Mark
3:20-35
Some
quotations on families:
"When
your mother asks, 'Do you want a piece of advice?' it's a mere
formality. It doesn't matter if you answer yes or no. You're going to
get it anyway." Erma
Bombeck, 20th century
"After
a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one's own relatives."
Oscar
Wilde, 19th century
The
bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect
and joy in each other’s life. Richard
Bach,
20th century
Why
are Jesus' family troubled so?
At
that time, family was the basic unit for effectively everything.
The
economic base: within your family you found your livelihood, e.g. as
part of a fishing family; you
worked within the family occupation or, if you couldn't work, they
supported you as
they were
able;
they
were the safety net; the
family gained – or struggled to gain
– livelihood together, and without a family you had nothing.
Family
was also the social base, within which
the primary code was
honour and shame: you
had your place, and knew your place, within the order and authority
of the family; the
most important thing was never to do anything that brought shame to
the family.
So
you can see why Jesus was a problem and
a worry
to his
family.
Now
what's
this talk about Satan? Jesus is labelled by the scribes as this
deviant named
Satan, labelling
being their
scheme
to get rid of him. He was threatening the order and authority of the
religious family.
Jesus
responds with a question: “How can Satan cast out Satan?”
Let's
reframe that in our kind of terms:
How
can negativity cast out negativity?
How
can force cast out force?
How
can compulsion cast out compulsion?
How
can violence cast out violence?
How
can coercion cast out coercion?
How
can manipulation cast out manipulation?
How
can bullying cast out bullying?
There
are plenty of contemporary alternatives for the word “Satan” and
this is the
question: how can you
get rid of harm using
harmful
means?
Jesus
tells a story of a
raid
on
a house. It will only work if the power controlling
the house
is first put out of action. To deal with the powers that harm, you
have to first – somehow – tie up those
powers, put
an end to their controlling influence. Hold onto that thought and
we'll come back to what this can mean for us.
Before
that we need to clarify what our equivalent of family would
be,
i.e.
what
Jesus would be talking about in our context. In part, it is our
actual family, but that does not have the all encompassing social and
economic role that was the case in Jesus' time. We
can have a viable life apart of our family and, in fact, we see it as
important that we
have some level
of independence.
The
family equivalent
for
us now is
our
overarching culture. What
Jesus would speak about is
the system,
the whole social,
economic, political,
technological, environmental
system, in which we make our way as best we can; within
that, we find our place or we struggle to survive. Within that, we
adhere, or not to
our jeopardy,
to norms of a kind of honour and shame.
For
example, it's
somewhat shameful:
not
to be
in favour with those you mix with;
not
to be concerned about providing for yourself;
to
make choices that aren't concerned either
with achieving more (e.g. more income) or
pursuing pleasure and
thrills;
(now
you might think that's not so much you, but that is the dominant
culture we now live in, and some of us don't really measure up,
that's just a fact. Old-fashioned, a
killjoy, a
bit of an embarrassment to family members perhaps.)
It's
somewhat shameful not
to
want new and better things.
And
it's
definitely an embarrassment to try to live the Way of the Cross.
We keep quiet about it.
It
is really important that we recognise the
powers
in the midst of this. Call it Satan: Jesus would. A
kind of power or controlling influence that means we think and act
differently from what we know Jesus would. Subtlely taking over our
thinking and choosing. Even if we're not to the extreme of popular
culture that says, e.g. “Winning is not the most important thing:
it is everything”,
we are still under the sway of motivation
and purpose that is totally not
God's kingdom
way.
The world we live in simply makes Christian values of compassion,
generosity, unconditional love, total non-violence (no
war)
impractical.
We can't be
completely to blame
ourselves for that: it's the world we live in; it's the powers and
the
principals
that are in charge.
We've
under-estimated the grip this
has on good people and we've made it harder to recognise by throwing
out the baby with the bathwater as
happened when
Satan and
the devil became no longer acceptable as a topic of discussion.
We've said evil is not real; we can live good lives; it's up to us to
just do it. But left to our own resources we remain under this
powerful influence of society and its cultural norms, its economic
rules, its
social persuasiveness.
To be more or less like everyone else is a huge pressure; to
find our place to belong, to be successful or at least to
get
by.
Jesus
offers an alternative culture. In the terms of his time, he offers
a new family. For
us he offers a new
culture that
is under
instead
the
powerful influence
of
the Spirit: the
culture of kingdom values. Put
yourself in the midst of this
and you tap into a totally different way to respond to the evils
listed earlier
– bullying, compulsion, negativity, violence...
Speaking
of Jesus here in this passage in Mark's gospel, Mark Fry writes,
They
wanted to restrain him and send him to the asylum. It was too hard to
bear, too dissonant a voice. The cry of the living
God was inviting people to shed the burden of self-concern, to let go
with complete abandon, and to venture out into the wilds of God's
kingdom armed with nothing but a passionate vision of life lived
fully awake in love.”
They
eventually did restrain Jesus, on a cross, and when he asked his Abba
to forgive the men who were executing him, they were stunned. “He
really is crazy,” they thought. But the experience of the crucified
Jesus left them marked, and they would never be the same again. No
one walks away from that vision unscathed. Even restrained on the
cross Jesus was widening the circle of his mothers, sisters, and
brothers.
The
circle is open to
each of us. Come,
find your place in the family – the culture – of God's kingdom
Way. Your place at the Table.
