Readings
Genesis 3:8-15
Psalm 130
2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1
Mark 3:20-35
I’ve been thinking a lot about the current state of affairs in our world. How divided we have become and how quick we are to demonize the other. And what I’ve come to notice is that when something is especially egregious in our eyes, we have a tendency to either treat it as lunacy or evil. Pick your side, how many of us have wanted to attribute to our opponents some form of mental illness? Or worse have labeled them as either potential or actual agents of evil?
What is that about? Well, friends, I think that at the heart of it is fear. That’s right, plain old fear. Now we can debate whether or not that fear is justified. But what drives us to extreme thought and/or behavior is nothing more than fear of something we are observing in the world or fear that what we are observing is a danger to us or those we love.
In today’s Gospel something similar is going on. Jesus is gathered with a group of followers and his family comes with the intent of “restraining him” because they have heard that he is “out of his mind.” Not only that, but the scribes from Jerusalem are accusing him of nothing less than demonic possession by the king of the demons.
Jesus responds, not by driving these people away but by drawing them near and teaching in parables. He challenges the notion of his being with Beelzebul, by asking “how can Satan cast out Satan?” He equates it to a kingdom divided or a house divided, indicating that such a state can’t be maintained. He allegorizes his ability to cast out demons to that of being able to enter the house of a strong man and plundering it. He basically says that the reality is that he has bound up Satan, not the other way around.
But then he doubles down on the accusation. He says that all sorts of blasphemy can be forgiven, but not blaspheming against the Holy Spirit. In essence he is saying that when God is at work, and one attributes it to the devil, then one is cutting oneself off from God completely.
Now to be frank, I struggle with this passage. I want to attribute that particular set of sentences to a scribe because it doesn’t fit neatly into how I prefer to look at God and at Jesus as God. I don’t want to think of the idea that there is something that is unforgivable. I want to believe in a God who will forgive everyone without exception.
But what if the issue isn’t the loving nature of God? What if the issue of forgiveness isn’t about God’s unwillingness to forgive, but our unwillingness to recognize God at work in our lives and our subsequent inability to accept that forgiveness? If we truly have free will, then that must include our ability to reject God even in the face of God’s overwhelming presence.
This is what I think Jesus is getting at. He is making explicit that what the scribes are doing is mislabeling his acts of good as acts of evil. They are mislabeling him as an embodiment of evil when, in fact, he is an embodiment of the Divine.
And why are they doing that? And, for that matter, why are his mother and his brothers and sisters treating him as if he is crazy? Well, it’s because he isn’t behaving the way they expect him to. He is functioning outside their norms, and it is scary.
When confronted with Jesus’ teaching, preaching, and deeds of power it is easier for all of them to reject, deny, vilify, or demonize him, than it is to come to grips with what’s going on, both in him and in themselves.
But before we’re too harsh with Jesus’ family or the scribes, let’s be clear. They all lived in a world in which evil was a daily reality. They lived under foreign occupation and the existential threat of extreme violence. Theirs was a divided society with those at the top taking advantage of everyone else. It is understandable that when confronted with someone like Jesus or his followers that they might be scared or confused.
But Jesus is clear. That doesn’t get them off the hook. They needed to look beyond their established expectations to determine whether someone or something is crazy or sane, good or evil. They needed to be actively looking for God and for the good. They needed to push past their fear and pay attention to the facts on the ground.
We too are confronted with many scary things in this life. We too encounter both good and evil. And we too have social, cultural, and spiritual expectations shaped by how we think the world should work. But we’re not off the hook either.
If we wish to know God in this life then we must push past our fears and look at the facts on the ground. We need to actively be looking for God not simply in what we expect or believe, but in the shocking and startling ways God reveals God’s self to us day after day.
Will there be things we encounter that are not of God? Absolutely! But what we may well find to be the case is that much of what we wish to demonize has little to do with the devil or evil, but instead our fear. What we may well find is that God is at work doing deeds of power in the lives of others in ways we did not expect. We may well find our mother, our brother, or our sister where we least expect it.
But how do we do that? We need to cultivate a heart that is like Jesus’ heart. We need to move beyond the hardness in our hearts that is motivated out of fear born of presumption. We need to set aside the simplistic Sunday School definitions we were given as children and step into the deeper mystery of the presence of God.
The great 20th century theologian Howard Thurman sums it up best for me in a prayer from his book “Meditations of the Heart.”
Lord, I want to be more holy in my heart.
Here is the citadel of all my desiring,
where my hopes are born
and all the deep resolutions of my spirit take wings.
In this center, my fears are nourished,
and all my hates are nurtured.
Here my loves are cherished,
and all the deep hungers of my spirit are honored
without quivering and without shock.
In my heart, above all else,
let thy love and integrity envelop me
until my love is perfected and the last vestige
of my desiring is no longer in conflict with thy Spirit.
Lord, I want to be more holy in my heart.
May we be more holy in our hearts. May we see our mother, our brother, our sister. May we see Jesus.