Plundering the House

Mark 3:19(b)-35

June 10, 2018

William G. Carter

Then (Jesus) went home, and the crowd came together again, so that they could not even eat. When his family heard it, they went out to restrain him, for people were saying, “He has gone out of his mind.” And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem said, “He has Beelzebul, and by the ruler of the demons he casts out demons.” And he called them to him, and spoke to them in parables, “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 has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but his end has come. But 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.”

“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”— for they had said, “He has an unclean spirit.”

Then his mother and his brothers came; and standing outside, they sent to him and called him. A crowd was sitting around him; and they said to him, “Your mother and your brothers and sisters are outside, asking for you.” And he replied, “Who are my mother and my brothers?” And looking at those who sat around him, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.”

At the height of his popularity, the family of Jesus came to take him away. At the pinnacle of his effectiveness, they came to restrain him. Let that sink in for a minute.

It’s still early in the Gospel of Mark, but Jesus has been busy. He’s been preaching that God rules over heaven and earth. He has collected a few unimpressive fishermen and invited an imperial tax man away from his table. Jesus has been hanging around with the wrong kind of people and pronouncing forgiveness without official approval. He has been touching lepers, always a fearful practice, even if it was to heal them, and he has cured every manner of illness. He has an unconventional view of the Sabbath, which angers the religious professionals to the point that they conspire to kill him, and it’s only chapter three.

And then, there are all the demons: Jesus has been chasing out the demons. It doesn’t matter if they have been infesting the synagogue and lodging in the soul. He says, “Get out of here!” and they go.

So, his family comes to take him away, to restrain him. Are they afraid for his safety? Perhaps. He could meet with some harm, if not from the furious Pharisees and scribes, perhaps from all those demons. If you start confronting evil, it will strike back. Or worse, it’s can be running through the thistle patch on a summer day: some of what you’re trying to get through starts to stick to you.

And this is only chapter three. Yet even this early, Jesus has revealed two character traits. First, he is fearless. Nothing frightens him, nothing slows him down, nothing gives him a second thought. He plunges right in to do what he needs to do. Second, he has complete clarity about what it is that he has come to do. There is no confusion about where he should go or whom he should confront. He has come to proclaim that God rules over all things, and that’s what he going to do.

His family comes to restrain him and get him to stop. Why would they do that? Well, the word on the street is that he has “gone out of his mind.” The first-century diagnosis is that Jesus is “beside himself,” that he has literally split himself, so his mother and his brothers come to remove him from society. This has gone on long enough, they figure. Let’s get him out of there. Long before his crucifixion, let’s get him out of sight.

It is a striking scene, unlike any other in the whole New Testament. If it weren’t so dangerous, we might think it was funny.

I used to think it was funny. When I was a teenager, I locked myself in the bedroom on Sunday nights. Then I tuned in to a syndicated radio show on the local rock station. The host called himself Doctor Demento, and he specialized in playing the most peculiar recordings ever to hit the airwaves.

This was the show that introduced Weird Al Yankovic to the world. He played to the Spike Jones Orchestra performing the “Billy Tell Overture” and the pyromaniac version of “My Old Flame.” At Christmas time, we heard “Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer.” At Halloween, we grooved to “The Monster Mash.” In springtime, he played Tom Lehrer’s satirical tune, “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park.” The show was out there.

But by far, the most bizarre song on a very strange show was a little ditty by an artist who called himself “Napoleon 14.” Over the sound of an insistent snare drum, an unstable man in a straight jacket lamented a lost love:  

Remember when you ran away / And I got on my knees
And begged you not to leave / Because I'd go berserk

Well you left me anyhow / And then the days got worse and worse
And now you see I've gone / Completely out of my mind…

And they're coming to take me away, ha-haaa
They're coming to take me away, ho-ho hee-hee ha-haaa,
To the funny farm / Where life is beautiful all the time
And I'll be happy to see those nice young men in their clean white coats
And they're coming to take me away ha-haaa.[1]

That song from 1966 was insensitive and rude, which is exactly why a teenager enjoyed it so much. The fact is it reinforces every inappropriate stereotype of emotional challenges and mental disorders. It assumes that some people are completely well and those who are not ought to be removed.

In the week that we’ve lost Anthony Bourdain and Kate Spade, two cultural icons who were widely loved and highly respected, we are reminded again of how fragile all of us are. A lot of us struggle out of sight, often in isolation. We don’t say anything lest we be demeaned, degraded, or demolished. Or worse, removed.

So it’s all the more important that we lean in to see what’s at stake with Jesus. By all accounts, he was not “out of his mind.” He was completely in his mind, completely clear, completely fearless. Every day, with single-minded vision, he got up and went about his work. And his work was to make people well. To confront the forces that splinter human souls, that oppress human spirits. Mark says Jesus has come to drive out evil.

It’s fascinating, in a way, that the religious establishment piles on the popular assessment of Jesus. That not only is he crazy, he’s possessed by a demon. You see, that was the first-century pop psychology. They figured someone was disturbed because something got into them – a demon, an unclean spirit, something. And the scribes look at the relentless work of Jesus, he can only do these things because Beelzebub, the Lord of the Flies, has infested him.

Now, may I say, that’s pretty twisted. Their argument, according to the text, is that Jesus casts out evil because he is so full of evil that he can drive out the evil. It’s kind of head-spinning argument, but it’s exactly the sort of thing that happens when anybody confronts something that is so blatantly wrong, so divisively nasty.

For instance, Roseanne says some racist nonsense, gets fired, loses her number one show, apologizes, but then says more nasty things. Samantha Bee says something nasty on late night television, apologizes, doesn’t get fired, goes back on the air and apologizes. And the people who like Roseanne, who laugh at her caustic comments, are furious and condemn Samantha Bee. They say it’s a double standard, as if any of these people have any standards, on either side of the hedge.

It takes somebody with the moral clarity of David Brooks to point out the obvious: that maybe we shouldn’t be saying foul and disgusting things about one another. “These days,” he says, “a lot of corrosion has happened in the way we talk to one another. And one of the good things about being conservative is you tend to think manners are more important than laws… Manners are what purify or degrade, and manners touch us every day and really determine the shape of society.”

“And our manners have taken a hit these days,” he says,[2] and we can probably figure out some of the reasons why.

The family of Jesus wants to restrain him and remove him. The scribes want to dismiss him, essentially on the twisted argument, “He must be full of evil, the same way everybody is full of evil.”

But Jesus responds with devasting clarity in a single question: How can the devil drive out the devil? How can evil eradicate evil? They accuse him of being “beside himself,” but what they say about him is even more schizophrenic. Jesus is not torn in two; he is completely clear. He has come to heal, to restore, to purify. Every day of his life, he lifts up the downtrodden and frees the oppressed. He comes to drive out the poison. He comes to make people well.

In short, he comes to plunder the house of evil. In the power of God, Satan’s days are numbered. There is a cosmic struggle between good and evil, and it come to a head because Jesus, in his perfect goodness, steps into a world that is infected with toxic hatred and really bad manners. Whether they realize it or not, both the Jerusalem scribes and his own family are conspiring – colluding – to get him to stop. It’s precisely because Jesus is so effective that the powers-that-be will do whatever they can to get him to shut up and go away.

And will they succeed? No. The conflict will continue in the next twelve chapters of Mark. It will come to a head on the cross, when the powers of hell think they’ve finally gotten rid of him. And you know what happens: on the third day, his tomb is found empty and the news comes that he is alive again and on the loose. God truly does rule, even over a rebellious, resistant world. And the struggle will continue for a while, until God says enough is enough.

In our time, perhaps no one has seen the true social dimension of God's kingdom more clearly than Martin Luther King, Jr. King confronted the evil of division. poverty, and hatred with a clear word of gospel justice. The clearer he could see, the more got thrown back at him. There were allegations against his character and threats on his life. His own moral failures were tossed in his face to get him to stop. Yet he remained faithful to his vision until the day he died.

How did he keep going? The key, as he said in a number of his speeches, was a certain maladjustment:

There are certain things within our social order to which I am proud to be maladjusted and to which I call upon all [people] of good will to be maladjusted. If you will allow the preacher in me to come out now, let me say to you that I never did intend to adjust to the evils of segregation and discrimination. I never did intend to adjust myself to religious bigotry. I never did intend to adjust myself to economic conditions that will take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few. I never did intend to adjust myself to the madness of militarism, and the self-defeating effects of physical violence. And I call upon all [people] of good will to be maladjusted because it may well be that the salvation of the world lies in the hands of the maladjusted.

 Then Dr. King concluded:  

Let us be as maladjusted as Jesus of Nazareth, who could look into the eyes of the men and women of his generation and cry out, 'Love your enemies. Bless them that curse you. Pray for them that despitefully use you.’[3]

Ah, who’s crazy now?

It really comes down to what we believe about the first coming of Jesus. Has the world changed because of him? Has the kingdom of God truly come near?

If nothing has changed, then human life will be an endless string of oppression, misery, darkness, and defeat. But if God has come, if God is intruding upon the status quo, then we can act like Jesus. We can do the will of God. We can confront the powers of hell as if God rules over heaven and earth. We can act in the face of death as if death has already been defeated. We can heal, lift up, and love all people abundantly. We can gather here to sing praises to a Savior who has already assured us of the world's ultimate redemption.

The world might look at us and say, “You’re out of your minds.”  But that’s when we hear Jesus say, “You’re my brother, you’re my sister, you’re my family.”

 (c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved.

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[1] Hear the song for yourself at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-lJZiqZaGA

[2] https://www.npr.org/2018/06/01/616257705/week-in-politics-u-s-allies-react-swiftly-to-new-u-s-tariffs-on-steel-and-alumin

[3] Martin Luther King, Jr., "The American Dream," A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: HarperCollins, 1986) 216.