The Second Sunday after Trinity, 10 June 2018
Austwick, Clapham, Keasden
If you had one word to describe Jesus, what would it be? I doubt it’d be the same one which the religious leaders of his day called him. For the word they used - in accusation against Jesus - was evil - they said that, because he was casting out demons, he must have the Devil in him.
And in response to these accusations, what did Jesus do? He told a parable, starting with a riddle [1]:
‘How can Satan cast out Satan?’ He asked. ‘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. And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but his end has come.’
So was Jesus bad? Or was there wisdom in his riddling which throws light on how he saw the world and his mission in it?
Well, those who study human societies tell us that in every culture there are always people being accused of being satanic, trouble-makers, the cause of society’s ills. We’ve seen this writ large in history through events like the Witch Trials, or McCarthyism, or the treatment of the Jews in Nazi Germany, and we see it writ smaller in the everyday tensions that we all experience in our own society, our own community, even our own homes: in the instinct of finding someone to blame when things go wrong. [2]
Significantly, the Witch Trials, and McCarthyism, and the growth of Nazism, each took place in societies which were at the time in some ways troubled and divided by economic or social conflict, and the same could be said for occupied Israel in Jesus’ time. Finding a scapegoat was their society’s way of addressing their inner turmoil.
If Jesus the healer had been exorcising demons in Seventeenth-Century England they’d have put him on trial as a witch. If Jesus the healer had been preaching liberation to the poor in 1950s America they’d have branded him a communist. And if Jesus the Jew had the misfortune to be living in 1930s Germany then his name would have been on their list for transportation.
So the Jerusalem scribes who accused Jesus of ‘having Beelzebul’ - by singling him out and calling him evil they were creating the conditions for the act of casting him out, for the sake of keeping peace and order, maintaining the status quo, in their human community.
But in the riddle he riddled, the parable he told, Jesus turned this completely around on them.
‘How can Satan cast out Satan?’ he asked. This wasn’t about him any more; it was about them. The Satan he was talking about was the way in which their society righted wrongs. By finding and casting out their so-called ‘Satan’, the one they accused of evil, by creating a scapegoat, they were the ones acting satanically. In Jesus’ riddle the way in which society righted wrongs was itself the thing which was evil: ‘How can Satan cast out Satan?’ How can a society rid itself of evil when the only way it knows to do so is evil in itself?
Jesus’ riddle made a nonsense of this way of acting, by showing that it always failed.
‘… if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but his end has come’ - he said. Jesus’ parable made it clear - by asking how a society can rid itself of evil when the only way it knows to do so is evil in itself, he shows that scapegoating can never succeed, it is fatally flawed. [3]
We’ve seen this again and again in history, examples of failed scapegoating: the Witch Trials did not succeed in ridding Europe of plagues and crop-failures or in solving the religious and political conflicts of the time; the American nation did not become united behind McCarthyism, and a broken Germany’s search for stability and reconstruction was spectacularly failed by Nazism.
And in those places where we have witnessed this Satan at work, it fails too - everyone in the school playground may be in concord for a few moments in a united act of bullying the odd-child-out; but scapegoating that child doesn’t fix all the internal conflicts at play between all the pupils; the family may be uniformly glad to see the back of a nephew’s girlfriend, who in their judgment never fitted in; but there will soon be a return to other niggles within houses divided against themselves.
I’ve been struck this week in reading accounts of the events around the Grenfell Tower fire a year ago, and how, in searching for someone to blame, people began calling the deputy leader of Kensington and Chelsea Council, ‘evil’. The eventual forced resignation of Rock Fielding-Mellen and his colleagues at the top of the council may in the short term have helped to assuage the anger and pain of the people on the ground, but as the ongoing public enquiry is now showing, the failures which caused the horrors of that night are multiple, and systemic, with many players involved, none of whom intended for this to happen. [4]
Now we know that some scapegoats are completely innocent - those ostracised in the workplace purely because their face doesn’t fit, the Traveller family ostracised in the village purely for looking and speaking differently, the Muslim woman going about her everyday business wearing traditional dress.
But we’re also aware that others who become scapegoats do ‘bring it on themselves’, in a sense: their words and actions mean that they draw attention to themselves, and attract opposition. For this describes the Jesus who we see in Mark’s gospel.
For, having laid bare his opponents’ worldview, revealed their way of doing things as evil and fatally flawed, demonstrated that they can’t ‘clean out their own house’, Jesus is introducing the idea that he is the one who will lead the revolt against their powers, to bring their rule to an end. Jesus is declaring ideological war with the religious establishment, the scribes.
If you had one word to describe Jesus, I doubt it would be the same he used of himself in that moment: thief.
‘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,’ he said. [5]
Jesus is the plunderer of Satan’s evil house. Jesus is the one who binds up the strong man, Satan; Jesus is the one whose way of love alone carries the power to overcome the broken ways of the world.
This is Jesus setting in motion a new way for us to see God in present and future tense: as a thief in the night, breaking into a world at war with itself, armed with the one device capable of bringing peace: the incongruous instrument of absolute loving forgiveness.
No wonder Jesus’ family wanted to restrain him at that point: wouldn’t you if you saw your child facing up so audaciously against the powers-that-be, inviting their inevitably hostile response.
No wonder Jesus’ mother and brothers, hearing people asking if he had gone out of his mind, tried to drag him away from the crowd. Imagine how they felt when they heard that he’d said to his disciples, ‘Who are my mother and my brothers?’ And looking at those who sat around him, said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.’
Now we may feel a little uncomfortable with the Jesus portrayed here in Mark. This is no ‘gentle Jesus, meek and mild’. [6] This Jesus is less concerned with issues of personal salvation, and more with addressing social evils. This Jesus is unconcerned with what we might call ‘family values’, who is dedicated to building a new community of faith, consisting of those willing to join him in his mission, people from all walks of life, all cultures, learning how to live together in the way of absolute forgiveness, regardless of the opposition they would receive.
So had Jesus lost his mind, as some said? Or was Jesus evil, in the words of his accusers? Or was this the beginning of his battle with the Satan of the broken powers of the world, his task of binding that strong man?
When he had one word to describe himself this was the one Jesus chose: thief. He is the thief who steals away the madness and evil of the world; he is the intruder with the life-giving spirit of absolute love and forgiveness, who opens up the space for healing and reconciliation in which we can all share.
Notes
A revised version of Jesus - was he mad or was he evil?, preached at Sparkford and Weston Bampfylde in 2015.
[1] I’m grateful, as ever, to Paul Nuechterlein for his notes and resources on the passage in Girardian Lectionary, Proper 5b, and particularly for using the term ‘riddle’ to describe Jesus’ semantic tricks, which I like! As an opener to this extremely valuable web page, Nuechterlein writes, ‘“The Parable of Satan Casting Out Satan" of Mark 3:23-27 is a pivotal text for Mimetic Theory. It is the first biblical text I heard René Girard speak on (in the early 90's); he first wrote on it in ch. 14 of The Scapegoat (1982). For those not familiar with Girard's take: when Jesus asks, seemingly rhetorically, "How can Satan cast out Satan?", Girard essentially answers, 'It happens all the time. In fact, that's what human culture is founded on. Our anthropology can be summarized by the phrase Satan casting out Satan.’’
[2] Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man, p164-5 suggested the examples of witchcraft and the cold war to me.
[3] Besides the explicitly Girardian interpretations of this text, in this area of the sermon we’re in the territory of our battle with the principalities and powers (of Ephesians 6.10-12) so well expounded by Walter Wink [summarised here], and Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man, which takes its title from today’s passage.
[4] Andrew O’Hagan, The Tower. London Review of Books V.40 N.11, 7 June 2018. Chapter V. Whose Fault?
[5] This paragraph is my adaptation of a passage from Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man, p166.
[6] ChurchAds.net, MEEK. MILD. AS IF. An advertising campaign, Easter 1999, which famously depicted Jesus as Che Guervara. The campaign generated controversy (see BBC report, Jesus ad campaign 'not blasphemous'), and the advertisers defended the poster with this statement: ‘Jesus was not crucified for being meek and mild. He challenged authority. He was given a crown of thorns in a cruel parody of his claims about proclaiming the Kingdom of God. Our poster has the most arresting picture our advertisers could find to convey all this – the image deliberately imitates the style of the well-known poster of Che Guevara.’
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