The First Sunday after Trinity, 7 June 2015
Sparkford, Weston Bampfylde
They called Jesus mad - his family, seeing the trouble he was getting himself into with the authorities.
The authorities themselves called Jesus evil - saying 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 mad? Or was Jesus bad? Or was there wisdom in his riddling which made sense of how he saw his mission in the world?
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. It goes all the way back to that moment when the peace of Eden was broken by first Adam accusing Eve, then Eve accusing the serpent of making 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 he’d been exorcising demons in Seventeenth-Century England they’d have put him on trial as a witch.
If he’d been preaching liberation to the poor in 1950s America they’d have branded him a communist.
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’ were doing their society’s work in singling him out, 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. It was about the mechanism by which their society righted wrongs. It was about them acting as Satan the accuser, in casting out their so-called ‘Satan’, the one they accused of evil. In Jesus’ riddle the mechanism by 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?
And Jesus’ riddle ridiculed that mechanism, by showing that it always failed.
‘If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand’ - he said.
‘And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand’ - he said.
‘And 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 the mechanism of 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 has failed 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 that child’s scapegoating 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 alcoholic girlfriend, as he jilts her; but there will soon be a return to other niggles within houses divided against themselves.
Now we know that some scapegoats are completely innocent - the child in the playground bullied purely because their face doesn’t fit, the Romany family ostracised in the village purely for looking and speaking differently, the middle-manager sacked during a crisis in the corporation purely for being in an expendable post.
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, attract opposition. And 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 then asserts that it is up to him to lead the revolt against their powers, to bring their rule to an end. This is no less than Jesus’ declaration of ideological war with the scribal establishment. He goes on to spin a thinly veiled political parable in which he likens his mission to criminal breaking and entering:
‘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 says.
Jesus is the plunderer of Satan’s evil house. Jesus is the one who binds up the strong man, Satan, the establishment way of doing things, the flawed mechanism of scapegoating so preponderant in the world.
This is a Jesus awake to the question posed centuries before by the prophet Isaiah: ‘Can the prey be taken from the mighty, or the captives of a tyrant be rescued?’ - to which Jesus answers, yes, they can.
This is a Jesus inaugurating a new way of seeing 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 forgiveness. [4]
No wonder Jesus’ family wanted to restrain him: wouldn’t you if you saw your son facing up so audaciously against the powers-that-be, inviting their inevitably hostile response. No wonder Jesus’ mother and brothers, feeling that he had gone out of his mind, attempted 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.’
Mark’s Jesus is a Jesus we may feel uncomfortable with. He’s a Jesus we’re unfamiliar with, our hymns and songs more often focussing on a gentle Jesus, meek and mild. [5] This is a Jesus less concerned with issues of personal salvation, more with addressing social evils. This is a Jesus unconcerned with what we might call ‘family values’, instead dedicated to building a new community of faith, consisting of those willing to join him in his mission of confrontation with the powers that be, learning how to live together in the way of absolute forgiveness.
So was Jesus mad? Or was Jesus bad? Or was there wisdom in his riddling which made sense of how he saw his mission in the world?
I encourage you to grapple with Mark’s portrayal of Jesus. To spend time reading that earliest and briefest of gospels. It may be disturbing, but ultimately inspiring, as we see how Jesus’ battle with the Satan of the powers-that-be played out, and how in binding that strong man, the thief in the night introduced a new and life-giving spirit to bring healing into the systems of the world.
Notes
[1] I’m grateful, as ever, to Paul Neuchterlein 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, Neuchterlein 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 in the work of Walter Wink [summarised here], and Ched Myers' classic commentary on Mark, Binding the Strong Man, which takes its title from today’s passage.
[4] This paragraph is my adaptation of a passage from Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man, p166.
[5] 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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