New Family New Culture

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.