A Sermon by Sydney V. (Skip) Jackson — March 22, 2009
Indianola Presbyterian Church, Columbus, Ohio
Text:  Mark 3:7-35

Hearing [what was happening]… his family…

“He has gone out of his mind.” — Mark 3:21

[Jesus] said, “Here are my mothers and brothers!

sister and mother.” — Mark 3:34b-35

We’re only in Chapter 3 of Mark’s telling of “the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God” [Mk 1:1] and already we know Jesus as a man of nearly constant action.  Everything happens immediately in Mark, leading readers to wonder constantly, “What now?  What’s next?”  In Chapter 1, immediately after John baptizes Jesus, the Spirit drives him into the wilderness where he struggles with evil incarnate.  Upon leaving the desert, he takes his struggle with evil into the most populous town in the region, Capernaum, where he comes up against the symptoms of evil in the world—sickness and disease, epilepsy and blindness, spells and fits, as well as poverty and all kinds of oppression.  The picture of Jesus that Mark’s Gospel offers is of someone working against evil in all its forms.

 

In Chapter 2, conflict between Jesus and the religious leaders erupts as the scribes and Pharisees converge, eager to charge Jesus with crimes and blasphemy.  His popular following worries them a great deal, for he challenges their authority.  He continually violates religious laws and customs.  He breaks the Sabbath to heal people.  His disciples don’t fast.  He shares meals with sinners and traitors.  But two things are worst of all.  First, he teaches new things that threaten their hold on power—“What is this?” the people cry, “A new teaching—with authority!” [Mk 1:27]  Second, Jesus steps on their toes by forgiving sins.  “This is blasphemy!” declare the scribes, “Who can forgive sins but God alone?” [Mk 2:7]  The scribe, of course, see themselves as the one who point out what God is and is not doing.  So at the start of Chapter 3, Mark tells us how the religious authorities begin plotting to kill Jesus.  In two weeks on Palm Sunday we’ll skip ahead in the story to the culmination of their plot, Holy Week and Crucifixion, but then witn Easter they and the whole world are in for a surprise when God raises Jesus from the dead.

In the parts of Mark’s story we heard this morning, Jesus tries but cannot escape from the hullabaloo.  He seeks to withdraw, but the crowds flock around so people can’t even eat.  The conflict follows him as well.  His own family wants to lock him up, for they (or others) think he’s gone completely bonkers.  The religious authorities try to brand him as a demon agent of evil.  What now?—we wonder—What’s next?  Well, Jesus foils both his family and the authorities, although we might enjoy his victories more if his responses were not among the hardest sayings he ever spoke.  One writer calls them “things I wish Jesus had never said,” and who can blame him?  Jesus’ words about family seem to threaten deeply-held and cherished family values.  (Put the crowds before his mother and brothers.  Indeed!)  Then comes a strange saying about the so-called “unforgivable sin” of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.  On the one hand, the idea of a sin God can’t forgive is like the proverbial question whether God can make a rock too heavy for God to lift.  On the other hand, some people spend an inordinate amount of time wondering just what this “unforgivable sin” might entail.  Whether they want to be sure they avoid it or to be able to accuse others of it, I don’t know.  The threat of “eternal damnation” (as the King James Version puts it) for such a sin is a powerful weapon to wield against your enemies—sort of like the scribes accusing Jesus of having an unclean spirit and being in league with Beelzebul.

Mark interweaves the stories of Jesus’ two conflicts—with his family and with the religious authorities—so each might complement and comment upon the other.  But let’s consider them separately.  First, it’s very striking to see that those closest to Jesus—his own immediate family—simply do not understand him.  They seem totally unaware that God is somehow at work in his life.  Most likely they are too concerned about the family honor and keeping up proper appearances.  Their actions may even be well intentioned, but they end up opposing his purposes.

This is a sobering reminder to any who, because of their long and close relationship with Jesus as “personal Lord and Savior,” might assume they know exactly what is and is not properly Christian understanding and behavior.  Past relationship does not guarantee proper action relative to God’s will.  This lesson is heightened when Jesus deals with the scribes, who are the supposed religious experts.  Traditional understandings are important, yes, but they do not trump the movement of the Holy Spirit.  There are always those in the church who are too ready to cry heresy and seek to restrain those who would think new thoughts about God, imagine new theologies, or do new things in response to God’s call to do justice.  Instead, it is important to remain open to the Spirit and ready to follow in new and perhaps startling directions as disciples of Jesus Christ.  “The way we’ve always done it” may be comforting and comfortable, but past experiences and understandings of God cannot be taken as either complete or final.

Jesus’ definition of just who is to be considered part of his family is remarkably inclusive, so wide-ranging, in fact, as to be more than a little disconcerting.  In our culture we are of two minds about family.  The so-called “nuclear family” of mother, father, and one or more children is the ideal.  Yet we’re also aware of how many different variations of family are possible.  Either way, family is seen as important—family values, support for families, the family as an economic unit.  Gays and lesbians presently are engaged in a struggle to enjoy the rights and privileges that our world reserves for families.  In Jesus’ day, the extended family was crucial, for it almost completely defined one’s economic, religious, educational, and social status.  Yet Jesus took the concept of family and stretched it far beyond anything previously envisioned—expanding it to include within the family of God any and all people who seek to be aligned with the will of God.

There are two important things here.  For one, only you can decide whether you are in or out—not someone else, not some outside religious or civil authority.  Truly trying to do God’s will in the here-and-now is what’s important.  I’m reminded of the rule in Alcoholics Anonymous:  “the only requirement for membership is the desire to stop drinking”—not stopping itself, but the desire to stop.  The second thing here is that Jesus gives a strong warning to the religious authorities that they are to be especially careful about declaring anything to be devoid of God’s activity.

So let’s turn now to Jesus’ response when the scribes’ charge that he is in league with evil.  The important thing here is to note Mark’s clue when he says in verse 23 that Jesus “spoke to them in parables.”  Parables are not simple, straightforward teachings.  They’re not about facts.  Parables are about changing the way people think about the world, changing minds.  “The kingdom of God is at hand.  Repent,  and believe in the good news.”  [Mark 1:15]  Remember that the Greek word for “repentance” is metanoia—which comes from two Greek roots, meta “to change” and noeo “to know.”  Metanoia is not just saying you’re sorry but changing how you think about and what you know about the world.  Jesus turns to the scribes and asks, “How can Satan cast out Satan?” And these religious authorities are caught up in a trap of their own logic.  For they themselves have acknowledged that Jesus cast out evil.  But how can a house divided against itself possibly stand?  Abraham Lincoln cited this parabolic saying with much the same, telling effect in the Lincoln-Douglas debates about slavery.

We should refrain from taking what Jesus’ says about forgiveness and blaspheming the Holy Spirit as a direct, factual statement.  This, too, is a parable, with parabolic twists of logic designed to lead trap his opponents in their own logic and lead them to think differently about the world and about God.  These twists become more apparent as we delve a little deeper into Jesus’ words. 

 

First, blaspheming the Holy Spirit does not refer to cursing or insulting one of the persons of the Holy Trinity.  The Trinity is a much later doctrine and so is not at issue here.  In Jesus’ time, the “Holy Spirit” was a way of referring to God’s presence and activity in the world.  To blaspheme the Holy Spirit meant to deny God’s role in what is really a divine action—in this case, saying that Jesus’ power to forgive came, not from God, but from an unclean spirit.  Yet how could an unclean, evil spirit have anything to do with forgiveness?

Next, contrary to popular understanding, Jesus does not speak of this sin as unforgivable.  Nothing is beyond God’s forgiveness.  What the literal Greek text says is that “whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit can never have forgiveness.”  Those words—“never have forgiveness”—are also in the New Revised Standard.  Granting forgiveness to someone is not the same thing as them having that forgiveness.  You may well forgive me for something I have done, yet I may deny and shut out your forgiveness and go on without it present in my life.  The scribes affirm that God and only God can forgive.  So, by denying God’s role in the forgiveness granted by Jesus, they in effect cut themselves off from the only sole source of forgiveness.

Finally, Jesus does not threaten “eternal damnation” for those who “blaspheme the Holy Spirit.”  What the literal Greek says is that they “are involved in an eternal sin.”  “Guilty of an eternal sin” is too strong.  For this is not about guilt but, rather, a self-imposed state of being.  The logic here is clear in the very nature of the sin.  If your sin is to deny the activity of the only source of forgiveness, you leave yourself with no way out of this sin.  Logically, therefore, it must go on eternally.  Beyond this, the Holy Spirit as the “activity of God” is responsible for time itself, for the flow of events, for all that is new.  Hence to deny the Spirit is to seek to freeze time in an eternal, never-changing, present moment—one, however, that is a state of sin, separate from God and apart from the newness of redemption.

Now, don’t go taking all this literally.  Jesus is speaking in parables, after all.  And once again the religious authorities attacking Jesus end up the butt of the joke.  Eugene Peterson catches a bit of the humor of all this in his contemporary English version of the New Testament, The Message, where he renders these verses as:  “There’s nothing done or said that can’t be forgiven.  But if you persist in your slanders against God’s Holy Spirit, you are repudiating the very One who forgives, sawing off the branch on which you are sitting, severing by your own perversity all connection with the One who forgives.”  These scribes are, in effect, the proverbial ostriches sticking their heads in the sand, denying God’s presence and activity in the world and in their lives.

I recently read an article about Dr. Martin Luther King’s “Letter from the Birmingham Jail.”  In it the author offered numerous quotes from the letter and recalled incident after incident where Dr. King’s faith led him to seek and to promote God’s justice and wholeness in the world.  But then the author asked:  “Who remembers the eight white clergy to whom [the letter] was ostensibly addressed, who had first written Kink, deploring his nonviolent civil disobedience and urging ‘our own Negro community’ not to support King?”  [Gustav Niebuhr in Beyond Tolerance: Searching for Interfaith Understanding in America (Viking Pres, 2008) p. xx]  How easy it can be for religious folk—those who think of themselves as closest to Jesus—to be ostriches with heads in the sand when faced with justice issues having to do with such things as race, gender, sexuality, poverty, and oppression.

It doesn’t need to be that way for us.  Instead of “heads in the sand,” we can be like that ostrich pictured on the cover of today’s worship bulletin—heads up, eyes wide open, looking ahead.  We can strive to be open-minded and responsive to God’s creative and renewing work in the world.  We can seek to be part of the family of Jesus, wondering “What now?  What’s next?” even as we pray, “Thy kingdom come; thy will be done, on earth as it is