Mark 3:19b-30

10/05/11 Mark 3:19b-30 GUMC Youth

It seems like forever ago since we last talked about Mark together. All kinds of things have happened since we looked at Mark. We had the Fair, the night at the Wittstruck's, you got to hear from my friend Mollie, and even Life Light. It's been a whole month since we've looked at Mark's account of the life of Jesus. Before we dig in to the passage for tonight, we should spend a little bit of time remembering where we have been.

Jesus has been baptized and set apart for ministry, called some fishermen from their nets, and has done all kinds of miracles, healing people who were sick or broken and casting out unclean spirits. However, we need to remember at every step of the way, that Jesus has made it incredibly clear that his main purpose is not to heal the sick, but to proclaim his message to everyone. After all, back in the first chapter, he left a crowd full of people who were hoping that Jesus would heal them or their loved ones in order to go to other towns and preach there. Jesus is clearly a wonder-worker, but the miracles are not his main point. He cares much more about what we learn and who we become rather than on being fixated on healing, though he is clearly powerful enough to do that.

We need to remember, though, that not everyone was happy with Jesus. In the famous story of Jesus healing a man who was paralyzed and had to be lowered down from the roof, we read that he declared that the man's sins were forgiven. There were scribes present who got upset. After all, who can forgive sins but God alone? However, in order to demonstrate that he was indeed powerful enough to forgive sins (that is, in order to show that he is indeed God), he healed the man of his paralysis. Shortly after that, when Jesus had called a tax collector, the people complained that he ate with people that most Good Jews refused to eat with. When they tried to trick Jesus into breaking the Sabbath laws, he healed people anyway, showing that he understood the law far better than the people who thought they did.

So Jesus has been helping the people, but has also been greatly upsetting the so-called "authorities." You can only irritate the people in charge for so long before people start to notice. For some people, this is great, because not everyone likes the people who are in charge, but to others, if you upset them too much, you are a troublemaker who should be avoided. Jesus went back to the house he was staying at and was so popular, there were so many people in the crowd who had come to see him that he couldn't even sit down and have a meal. But we read that his family came along because people were saying, "He has gone out of his mind," which is a far cry from what some people want to say today, that Jesus was a great human teacher; but we will come back to Jesus' family next week.

Look at what the scribes say to Jesus. Actually, before we get to that, we should pay attention to the fact that these are not local scribes, like we saw earlier. These are scribes from Jerusalem, who had travelled an awful long way to get to hear Jesus. However, they don't have much nice to say. They didn't come so far because they thought he was wonderful and they wanted to learn from him, but because they thought he was corrupting the people and they wanted to stop him.

But what do they say? They say, "He has Beelzebul, and by the ruler of the demons he casts out demons." This is hardly a nice thing to say, but even though it is clear that, according to Mark, the scribes have completely misunderstood Jesus and are very wrong, we ought to spend some time trying to understand what they are trying to say, even if we do not, in the end, agree with it. By the way, if you are really going to disagree with someone, you should make sure you really understand them first. The best way to convince people that you aren't a big jerk is to really take the time and be honest with them and learn where they are coming from. I have many friends with whom I disagree passionately, especially my atheist friends, but we can have real, civilized discussions in spite of that.

The scribes don't like Jesus, but they have to account for the fact that he is casting out demons from people. These were people who everyone knew to be affected by demons who were now no longer troubled by them, but were perfectly in their right mind. There wasn't a particularly strong tradition of exorcisms in the history of Israel that we read about in the Old Testament, so they wouldn't have been forced to admit that only God can cast out demons, but they surely would have believed that God could, indeed, cast them out. The question was whether or not they could find some other explanation, regardless of how plausible it seemed. They found one. They argued that, if Jesus was possessed, not just with an ordinary demon, but with the ruler of demons, he would be able to have authority over ordinary demons, and he would be able to cast them out.

But that is actually a pretty silly explanation, as Jesus points out to them. He says, "How can Satan cast out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand." You might have heard that Abraham Lincoln is famous for saying, about the split between North and South, "A house divided cannot stand." He got it from Jesus, not the other way around. He continues on and makes his point. "And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but his end has come."

Do you see what Jesus is doing? He is pointing out that, even though the scribes' argument made sense to them, because they did not want to see any other explanation, it was really a ridiculous conclusion. Why in the world would Satan attack his own demons? Why would he wage war on his own troops? The only reason I can think of is to show how powerful he is, that he can actively weaken his own army, but that seems pretty far-fetched, doesn't it? Jesus is pointing out that there is a much more likely interpretation of what he is doing. He says, "But no one can enter a strong man's house and plunder his property without first tying up the strong man; then indeed the house can be plundered."

The symbolism is pretty easy to follow. Satan is the strong man, one who has stolen many things and is, in general, able to defend what he has taken. However, one cannot just walk into his house and take back whatever you want. Before that can be done, someone who is stronger needs to come in and overpower the strong man and tie him up so he can no longer resist. Satan is the strong man of the story, but Jesus is the stronger man, the one who is able, with a word, to bind Satan himself and do whatever he wants with his kingdom, releasing people from his bondage and setting them free. When Jesus casts out demons, it is not proof that he is working side by side with Satan, but rather that he has declared war on Satan and has invaded enemy territory and is plundering his enemy, which only can happen after the enemy is defeated. It is a much more natural interpretation of what was happening, and it is clear that the scribes were just looking for excuses.

I'm sure we can all relate to the scribes. I don't know about you, but there are times when I can create pretty elaborate explanations for things that, at the end of the day, probably aren't true, but I do it because I desperately want them to be true. Have you ever done anything like that? Have you ever been on the opposite side of something like this, where someone else comes up with an incredibly unlikely explanation for something when it is as clear as day what the real reason is? It can be unbelievably frustrating.

The end of our passage for tonight includes one of the scariest statements in the Bible for some people. Jesus says, "Truly I tell you, people will be forgiven for their sins and whatever blasphemies they utter; but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit can never have forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin." I will bet that there are at least a few of you, if not all of you, who, the moment you heard those words had a thought like this. "Oh my goodness. There is a sin that absolutely cannot be forgiven? Have I committed it? How could I know if I've committed it? Is it already too late for me?" If you had thoughts like that, you are not alone. But I think that part of the reason that those words seem so frightening to us is because we get so distracted when we hear them that we do not continue to listen to the last verse in the passage. We are told that Jesus said this because the scribes had said, "He has an unclean spirit."

We need to understand this a few different levels. The first thing we need to understand is the seriousness of what Jesus is talking about. Here is Jesus, God in flesh, God in their midst, demonstrating his divine power for all to see, doing what nobody else could do, doing things that the only other explanation his enemies can come up with (and enemies are usually really good at finding all the reasons why we should not trust someone) is completely unlikely. In spite of all that, there were some people who so completely misunderstood who Jesus was and why he had come among them that they could only say that he had an unclean spirit, that he was possessed by the devil. You need to understand the degree of confusion that we're dealing with here. We aren't just talking about someone making a small mistake, or making a wrong judgment based on what they heard from someone else, which may or may not have been true. We are talking about people being confronted with the very presence of God, seeing him doing all kinds of mighty things, and then calling him, not the God of the universe, who had walked with their ancestors for hundreds of years, but the very enemy of God.

We need to understand that, when Jesus talks about this idea of an unforgiveable sin, he is not talking about something that you or I can just stumble into, that we can simply lose our head for a moment and do something that will condemn us forever. In order to commit this kind of sin, we have to set ourselves completely against God, so completely against God that, when we see God move, we genuinely believe that it is the activity of evil personified. It would take nothing less than us setting ourselves in the place of God and judging that God is himself evil. So, even though this is indeed a serious issue and not something to be taken lightly, hear this word of encouragement. The fact that you are even willing to enter a church, that you are willing to come and sing songs glorifying God and to hear a message about God shows that the odds against you having committed this unforgivable sin are astronomical. The fact is, if you had done what Jesus is warning about, you would either never have come tonight, or if you did, you would only have come to ridicule God. This is the kind of thing where the people who are worried probably shouldn't be and those who aren't worried just might want to be.

But lets try to understand this in a trinitarian way. The Holy Spirit plays an incredibly important role in our Christian lives. If we really pay attention when we read the gospels, we find that nobody, not the disciples, not the crowd of people who follow Jesus, not even the other folks we see from time to time, really understand who Jesus is and his significance. Some of the greatest examples are Peter and Judas, who deny and betray Christ, respectively. Even after Jesus is raised from the dead, and many people were convinced of his importance, we still read incredible things like this, which shows up right before Jesus gives the Great Commission. "Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. When they saw him, they worshipped but some doubted." There was Jesus, resurrected in glory, right before their very eyes, but some doubted even then.

The doubt only really went away at Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit came upon those first Christians. There is something about the Spirit that makes it so incredibly important, that if we do not have the Spirit, we do not, we can not, really understand who Jesus is and really come to know him. So look at Jesus' warning this way. You can say all kinds of terrible things about God, even about Jesus Christ, and you can be forgiven. After all, at the end of the day, who knows whether the Spirit will move and transform you like it did to the disciples on Pentecost. However, if you utterly reject the Spirit, how can you come to know the truth? If you become completely convinced that even the Holy Spirit of God is a force for evil and not for good and you completely resist it, how can you ever be corrected? If we have committed ourselves to falsehood, how can we ever know the truth?

The point that I want you to take with you is actually the amazing grace and forgiveness of Christ. Even if you have set yourself up against Christ in the past, that does not mean that you cannot be forgiven and restored. When Jesus was on the cross, bleeding and dying, he cried out and said, "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing." Even though the people certainly thought they knew what they were doing, they were crucifying a public enemy, Jesus still sought to embrace them in his forgiveness.

There is an awful lot of evil in the world today. I'm sure you see it day by day in school and in the world around you. There are days where it seems hard to be motivated to keep going, but I want to remind you what Jesus said. He is the one who is stronger than Satan, who has bound Satan, and who is about the business of plundering Satan's kingdom. Not everyone notices this; obviously the scribes in our passage missed it, but that doesn't make it any less true. On the days when it seems that the whole world is crashing down around you, when you are having a hard time seeing the hope and joy you know you should see, trust and remember that Jesus is indeed the stronger man, who has a forgiveness that extends much further than you or I will ever know. Let us pray.

AMEN