Text: Mark 3:20-35
Beloved
in Christ, for quite some time now Christians have presented a rather tame
picture of Jesus. In the last century or two artists and theologians alike tend
to portray Him as soft and gentle. There is no manly ferocity about Him, nor
even an intensity of soul. He is presented as almost a nothing, someone who can
be fashioned into whatever you want to believe or think about Him, but
certainly no one who would ever shake up your world or your worldview. But as
the Anglican theologian N.T. Wright has observed, there is nothing in these
portrayals of Jesus that would explain how He ended up on a cross. A Mr.
Milquetoast may be an altogether pleasant individual, but a Mr. Milquetoast
never gets crucified, either.
Now
I am not saying that Jesus behaved like a marauding barbarian. His ferocity and
intensity did not show itself in violence and butchery—and neither should ours.
But He intended to shake up society as much as Attila the Hun would. Indeed,
Attila came and went, and whatever havoc he caused soon diminished after his
passing. But our Lord’s kingdom continues to endure twenty centuries after our
Lord began His ministry.
The
early Christians understood this. Mark, in particular, grasped this truth. Of
all the gospel writers he is the most forthright about describing Christ’s
stunning power as well as the opposition it evoked. And we see that in today’s
gospel. On the one hand, Jesus was so incredibly popular that crowds were
trying to get near Him, leaving no time for them or Him to grab a bite to eat.
On the other hand, his own family thought that he was crazy, while the learned
religious teachers thought that he was downright demonic. The one thing you
didn’t hear people say about Him was that He was just okay.
Jesus
was either demonic, crazy, or the incarnate Son of God. Some of you have heard of
C.S. Lewis’ threefold dilemma: Since Christ claimed to be the Son of God,
either He was a liar, a lunatic, or the Lord. As Lewis explained, either Christ
was the Son of God or He wasn’t. If He wasn’t the Son of God, He either knew
that He wasn’t or He was deluded into thinking that He was. If He knew that He
wasn’t, He would have been a liar. If He was deluded, He would have been a
lunatic. But if He was telling the truth, He must be Lord. Note that there is
no option of merely “Good Teacher” among the possibilities.
Mark
in effect sets up the same dilemma, but he sharpens it. He doesn’t merely say
that Christ would be a liar if He knew that He wasn’t the Son of God. No, He
would actually have had to have been demonic, for even His enemies knew that He
did supernatural things. Far from being a good teacher, He would have had to
have been the devil incarnate if He tried to pass on such a horrible deception
that He was the Son of God when He wasn’t. And so Lewis may have spoken of the
choices being liar, lunatic, or Lord, but Mark sets forth the choices as
demonic, crazy, or Lord.
Well,
how do we evaluate these choices? Today’s gospel gives the “crazy” option
rather short shrift. If Jesus were that crazy, He wouldn’t have drawn
such large crowds as He did. If you seriously think that He was crazy, we can
talk about that after the service or in a future sermon. But let us look instead
at what interests Mark the most: the accusation that Jesus was demonic and
advancing His kingdom by using satanic powers. The accusation takes
seriously—as it should—that there is a spiritual realm beyond the merely
physical and that not everything in that spiritual realm is good. Both Jesus
and His opponents would have agreed on those premises. Many people today would
not, and that shows how spiritually impoverished our society is. No society can
be truly spiritual if it denies the spiritual realm altogether or equally if it
naively assumes that everything spiritual is good, as the “spiritual but not
religious” crowd tends to believe today.
Well,
what would have aroused suspicion among Jesus’ opponents? After all, so far in
Mark’s gospel Jesus had cast out demons and healed many people. Those are good
things, and we might expect that they would confirm Jesus to be a truly
spiritual man. But He did a couple other things that rankled some people.
First, He forgave the sins of a paralyzed man. Had Jesus just healed him,
nobody would have had any problem. But the way He set it up implied that His
ability to heal proved His ability to forgive sins. Second, He proclaimed
Himself “Lord of the Sabbath” and healed on the Sabbath and
defended His disciples who had plucked grain on a Sabbath and nibbled on it on
the way. In so doing He was trumping Moses and setting Himself up as someone
greater than Moses.
These
incidents get at the heart of why people hated Jesus back then and why they
hate Him now. He doesn’t proclaim Himself a mere guru or wise teacher. He
proclaims Himself Lord of creation, including Lord of the Sabbath. But the real
sticking point is that He comes bringing the forgiveness of sins. If He were to
stick merely to helping people improve themselves, then everyone would accept
Him. But He says that He can forgive sins and wipe the slate clean. For us that
naturally seems as diabolical as diabolical can be—the inverse of real
spirituality. For there are two truths that we hold self-evident: we are not
sinners and, even if we have done some bad things, we can get to a point in our
life where God will have to accept us for all the good that we have done. Either
way, sin is not a problem that needs to involve Jesus’ meddling.
Thus,
either we or Jesus are diabolical liars. Either He is devilish for interfering
in the natural process whereby we do enough good works to earn favor with God,
or we are devilishly deceived in thinking that our works are good enough to
please God. Well, which is the case? You might consider the comments you made this
past week about other people and consider whether or not others might make
similar comments about you. Just as you felt justified in your criticism of
others, they would be equally justified in their thoughts about you. Now if
this is what other people think of you, even though they cannot examine your
thoughts and impulses and desires, how do you think you will fare before
Almighty God, to whom all thoughts are known?
No,
Jesus is not the diabolical one. We are. We are the people who have taken our
bad deeds and tried to pass them off as heroic virtues. We are the people who
want to take our sweaty stink and call it perfume. And so when Jesus sets
Himself before us as our Savior, we had better take Him seriously, for our hope
does not lie in ourselves.
Our
Lord invites us to see that He is doing something breathtaking. He intends to
do nothing short of overthrowing Satan and the whole demonic realm. He began
casting out demons, but He didn’t stop there. He stopped our demonic habit of
trying to justify ourselves. Let’s face it. We’ve been doing that ever since
the fall into sin in the Garden of Eden. We pointed fingers at others and said,
“They are the problem. They are the reason for any sin in my life. They are to
blame, not I.” But Jesus stopped that blame game by Himself taking our blame.
He carried that guilt all the way to the cross, where He died. He allowed Satan
to bruise His heel so that He in turn could crush Satan’s head.
Therefore,
now the truly crazy and demonic thing to do would be to oppose our Lord Jesus
Christ. That is why our Lord warned us against interfering with the Holy
Spirit’s work in such a way as to blaspheme the Holy Spirit. Our Lord didn’t
mind being called all sorts of nasty names. That came with the job, as far as He
was concerned, for He would be called many things on route to the cross to
atone for the world’s sins. And so He let those insults roll off of Him. But He
didn’t and doesn’t want us to call the work of the Holy Spirit satanic. The
Holy Spirit calls us to repent of our sins and to trust in Christ. If we call that
work of the Holy Spirit “demonic,” it will cut us off from the one path that
leads to eternal life.
It
isn’t that badmouthing the Holy Spirit is worse than badmouthing Jesus or God
the Father. What Jesus is talking about here is resisting the Holy Spirit
tugging at our hearts, convincing us of the truth about Christ, and leading us
to repentance. If we persistently and consistently to our death resist the Holy
Spirit’s prompting, then all is lost, for we will have cut ourselves off from
the only person who could have helped us.
Instead,
our Lord invites us to look more carefully at Him. He is not a tame Jesus, but
the one who has tied up Satan and proceeded to plunder all his treasures, which
by the way would include us, who had been his captives. Therefore, Christianity
is not a tame religion, nor are Christians tame people. Again, as I said
earlier, we do not behave like barbarians. When Jesus spoke of tying up Satan
and plundering his house, He wasn’t saying that He would act like a common
criminal. Instead, He was saying that His kind but firm and persistent actions
would have that devastating effect on Satan's dominion. In the same way, we persistently and
intensely follow our Lord. We are like the crowd that can’t get enough of
Jesus, but who hang on His every word. And, thus, we are also His brothers,
sisters, and mother, as dear to Him as He is to us. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
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