THE VERDICT OF HIS FAMILY
Mark 3:20–1
Jesus went into a house, and once again so dense a crowd collected that they could not even eat bread. When his own people heard what was going on, they went out to restrain him, for they said, ‘He has taken leave of his senses.’
SOMETIMES someone drops a remark which cannot be interpreted otherwise than as the product of bitter experience. Once when Jesus was enumerating the things which might have to be faced for following him, he said, ‘One’s foes will be members of one’s own household’ (Matthew 10:36). His own family had come to the conclusion that he had taken leave of his senses and that it was time he was taken home. Let us see if we can understand what made them feel like that.
(1) Jesus had left home and the carpenter’s business at Nazareth. No doubt it was a flourishing business from which he could at least have made a living; and quite suddenly he had flung the whole thing up and gone out to be a wandering preacher. No one with any sense, they must have been thinking, would throw up a business where the money came in every week to become a vagrant who had nowhere even to sleep.
(2) Jesus was obviously on the way to a head-on collision with the orthodox leaders of his day. There are certain people who can do a great deal of harm, people on whose right side it is better to keep, people whose opposition can be very dangerous. No one, they must have been thinking, would ever get up against the powers that be, because it was obvious that in any collision with them people always came off second best. No one could take on the scribes and the Pharisees and the orthodox leaders and hope to get away with it.
(3) Jesus had newly started a little society of his own – and a very strange society it was. There were some fishermen; there was a reformed tax-collector; there was a fanatical nationalist. They were not the kind of people whom anyone with ambitions would particularly want to know. They certainly were not the kind of people who would be any good to anyone who was set on a career. They must have been thinking, ‘How could anyone pick a crowd of friends like that?’ They were definitely not the kind of people a prudent person would want to get mixed up with.
By his actions Jesus had made it clear that the three laws by which most people tend to organize their lives meant nothing to him.
(1) He had thrown away security. The one thing that most people in this world want more than anything else is just that. They want above all things a job and a position which are secure, and where there are as few material and financial risks as possible.
(2) He had thrown away safety. Most people tend at all times to play safe. They are more concerned with the safety of any course of action than with its moral quality, its rightness or its wrongness. A course of action which involves risk is something from which they instinctively shrink.
(3) He had shown himself utterly indifferent to the verdict of society. He had shown that he did not much care what people said about him. In point of fact, as the writer H. G. Wells said, for most people ‘the voice of their neighbours is louder than the voice of God’. ‘What will people say?’ is one of the first questions that most of us are in the habit of asking.
What appalled Jesus’ friends was the risks that he was taking, risks which, as they thought, no one with any sense would take.
When John Bunyan was in prison, he was quite frankly afraid. ‘My imprisonment’, he thought, ‘might end on the gallows for aught that I could tell.’ He did not like the thought of being hanged. Then came the day when he was ashamed of being afraid. ‘Methought I was ashamed to die with a pale face and tottering knees for such a cause as this.’ So finally he came to a conclusion as he thought of himself climbing up the ladder to the gallows: ‘Wherefore, thought I, I am for going on and venturing my eternal state with Christ whether I have comfort here or no; if God doth not come in, thought I, I will leap off the ladder even blindfold into eternity, sink or swim, come heaven, come hell; Lord Jesus, if thou wilt catch me, do: if not, I will venture for thy name.’ That is precisely what Jesus was willing to do. I will venture for thy name. That was the essence of the life of Jesus, and that – not safety and security – should be the motto of every Christian and the mainspring of the Christian life.
ALLIANCE OR CONQUEST?
Mark 3:22–7
The experts in the law from Jerusalem came down. They said, ‘He has Beelzebul on his side.’ They said, ‘It is by the ruler of the demons that he casts out the demons.’ Jesus called them and spoke to them by way of analogy. ‘How can Satan cast out Satan? 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 had risen up against himself, and is divided, he cannot stand – he is finished. No one can go into the house of a strong man and plunder his gear unless he first binds the strong man – then he will plunder his house.’
THE orthodox officials never questioned Jesus’ power to exorcise demons. They did not need to, for exorcism was a common phenomenon at that time. What they did say was that Jesus’ power was due to the fact that he was in league with the king of the demons, that, as one commentator puts it, ‘it was by the great demon he cast out the little demons’. People have always believed in ‘black magic’, and that is what they claimed Jesus was practising.
Jesus had no difficulty in exploding that argument. The essence of exorcism has always been that the exorcist calls on some stronger power to drive out the weaker demon. So Jesus says: ‘Just think! If there is internal dissension in a kingdom, that kingdom cannot last. If there are quarrels in a house, that house will not endure long. If Satan is actually making war with his own demons then he is finished as an effective power, because civil war has begun in the kingdom of Satan.’ ‘Put it another way,’ Jesus said. ‘Suppose you want to rob a strong man. You have no hope of doing so until you have got the strong man under subjection. Once you have got him tied up you can plunder his goods – but not until then.’ The defeat of the demons did not show that Jesus was in alliance with Satan; it showed that Satan’s defences had been breached. A stronger name had arrived; the conquest of Satan had begun. Two things emerge here.