One
of the arguments for regular, repeated reading of the Bible is the way you keep
coming across sayings and phrases you’d swear you’d never heard or seen
before. This morning’s Gospel—Mark’s
account of Jesus’s family’s attempts to restrain him and the ensuing uproar
about where his power comes from—this is a passage I have preached on at least
a dozen times over the course of my career.
As I sat down to work on today’s sermon, I thought I had read and talked
about this bit of scripture as much as I could and would not be able to find
anything new in it.
Then,
as I read and reflected on it, I discovered this saying of Jesus that I had
never really taken in before:
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.—Mark 3.27
When I began to think about this
saying, it troubled me. What does it
have to do with anything that has come before it? In these early chapters of Mark’s Gospel, the
Jesus movement has really taken off. As
he goes around Galilee preaching, teaching, healing, and casting out demons,
the crowds keep coming toward Jesus for more.
He appoints the 12 apostles to help him do his work. Still the crowds keep coming. In the Gospel for today, even more people
have besieged him for help. His family
comes to restrain him, thinking that he is out of his mind. The scribes come up from the Jerusalem home
office and accuse Jesus of being in league with the Devil. They say, "He
has Beelzebul, and by the ruler of the demons he casts out demons."
What interests me today is the
nugget he slips in here in the middle of all this, a little gem of a saying I
had previously overlooked:
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.—Mark 3.27
Who is the strong man here? And who is the one who can tie him up and
plunder his house? What is going on?
As Jesus begins his ministry in
Mark’s Gospel, the first words we hear from him are these: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come
near; repent, and believe in the good news.” [Mark 1.15] In Mark’s Gospel,
Jesus has really only one message: “The
time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in
the good news.” In this political season, we might call him a “one-issue
candidate”.
Jesus used the phrase “kingdom of
God” as a way to describe what was happening all around him. For Jesus, the kingdom of God is a space or
place or zone where all is as God intended it to be: the sick become well, the poor are fed, the
mighty are cast down, demons are cast out.
Wherever Jesus is, God’s kingdom is, too. Normally, we live our lives in the kingdom of
this world: for Jesus that kingdom was
ruled by Caesar, for the Jews it was ruled by Beelzebul, the prince of demons.
The whole point of Jesus’s ministry is the proclamation of the kingdom of
God. It is at hand! Caesar’s days, Beelzebul’s days, are
numbered. The kingdom of this world
keeps us oppressed and depressed. The kingdom of God liberates us. People are getting healthy, compassionate,
and joyful. What’s beginning in Jesus will not be stopped until it frees and
transforms the whole world.
Now that’s good or bad news
depending on where you stand in relation to it.
If you’re poor, sick, oppressed, or lonely, the kingdom of God is good,
freeing news. But if you’re on Caesar’s
or Beelzebul’s team, or if their name is on your paycheck, then it’s very bad
news indeed. You’ll have to find another
gig. Those in league with life’s
oppressive forces might find the promise of liberation somewhat
threatening. Hence the resistance to
Jesus from the establishment. Hence the
confusion about Jesus even in his own family.
“The
time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in
the good news.” The point, at least for me, is this: those who live out and enact God’s kingdom
are God’s true messengers. Those who
stand in opposition to God’s kingdom are, perhaps unknowingly, in the service
of Caesar or Beelzebul. Hence the saying
about the strong man. “No one can enter
a strong man's house and plunder his property without first tying up the strong
man.” Caesar is the strong man. Beelzebul is the strong man. Jesus is the seemingly weak man who can
confound the strong man. He has knotted
Caesar and Beelzebul up in chains of their own making. By living a compassionate, joyful life, by
spreading health and justice, by casting out demons, Jesus is using the powers
of evil against themselves.
As I’ve thought about this passage
this past week, I’ve done so against the backdrop of what, for me, has been a
pretty ugly story: the attack the
Vatican is making on a major group of American Catholic nuns, the Leadership
Group of Women Religious. Through a
group of theological thought police, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the
Faith, the Vatican has charged American nuns with spending too much time on the
issues of poverty and economic justice and not enough condemning abortion and
same-sex marriage. This past week they condemned a book by an American nun who
is also a world-class scholar. The book
is Just Love: A Framework for Christian
Sexual Ethics, and the scholar is Sister Margaret Farley, a 77-year-old
professor emerita at Yale Divinity School and past president of the Catholic
Theological Society of America. The
ironies in all this would be funny if they weren’t so tragic. As Maureen Dowd
said in her column last week:
The denunciation of Sister Farley’s
book is based on the fact that she deals with the modern world as it is. She
refuses to fall in line with a Vatican rigidly clinging to an inbred, illusory
world where men rule with no backtalk from women, gays are deviants, the
divorced can’t remarry, men and women can’t use contraception, masturbation is
a grave disorder and celibacy is enshrined, even as a global pedophilia scandal
rages. [Maureen Dowd, “Is Pleasure a Sin?”
NY Times 6/6/2012]
If I can name any group of people in
the world who do Jesus’s work on earth, it is women religious, the nuns. If I can name any group of people who both
announce and enact the kingdom of God on earth, it is the nuns. They give themselves sacrificially, they live
joyfully, they bring healing and grace and hope to blighted areas that you and
I would never dare even visit ourselves, let alone live in. And for all that they find themselves
upbraided by their hierarchy, just as Jesus was upbraided by the scribes. The nuns of America are casting out demons in
their own way here, among us, in the 21st century. Jesus did that in his day and was
misunderstood by his family and understood all too well by the religious and
political elite. He was the one binding
the strong man in his day. Nuns are
doing that work in ours.
The poet William Blake said of the
great John Milton regarding Paradise Lost
that Milton “was of the Devil’s party without knowing it”. Christianity is finally about announcing and
enacting the kingdom of God. Oppressive
systems want to make Christianity into a set of ideas and then define a
person’s orthodoxy by their assent to or refusal of those ideas. Imperial
hierarchies tend to think the Christian’s job is to become the strong man. From the Gospel point of view, from the nuns’
point of view, the Christian’s job is to help Jesus bind the strong man. Christianity
is not about the exercise of power. It
is about how we treat people. Not strong or famous people. It’s about how we treat weak and powerless
people. Anyone can suck up to the strong man.
Only a real Christian can confound and bind him.
What’s true for the Roman Catholics,
of course, is true for us. A true
Christian is someone who does today the work that Jesus did then. A true Christian casts out the demons of hate
and fear. A true Christian is an agent
of healing and blessing and hope. A true
Christian is compassionate and joyful.
There are many angry, judgmental, hateful people abroad today who call
themselves Christians and presume to tell the rest of us what real Christians
ought to think and believe. I say, with
Blake, that they are of the Devil’s party without knowing it. I say, with Jesus, that the kingdom of God is
at hand. The strong man is being bound
by all kinds of people—even and especially by faithful women religious who
bring good news to the poor, and also by countless others who seek to make life
better for all those with whom they come into contact. Doing that, and perhaps only that, is the
church’s real business. Don’t confuse what some people say they believe with
how they actually behave. And don’t
forget that even Jesus’s relatives thought he was crazy.
Sometimes we don’t recognize Jesus,
even when he is right there in front of us.
Look around you. Even now, the pains and griefs of the world are being
borne by those who sense the breaking in upon us of a new and hopeful age. Let
us support them, thank them, and strive to be like them.“ The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has
come near; repent, and believe in the good news.” Amen.
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