Mark 3:20-35 “Seeing What’s Real” Scott Hoezee

There is an old saying that sometimes a person “can’t see the forest for the trees.” The idea is that sometimes we become so wrapped up in one thing that we lose sight of the larger picture. Sometimes this can be humorous. So on a TV show you may see a man who is obsessed with getting his tie knotted just so. Hence, he spends an inordinate amount of time in front of the mirror until the tie is perfect and he has achieved that small crease just below the knot. Satisfied that he now looks good, he walks out of the house totally oblivious to the fact that his pants have a big rip right on his backside!

Viewed from the right angle, something like this has happened when it comes to Mark 3. Many people have walked away from this chapter fretting to the depths of their soul the so-called “unpardonable sin.” We worry what the precise contours of that sin may be. We worry that someone we know may have been guilty of it. We worry that we may have accidentally committed this very sin. So in the past preachers have tried to address this matter. Some have dealt with it through the traditional line, “If you are worried about this sin, then you didn’t commit it.” Others suggest that this most perilous of sins isn’t a one-time lapse. For the consequences to be this eternally dire, the person in question must be a hardcore anti-God figure who never accepts the Lord’s work even for a moment.

But however we deal with this, the point is that we have tended to become obsessed with this particular part of the chapter very nearly to the exclusion of all else. Hence, what we sometimes come close to forgetting is that there are two rejections of Jesus in Mark 3. But when we become obsessed with the ins and outs of the unpardonable sin, we tend to ignore the fact that Mark 3 shows us also another unhappy way to view Jesus and that we need to avoid that attitude, too. Even if we have the assurance of God’s indwelling Spirit that we have not committed the unforgivable sin, we can still check ourselves on the other matter presented by Mark. The attitude taken by Jesus’ family was probably very forgivable but that does not mean it was a good thing. By focusing on the really big sin here, do we sometimes miss our participation in the lesser sin?

Let me explain what I mean, but to do that I need to widen the context just a bit. In verse 20 where our passage tonight began, Jesus and the twelve disciples have just come down off a mountain. Mountaintops in the Bible are typically places of revelation and new creation, and Mark 3 is no exception. Jesus takes his disciples up to a mountain and while up there he creates a new community that would ultimately become the Church. This new community would eclipse all other communities and all other commitments that Jesus’ followers have in life, including blood ties of family.

To help make that point, Mark brings Jesus’ family into the picture. Before this chapter is finished, Jesus will make clear that important though our families of origin may be, they must not get in the way of the more important bonds we now share as co-disciples of God’s Christ. That becomes all-the-more poignant in Mark 3 because of the fact that Jesus’ mother and brothers have apparently not yet become members of Jesus’ band of disciples. They have been following Jesus in one sense but not in the more important sense. They have followed Jesus to check up on him, to observe what he has been up to. But the result of that kind of following is a dire conclusion: Jesus is off his rocker! He has become something of a family embarrassment, a public spectacle that they are eager to whisk out of sight. They want to take Jesus home, put him to bed, keep him quiet for a while, and then see if all this talk about casting out demons and the kingdom of his Father abates.

As some commentators have pointed out, it appears that it was particularly Jesus’ engagement with the demonic that was causing Mary and Jesus’ brothers to arch their eyebrows the sharpest. It all seemed a little bizarre to them. In verse 21 they say literally that they had to get him on home because Jesus was exeste, a word meaning to stand outside of yourself. Even today we may refer to a person who is an emotional wreck as being “beside himself” with grief. The idea is that someone has taken leave of his senses (or his senses have taken leave of him) and so what remains for the time being is a person whose emotions are unchecked and unregulated. This is the family’s assessment of Jesus.

Today someone might say, “He’s on drugs” or “He’s schizophrenic.” Again, literally speaking, the word “schizophrenia” means to have your mind split off from reality. In pop usage, people think that schizophrenia means having multiple personalities of the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde variety. But schizophrenia does not involve having more than one personality but rather it refers to seeing things and hearing voices that don’t exist. The poignant film A Beautiful Mind is a fine example. John Nash saw secret agents and heard voices that were utterly real to him—as real as you are seeing and hearing me right this very moment—but that did not exist at all. It’s sadly frightening to realize how real delusions can be to such dear people. Years ago when I worked on a psychiatric unit, I can well remember a young person asking me while the two of us were strolling down a sidewalk, “Are you punching me in the face right now?” If he didn’t ask, he couldn’t be sure.

Apparently all Jesus’ talk about invisible kingdoms of God and the casting out of demons led members of his own family to the conclusion that Jesus was seeing things that no one else could see and the reason was simple: he was out of his everloving mind! And it does appear that it was especially Jesus’ emphasis on the demonic that yielded this opinion because no sooner does Jesus’ family accuse him of being mad, and the religious leaders chime in with their own verdict. Because they limit their comments to the demonic, it’s a good bet that it was this aspect of Jesus’ ministry that was generating the most discussion. In the opinion of the scribes, Jesus was himself a devil. If Jesus seemed to have inside information as to the goings-on in the demonic realm, the explanation was simple and obvious: pulling a page from the old “it takes one to know one” playbook, the religious leaders lambast Jesus as being himself a demon incognito.

It was a ridiculous thing to say, and finally completely foolish, too. Why would the devil be shooting himself in the foot? What kind of military commander blows up his own tanks? No, if Jesus seems to be plundering the realm of the devil, it’s because he had already bound and gagged the devil himself and so now his lesser hosts were easy targets for Jesus. Jesus did his work not because he had the power of the devil but because he had already demonstrated power over the devil.

The religious leaders, however, had crossed a vital line. Certainly it is true that what they said was laughable and easy to refute, as Jesus ably does. But here is a piece of folly that is not just dumb, it’s blasphemously heinous. Across the spectrum of life there are any number of things that people may say or do that are flat out stupid. People make foolish choices all the time. People mount specious arguments that can’t hold water for two seconds. They make illogical statements that are self-defeating. They face a choice of actions and, with clear eyes, choose the one thing that will hurt them the most. Folly happens and it happens all the time. But Mark 3 shows us the ultimate example of what counts as culpable folly, a form of foolishness that is so dire that it cannot be chalked up as a mere mistake or a momentary lapse of judgment.

Jesus says that the religious leaders have shown that they live in a morally inverted, spiritually upside-down world. By their own choice they have made darkness their light and have rejected the true Light as the worst form of darkness. What can be done for people who insist on looking at the world that way? A few weeks ago in our Ten Commandments series we pondered the nature of blasphemy. We said then that blasphemy is at bottom a form of theft. Blasphemers steal holy language and symbols, associate them then with ugly and awful things, and so rob God of the chance to get through to us via his chosen form of revelation. So if the KKK can take the symbol of the cross and transform it into a symbol of racial hatred instead of what it really is (namely, a sign of reconciliation among all races and between God and the entire world), then God loses a key piece of how he wants to convey his love to us.

So also in Mark 3: those who try to turn the work of God into the work of the devil show by so doing that they are so far gone, so deeply enmeshed in a spiritually inverted reality, that there is no reaching them. Some of you will recall the dwarves as depicted by C.S. Lewis in the last book of the Narnia series. The dwarves had been brought by Aslan the Lion into the glories of the New Narnia, which stood for heaven or the kingdom of God. These stubborn dwarves sat smack in the middle of a sunlit meadow full of wildflowers and were being fed fruit and vegetables more exquisitely flavorful and fresh than anyone had ever before imagined was possible.

Yet their minds were darkened, their hearts were cold. And so they were convinced they were sitting in the middle of a stinky old stable being fed moldy bread and cow manure. When one of the other characters asks Aslan what can be done for these hapless figures, the answer comes back that nothing can be done. When black becomes white and white becomes black, when evil is good and good is evil, people are gone. God can’t get through to them. The reason the unpardonable sin can never be forgiven is because it will never, ever be recognized as a sin. Even if God came to such people bearing the sweet fragrance of his grace, all these people would smell would be the stink of a rotting corpse. They won’t be forgiven because they cannot be forgiven and they cannot be forgiven because they have come to believe that the gospel’s elixir of life is strychnine: pure poison.

But as I stated at the outset, that’s the part of this chapter that we tend to fixate on. But what about that other form of rejection here? Granted, it is definitely not the same thing as what the religious leaders did. But that hardly makes it OK. If you tell me you haven’t murdered anyone in your life, I will be glad to hear it. But my happiness that you are not a murderer won’t make me merely wink at you in case you then go on to tell me that you have been embezzling money from your firm for the last twenty years.

So the question we need to ask is if we are ever guilty of Mark 3's other wrong way to assess Jesus. As John Rottman once noted, in our modern world it seems like many of us are a bit squeamish when it comes to Jesus the Exorcist. We’ve looked at several passages in Mark these last few weeks and it’s pretty obvious that Jesus’ ability to exorcize demons is a major theme. And frankly, we don’t always know what to make of it. Some of our discomfiture comes out in the questions we ask. “Why don’t we see many demon-possessed people today,” some people ask. And lurking just behind that question are more serious queries: “Do you really think that all those people back then were demon-possessed or were they just mentally ill? Did those people really need an exorcism or, had it been available, would a dose of Haldol or Prozac have done the trick?”

It’s not difficult today to get people to acknowledge that something is wrong with our world. The news is too unrelentingly grim to deny it. And you can get away with it if you label what’s bad in life as sinful, as ethically wrong, as a crime, and even in certain extreme cases as being evil. But if you want to see modern people take a step back from you, just tell them that you believe in a personal devil who is ultimately behind what ails us in life.

But maybe most of us don’t have much difficulty believing in the devil. Even so, if you ever imagine what Jesus would do were he physically with us once again today, how often do you picture him going around and casting out evil spirits and demons? We can imagine Jesus visiting with homeless, hapless souls at Degage and giving a lift to their spirits. We can imagine him walking through the cancer ward at Butterworth Hospital and bringing miracles of healing to the terminally ill. We can imagine him visiting the prisoners in jail and bringing about conversions of even once-hardened criminals. We could hope to see him gently touch the heads of those of us with Parkinson’s disease and suddenly seeing all the tremors cease. Maybe we could even imagine his going to Zaagman’s and raising a dead person back to life right out of a casket. But when was the last time you ever pictured Jesus as walking through the middle of Woodland Mall and casting demons out of this or that person? Of all the things Jesus said and did as depicted in the four gospels, exorcism is the one feature to his ministry that was very prominent back then but that we have the hardest time translating into our modern context.

Now admittedly, part of our difficulty is in not always being sure what form the devil and his hosts take today. As we have noted before, the devil is, among other things, an opportunist. There is more than one way to work evil in this world and it’s not necessarily going to be the case that inhabiting a person and then making him shriek and wail and spit out green goo will be the devil’s chosen method in all times and places. And certainly our heightened and much more sensitive understanding of mental illness prohibits us from calling such sicknesses the devil’s work the way people of prior generations did.

Still, in Mark 3 Jesus’ family concludes that he is beside himself and out of his head because to their mind, he was seeing things that didn’t exist. But faith in Jesus means believing that those things did exist such that it was Jesus’ family members, not Jesus himself, who were the blind ones.

Of course, we now believe something else that those folks didn’t know: we believe that in the cross and resurrection Jesus delivered a fatal blow to the devil. But we must not turn our joy over that victory into complacency, much less into a misguided belief that what we’re up against in this world is no more than dysfunctional social patterns or human ignorance that we can eradicate if only we pass the right legislation or offer better community education courses.

Mark tells us that for the kingdom of God to come, the kingdom of darkness needs to be overcome. And Mark presents us with the one and only Savior who can do that because of the divine power at work within him. Someone once asked why it was that Jesus encountered so many demon-possessed people back then whereas today you don’t see too many people whom you would deem to be genuinely possessed. A well-known New Testament scholar suggested that the answer to that question is along the same lines as if you asked, “How come when I walk through Breton Village in the morning I don’t see too many bleeding people but when I go to the E.R. at Blodgett I do?” The place of healing attracts those who need it.

The devil and his lot may be defeated and on the run, but the headlines of this day’s paper tell us that their influence is not gone, is hardly just a memory. If Jesus did come here again today, perhaps we would be surprised all over again to discover all the places where Jesus saw the devil lurking and working after all. And if he pointed this out to us, then those of us who are part of that new community of faith that is Jesus’ truest family had best not respond by saying, “He must be seeing things!” Then and now Jesus did indeed see things all right. But there was nothing wrong with his eyes. The question, then, is “How’s your eyesight?” Amen.