Family

Scriptures:           Genesis 3:8-15                    Psalm 130

                              2 Corinthians 5:6-17          Mark 3:20-35

Today’s Gospel reading may remind us of the saying that “no good deed goes unpunished.”    We’re early in Mark’s gospel – three chapters in – but in that time Jesus has been hyperactive, teaching, healing, casting out demons – and he managed during that time to call some disciples as well.  He’s drawn crowds that follow him everywhere, begging for help.  And, being human, he needs some rest.  But the crowds won’t leave him be.  He came home to Capernaum to rest, but the crowds followed him, and some men with a paralyzed friend dug a hole in the roof to put their friend in front of him so he could heal him.

Word of all this – the exorcisms, the healings, the teachings, the crowds – reached Jesus’ family.  Now, we like the images of Jesus’ family in the birth narratives that we read at Christmas – Mary, Joseph, and the baby Jesus in the manger, surrounded by animals and wise men, with angels overhead.  Luke’s gospel gives us a glimpse of a moment in which the twelve-year-old Jesus wasn’t in perfect harmony with his family – we remember the boy Jesus staying behind at the Temple, talking to the religious leaders, after the rest of his family had left, and his mother asking him, “Why have you treated us like this? We’ve been worried sick?”  But even that image feels fairly safe, so that there are various artistic renditions of Jesus in the Temple. But in today’s reading, Jesus is all grown up, and his family once again doesn’t know what to do with him.  We might think that Jesus’ family would be proud of all their son was doing, but it would seem instead that they were embarrassed, that they were convinced that their son had lost his mind.  And so they stage an intervention, planning to go where Jesus had been teaching and putting him in restraints.  To my knowledge, there are no paintings in the Sistine Chapel of Mary and Jesus’ brothers chasing Jesus with a butterfly net and a straitjacket – but that’s the image Mark’s gospel gives us.   Maybe we at Emanuel can raise money to commission a stained glass window of this scene.   We could make a shrine of it, and draw troubled families to make pilgrimages to Emanuel.  I even have a name for the shrine:  “Our Lady of Dysfunction Junction”.

Jesus’ family aren’t the only folks staging an intervention.  We’re told that some scribes, some religious leaders, had come down from Jerusalem, to stage their own intervention.  They announce to the crowd that Jesus is not only crazy, but demon-possessed, possessed not by any old demon but by Beelzebul, Satan, the head demon.  And so Jesus reasons with them, as a grownup would reason with a small child:  You’re angry at me because I’m casting out demons.  If I’m possessed by the head demon, why would I be casting demons out of people?  Wouldn’t I be more interested in casting demons into people?  If Satan is casting out Satan, then Satan’s power is nearing an end, because a house divided against itself cannot stand.   And then Jesus let’s them in on what’s really happening:  just as a robber would have to bind the owner of the house before robbing him, Jesus is binding Satan, overcoming his power, in order to release people from his control.  He left these scribes with a really chilling word:  “Truly I tell you, people will be forgiven for their sins and whatever blasphemies they utter; but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit can never have forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin"  We’re told that he said this because these scribes had attributed his actions to Satan and not to the Holy Spirit of God working within him.

Jesus found his way out of the scribes’ intervention, but Jesus’ parents weren’t done with him yet.  They finally caught up with him, and were standing with the crowd outside the house, and ask some people to let Jesus know his family was standing outside.  And Jesus left them standing there, at least metaphorically left them standing out in the cold.  Looking around at the crowd, he told those with him:  “Who are my mothers and brothers?  Here are my mothers and brothers!  Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.”

As I said, no good deed goes unpunished.  All kidding aside, it’s not the most comforting picture of Jesus or his family.  The family comes across as overprotective, and Jesus comes across as inconsiderate.  If our families are experiencing stress or growing pains, we can take comfort that even the family of Jesus had its dysfunctional moments.

Both the family of Jesus and the scribes from Jerusalem tried, in their own ways, to get Jesus to tone himself down, tried to domesticate Jesus.  I think sometimes we’ve tried in our own way to do the same thing – and by we I mean the whole Christian church, not specifically our congregation - by trying to reduce the ministry and message of Jesus into something we can understand.   Sort of like the movie from 30 years ago, “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids”, except this time it’s “Honey, I Shrunk the Jesus.”  Often the church has tried to make Jesus all about the afterlife, all about his dying for us so we can go to heaven, in a way that says nothing about his earthly ministry.  Even our Apostles Creed does that, fast forwarding from “Born of the Virgin Mary” to “suffered under Pontius Pilate” without mentioning anything in between, without mentioning Jesus’ teachings, exorcisms, healings.  Others less heavenly-minded have tried to reduce Jesus to just being a teacher or a healer or social worker, a dispenser of advice or wellness in this life, without any thought of eternity.   Some have tried to dress Jesus up in the stars and stripes and claim Jesus as a proponent of Mom, apple pie, and the American way.  

I think the most frequent way in which the church tries to shrink Jesus is to accept the blessings of Jesus without responding to the call of Jesus to be his followers, to follow his command to radical love, to combat evil as he did.  As modern readers, we may not know what to make of Jesus’ exorcisms, of his casting demons out of people, any more than the scribes from Jerusalem did.  But Jesus exorcisms remind us that there is real evil in the world, what the Apostle Paul called principalities and powers, and spiritual wickedness in high places.  As followers of Jesus, we’re not called to be bliss-ninnies, closing our eyes to this evil, but we are called on to name it and combat it in Jesus’ name. 

Jesus defined his family as “those who do God’s will”.  Generally family is defined by blood or marriage, but Jesus proposed an alternate definition of family as those who shared his priority of following God.  St Paul also called Jesus the firstborn of a large family.  May we continue through our words and actions to be a part of Christ’s family of faith, part of the large family headed by Christ.  And may we invite our neighbors to be a part of this family as well. Amen.