Sermon from June 18, 2000
It is far more difficult to be honest than we think. The honesty of our gospels offers another piece of compelling evidence that they are telling the truth. One of their achievements is a candor about Jesus, His disciples and others that can at times be painful to read. We saw it when Mark reported Jesus' participation in a baptism for sinners. You just don't put your hero into a questionable position like that. It leaves Him open to serious misunderstanding. I hope you will find yourself drawn powerfully to Jesus Christ because of the integrity with which Mark has told His story of Jesus.

Mark 3 builds on two previous developments in the early ministry of Jesus. The first was the spread of His popular appeal. It appeared in Galilee. The first half of Mark 3 picks up and develops this theme. Last Sunday, we saw in Mark 3:7-8 that Jesus had earned a reputation throughout Israel and even beyond its borders. He did nothing to discourage that. In fact, He encouraged it to continue and consolidate it by appointing apostles to do the same preaching and healing He did. It was the beginning of an organized way to expand the work Jesus had begun in Capernaum.

The other development in Jesus' ministry was the emergence of opposition to His authority. It began in the understandable questions of some Jewish religious leaders, and in Mark 3:6 it had eveloved into a meeting to discuss how to put Jesus to death. The second half of Mark 3 picks up and develops this theme of opposition. The honesty with which Mark has done it may be painful to listen to.

Opposition to Jesus takes us back to the beginning of the Gospel of Mark. Do you remember how it opens with an Old Testament quotation, part of which came from Isaiah and part from Malachi? The Isaiah passage focused on the splendor of the coming King of the Jews, Malachi on the possibly unwelcome nature of His coming.

By putting these quotations at the very beginning of his gospel, Mark was preparing us unobtrusively to grasp the meaning of the story he was about to tell. It was to be the story of how the long expected King of the Jews had showed His hand right down in the jungle of life. Mark's story would show His splendor, like Isaiah; it would also show something unwelcome about King Jesus, as in Malachi. We can see how unwelcome He had become to some people in Mark 3:20-22.

Verse 20 shows again the scale on which people were coming to Jesus. Then Jesus entered a house, and again a crowd gathered, so that he and his disciples were not even able to eat. Not everyone was happy with His success. Unexpectedly, His family and perhaps friends of the family did not find His popularity to be an indisputable sign of success.

Verse 21 says, When his family heard about this, they went to take charge of him, for they said, "He is out of his mind." Opposition from Jewish religious leaders put Jesus in danger. This moment with His family brought exquisite pain to every member of the family. There is no emotional pain quite like that of a family.

Mark could have left this out, and no one would have been the wiser. Matthew, Luke, and John left it out. Mark alone tells us that Jesus came to His nearest and dearest, and His nearest and dearest received Him not. I will be surprised if at times you don't flinch at some of what Mark writes about Jesus, His disciples, and other characters that are part of the story, including here His family.

People in power, including families, use allegations of mental illness to discredit and marginalize those who embarrass or threaten them. No doubt, they meant for their diagnosis to excuse His embarrassing behavior.

What did Jesus do to embarrass His family? What pressures did they feel that brought their verdict of guilty by virtue of mental disturbance? What did they make of His miracles? Had they heard Him forgive sin and call Himself Lord of the Sabbath? If so, that might have done it. Had they gotten wind of the murderous tête-à-tête between Pharisee and Herodian? They would understandably resort to desperate measures to rescue Him from them. Perhaps news had reached them of the official committee that was coming from Jerusalem to render a decision about Jesus. They would go and get their Son and brother and make Him understand that things were getting out of hand. A plea of insanity and a promise to halt His public doings might satisfy the powerful men that were threatening Him and them.

By the way, this family verdict has an unexpected bearing on a controversy we talked about several months ago. They may not always have made the right diagnosis, but it looks like first-century Jews knew the difference between mental illness and demon-possession. People skeptical about the Bible say that pre-scientific, first-century Jews had no language for mental illneess and instead attributed schizophrenic behavior to demon-possession. They may not have had precise language, but this passage proves they made the distinction. The distinction helps us understand His family's action. Better that your son be known as a mental case than as possessed by the devil.

In verse 22 we move from family pain to public danger. And the teachers of the law who came down from Jerusalem said, "He is possessed by Beelzebub! By the prince of demons he is driving out demons."

It is characteristic of Mark to pack meaning tightly into a few words at critical places in His story of Jesus. He does so here. I hope the following observations will tease out the meaning of this accusation against Jesus.

First, these teachers of the law came down from Jerusalem. That suggests they came in some official capacity. The Pharisees and Herodians of Mark 3:6, who plotted Jesus' death, may have been nothing more than a collection of hotheads, wondering how to take matters into their own hands. The men who came from Jerusalem found the use of deadly force unnecessary at this point. Armed with the authority of Jerusalem, they would show the Galilean country-bumpkins how to deal with troublemakers.

Second, you deal with troublemakers by discrediting and marginalizing them. They did not use mental illness for their purpose, presumably because they, like us, did not find it persuasive. If Jesus' family could use it to turn Him aside from being a public nuisance, well and good. If not, they had a more effective tool for doing so. "He is possessed by Beelzebub! By the prince of demons he is driving out demons."

I have been careful never to leave you with the impression that Jesus' miracles gave indisputable proof of His authority to forgive or of His divine nature. I have said that a very different interpretation of His miracles could be put forward. That very different interpretation falls from the official lips of the Jerusalem delegation. "Of course, we do not deny His miracles. How could we? They are there for all to see. But where do you think He gets the power to do them? There is a power in this world other than God. In light of how Jesus undermines our Jewish distinctives, we suggest to you that His power comes from the devil."

Third, this unfavorable, official verdict brings home to us again the meaning of the kingdom of God. Everywhere Jesus went He preached, "The kingdom of God is near." The word kingdom is a political word. It carries within it the idea and the practice of power over people's lives. When scripture talks about the kingdom of God, it is talking about a massive power struggle. The issue of that power struggle is this: "Whose authority will hold sway over human life?"

In a small, private way, that issue faced Jesus' family. In a large, public way, that issue now faced the Galilean crowds, and huge issues of life and death hung on their choice. Was Jesus right or was His family right? Was Jesus right or was the Jerusalem delegation right? How would the massive crowds of Jesus' day, guided by their judgment or lack of judgment, answer? How do you answer?

Fourth, I would like to put two statements side by side for your consideration. In Mark 2:5 Jesus said, "Son, your sins are forgiven." The Jerusalem delegation said in Mark 3:22, "He is possessed by Beelzebub! By the prince of demons he is driving out demons." Can anyone prove either of those statements indisputably true or false? I don't think so, but if not, then how were first-century Jews, caught in the power struggle between Jesus and the authorities, to know whom to believe? How do we know?

Now, that way of stating the question is biased. Our modern notions of scientific proof have so biased the meaning of the word know in that question that we cannot answer if. If we ask, How were first-century Jews to know whom to believe, the word know defeats us, because we think we have to prove a thing scientifically to know it, and in this case we cannot do that. Scientific methods do not apply to religious disagreements.

However, we can ask the question a different way: How were first-century Jews to choose whom to believe? That levels the playing field considerably. Now, if we are responsible people, the power to choose does not give us permission to choose to believe anything, regardless of the evidence. But now, the outcome becomes a matter of good judgment, not scientific proof. Reason will help us make a good jugment. So will intuition. So will common sense. So will experience. So will the opinion of our friends. So will God Himself. Jesus will offer us help in this important choice in Mark 4.

Wherever the help comes from, sooner or later, we have to choose. Something happens that brings our need to choose to the front burner. The official verdict about Jesus' source of power did exactly that. The great crowds that thronged to Jesus everywhere He went could no longer pursue Him in a holiday atmosphere.

Bill Parsons, our church administrator, has said to me on more than one occasion, "I wonder how I would have responded to Him if I had been there in the days of Jesus." I find it an unsettling question. I hope my present faith in Jesus indicates that I would have chosen well then, but I am slow to presume that. I was not charged with safeguarding the integrity of a nation, when I became an open follower of Jesus Christ.

The men who accused Christ of doing miracles by the devil's power were not acting capriciously. They had come up against someone who challenged everything they held dear, everything they felt called upon by God to protect. Given our usual resistance to change, would we do any better? It was an awful moment for Israel. Reality itself or deception itself had come upon them. They had to choose. How would you choose?

Every culture asks questions of the Church. They are implicit in the cultural milieu. They may or may never find a voice to articulate them, but even if a question remains inarticulate, I believe the Church intuitively feels the force of that question and seeks to answer it. Such questions always question the legitimacy of the Church. They challenge the right of the Church to assert God's claim to authority over all human experience. Out of many such questions one seems to speak with great urgency.

This question rises out of our liberty to pursue what we love, anything we love, almost any time we wish. The question asks, "Can you Christians be people of integrity in a world where you are free culturally to do anything you can get away with?"

Today, I would like to articulate a second powerful question that challenges the very existence of our congregation. Let me put it into context with some examples. First, Jonathan Kozol is a Harvard graduate and a Rhodes Scholar, who has spent the better part of his adult life among the poorest of the poor children in this country. He works in South Bronx, NY, where unemployment among men is 75%, and very few children graduate from high school, must less go to college. His goal is to help as many children as possible graduate from high school and get into college.

He recently published a book called Other Resurrections. In it he made the following statement, "Like many overeducated people, I have tended for many years to pretend that I had a detached, ironical attitude about religion. This is a typical pretense of many people who imagine themselves to be sophisticated. When I was very young, I was deeply religious. I went to synagogue. I had a bar mitzvah. My grandmother was an immigrant from Russia and an Orthodox Jew; she was a strong religious force in my life.

"When I went to Harvard, it all got washed out of me. The students at Harvard were very supercilious about religion – if you said you believed in God, they would look at you cynically. If you wanted to be urbane and truly intellectual you didn't speak about religion except with that ironical detached tone that is so familiar in newspapers like The New York Times (CT, June 12, 2000, p. 94).

Detached is the operative word. Religion, especially Christianity, is treated like a curious specimen in a museum case – something you look at, make comments about and then move on to the next case. At street level this detachment works like this. If you express your beliefs in Jesus, you are likely to receive a response that says, "Well, that may be true for you, but it is not true for me."

Lesslie Newbigin was a missionary in India for 40 years. He tells of spending "one evening each week in the monastery of the Ramakrishna Mission in the town where" he was living. He sat "on the floor with the monks and (studied) with them the Upanishads and the Gospels. In the great hall of the monastery, as in all the premises of the Ramakrishna Mission, there is a gallery of portraits of the great religious teachers of humankind. Among them, of course, is a portrait of Jesus. Each year on Christmas Day worship is offered before this picture." (Gospel in a Pluralist Society, 3). It was the Hindu way of saying to Christians, who believe Jesus is the way, the truth and the life, "Well, that may be true for you, but it is not true for me."

Embedded in these incarnations of detachment coils an implied question for the Church. "Do you Christians believe that your faith is the truth for all people, or is it only true for you?" You will feel that question's power, if you will say in any public arena that you believe Jesus Christ is the Savior of the world. Your listeners will call you arrogant and narrow-minded, a "fundamentalist bigot."

How will you answer the question? If Christian faith is not true for all people, but is only true for us, then BVBC is a religious club. I do not believe coercion has any place in Christian practice, and I do not begin to think I have a monopoly on all truth. But otherwise, I say that Christian faith is true for all people, and all people must give an account of their lives in light of Jesus Christ. I call upon you: Join me! Take your stand! And in the most winsome way you know, speak that truth to your world.