that, including religious rules, he ditches them. The
only thing that matters is the love of God setting people free to love and be
whole. But the so-called authorities, the people with power, are so invested in
an oppressive system that tries to control and subjugate people that they can’t
even recognize God anymore. They commit the only unforgivable sin, which is to
witness the Holy Spirit at work and call it evil. It’s not that God won’t
forgive them: they’ve placed themselves beyond the reach of divine grace,
because when God comes to them with forgiveness or anything else, they
completely miss him by mistaking God for Satan. It doesn’t get any worse than
that. It doesn’t get worse than believing that God’s love, mercy, and
compassion are demonic and evil.
We don’t ever
want to go there. We are the Body of Christ, and we are still in the business
of setting people free. And so we want to further the liberating work of Christ
and not obstruct it. We want to be like the crowds who welcome Jesus and not
like the people in power who reject him. And that demands that we keep asking
the question, “How is Jesus working to set people free?” On one level, that’s a
personal question: “What is oppressing me in my life?” That could be an
addiction, depression, an abusive relationship, a bad job, hurtful habits,
destructive patterns of thought, or any
number of things. We’ll find Jesus in the energy and drive that is working for
freedom and healing in our individual lives. But it is also a social question:
“What is oppressing people in our world?” Poverty, racism, bigotry, lack of
access to health care, and other factors all contribute to binding people.
Christians may certainly disagree on the best way to tackle those problems, but
we can agree that they are problems. There are forces at work in our world that
oppress people and keep them down. And Jesus is always, always going to work
against those forces and set people free.
We will, of
course, struggle at times to discern and embrace the liberating work of Christ.
Sometimes we may even resist it. But we never want to become like the religious
authorities in the Gospel today: we don’t want to become so hardened, so
calcified, that we don’t even recognize the oppression in our own lives and in
the world around us, and then can’t even see God at work to deliver people and
let them go. What we heard today is meant to keep as awake and aware. Jesus has
come to bind the strong man and unbind us. We never want to be satisfied with
the oppression of anyone, we never want to mistake being shackled in any way
for the will of God. We want to be with Jesus and for Jesus, rejoicing in and
cooperating with his liberating work until, as the Apostle Paul writes in
Romans, all creation obtains the freedom
of the glory of the children of God.
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