The Second Sunday after Trinity

Sermon

9 June 2024

The Reverend Canon Richard Ames-Lewis

Mark 3.20-35

How could it be that Jesus had such popularity with the crowd, yet evoked such anxious concern from his own family and such hostility from the rabbis and scribes? What was it about the personality of Jesus?

Here we see the crowd around Jesus so thick that he and his companions cannot even eat. They know that he has something to offer them that they want and need. But here at the same time we see his family, his mother Mary and his brothers, thinking that he has gone out of his mind, and seeking to restrain him. And here we see the scribes who have come down from Jerusalem saying “He’s possessed! He has Beelzebul – the prince of demons - and by the ruler of demons he casts out demons.”

What was Jesus like? Imagine meeting him. Imagine his eyes, piercing yet full of love; Imagine his voice, strong and commanding, yet full of compassion; imagine his hands – full of gestures yet full of healing; imagine his stride, as he walked from village to village – a man in a hurry with work to do before the day is out – yet stopping when called by the needy crowd. Imagine his appetite sitting down to eat and drink, whether with rich or poor. Did he eat slowly or fast? What do you think?

Imagine meeting a person so full of love that you know you have come face to face with God.

This Jesus was a man but more than a man. This was a God/man whose personality caused division. We know him as Son of God, but for his family he was just another son and brother and they couldn’t appreciate him as anything more. We know him as sent to bring salvation to the poor, but for the scribes from Jerusalem he was a threat whom they dismissed as prince of demons.

In today’s gospel passage from St Mark Chapter 3 we see Jesus responding to this divisive controversy. He speaks in parables, for he knows that this allusive way of teaching makes it possible for people to hear and misunderstand, to hear and reject as well as to hear and embrace. Today we have heard three parables, often known as the “preliminary parables” which pave the way for the great parables later on. There, in Chapter 4, we shall read the parable of the sower, the parable of lamp, and the parable of the mustard seed.

Here we have three little parables which speak of Jesus’s power being of a different order from that of Satan.

·        Firstly, “How can Satan cast out Satan?” This is the parable of the divided kingdom, or the divided house. If a kingdom is divided against itself that kingdom can not stand. Or if a house is divided against itself, that house cannot stand. I’m afraid this reminds me of the Tory party going into the election.

·        Secondly, overcoming Satan. This is the parable of the tying up of the strong man. You cannot enter a strong man’s house and plunder his property without first trying up the strong man.  The inference is clear:  in Jesus’s healings and exorcisms he releases those who have been captured by Satan. In Jesus, Satan is bound by one stronger than he.

·        The third little parable is the most strange. It is not so much a parable and more a statement “whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit can never have forgiveness but is guilty of an eternal sin.” This is Jesus’ reply to those accusing him of having an unclean spirit. and shows Jesus’s love turning to anger. I can imagine Jesus at this point boiling with anger. Nothing can be more blasphemous than to accuse the source of love as being evil. Then evil triumphs. The world of good and evil is turned upside down: evil becomes good, ugliness becomes beauty, falsehood becomes truth, and anyone who chooses to inhabit this way puts themselves forever beyond forgiveness. I find myself thinking about the predilection of popularists like Trump for fake news.

Our Jesus, then, is a man, a God-man, of feelings. He is seized by the sense of his vocation, to be God’s agent of salvation for failing humankind. Nothing is more important to him than to follow this path. So when his mother and his brothers call him, he replies “Who are my mother and my brothers?” And looking at those who sat around him, he cries out, “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.” His call is of God, his family, now, is the whole community of faith.

Jesus has a vivid sense of evil. This is particularly vivid in St Mark’s gospel, for the whole thrust of St Mark’s gospel is to demonstrate Jesus’s defeat of the devil and Satan. I think this is why we see so many signs of anger in Jesus’s love. This is why he is at pains to show how evil is to be overcome by love, how the devil is to be tied up by the power of love, how anyone embracing evil is beyond forgiveness.

But what are we to make of this? Evil is not a concept we think about very much in the scientific and sanitised world of today. A personalised devil, or Satan, we tend to regard as purely literary rather than actual. For myself, I keep clear of reflection on anything to do with evil, sure in my heart that this will draw me away from reflection on God’s love.

Yet it is unquestionable that our world is evil. The corruption, institutional cover-up and inhumanity we have seen in our own country in our own time, be it the NHS Blood Products scandal, the Post Office Horizon scandal or the Hillsborough scandal, these are manifestations of shame perpetrated by people who have been tainted by evil. You could say that this has happened because of the secularisation of our culture. We have been drawn away from the moral and spiritual guidance of our inheritance in the Ten Commandments of the Old Testament or the two great Commandments of Jesus: Love God and love your neighbour as yourself. Rather than holding to objective commandments how to live and behave in ways that are Godly, our culture has preferred subjective guidance based on “how it feels to me”.

We are the fortunate ones, who have been seized by God’s love and drawn into the family of faith. We know that love is not simply something that “feels good to me”. Turning away from evil has not come easy. We have day by day to look into Jesus’s eyes to see there a love of a different order, won by sacrifice on the cross of evil, love which is mixture of anger, sorrow, and forgiveness.