Pentecost 3B2018
Mark 3:20-35
by Pastor Sarah Stadler
Jesus is out of his mind. That's what his family thinks. That's what the crowd thinks. Healing swarms of people and calling tax collectors and fishermen to follow him, Jesus upsets the expectations of those who know him and love him best. But more than being out of his mind, the scribes, who are part of the Jewish religious institution, believe that Jesus is Satan. They think Jesus is evil. Preaching, praying, cleansing lepers, healing people, teaching about fasting and the sabbath, and calling disciples, Jesus not only upsets familial and communal expectations; he upsets the heart of the religious institution of the day. He doesn't fit in the box in which the scribes place God, so they assign Jesus to an entirely different box. The scribes can't see what the readers of the gospel of Mark see—that God is at work in the life and ministry of Jesus, doing something new and unexpected.
It's easy for us as readers of the gospel of Mark, as people who identify as Christian to see what is going on here. Two thousand years later, we read this story and scoff at the scribes and their ignorance and their close-mindedness. Of course, God is working in Jesus. But this story troubles me because how do we tell the difference between what God is doing and what may be the manifestation of evil in our world? The lines are not so clear. God may be working again in new and unexpected ways. So how do we know what is of God and what is not?
Instead of moving directly to opinions we may have long held, instead of insisting on black and white answers, this story from the gospel of Mark challenges our expectations of God. The scribes were genuinely religious people. As far as we know, they worshiped, read the Torah, fasted, prayed, observed the food laws, rested on the sabbath, and sought the guidance of God in all things. Despite the gospels' focus on their hypocrisy—a condition we all share with the scribes, these deeply religious people genuinely believed that Jesus was not of God but of Satan. It makes me stop and think.
When we consider ourselves, people who go to church on Sunday mornings, people who consciously practice the ways of Jesus—grace, forgiveness, love, justice, peace, people who read the Bible and pray, we may be quite similar to the scribes. We who are genuinely religious or spiritual people always intend our actions and words for good, just as the scribes surely did. Many see Christianity and religion in general, regardless of tradition, as providing an ethical framework for life. The very thing we expect religion to do is tell us what is right and what is wrong. But what is of God and what is not is not always clear.
On one level, the Bible is clear. Grace, forgiveness, love, peace, justice, these are the ways of God. But the details get tricky. As just one example among many, what does God's justice look like? Like our criminal justice system? No. Retributive justice that includes punishment? I don't think so. Restorative justice? That seems closer, but even that model is limited. When we read the prophets of the Old Testament, they speak of God's justice as manifest in feeding people, housing people, clothing people, befriending people in addition to systemic policy change that makes life fair for everyone. Even in its clarity of major themes, the details of biblical ethics are complex.
On another level, the Bible is not clear at all. Scripture is chock-full of laws and commands and teaching from God and from Jesus, from the prophets and from Paul. Far from simple, these laws and commands and teaching at times directly contradict each other. Which teaching do we follow—and under which circumstances? And while discerning what is good or of God may be a bit simpler—basically whatever is gracious and loving, discerning what is bad or not of God is far more complicated.
In the 1930s, Lutheran pastor and ethicist Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose prolific works shaped and continue to shape ethical deliberation among Christians, remained in his home country of Germany as Hitler rose to power. While many Christians, including most Lutherans, succumbed to the Nazi agenda for understandable reasons, namely survival, Bonhoeffer and others founded the Confessing Church, a German Lutheran church body in opposition to Hitler and Nazism. Driven by his baptismal identity and deeply thoughtful about his choice's ethical implications, Bonhoeffer participated in a plot to assassinate Hitler. He and his colleagues were not successful, of course, and after some time in prison, the German state put Bonhoeffer to death. Yes, thou shall not murder. Murder is evil. But in this ethically sticky historical circumstance, in the Nazi state characterized the world over as evil, what was the truly good action? Did God call Bonhoeffer to assassinate Hitler?
We ever find ourselves asking these and similar questions. We read the paper and our Facebook feed. We listen to podcasts and the news, and we may be quick to judge, quick to label: good, evil, right, wrong, God's work, Satan's work. I'm right there with ya. I am quick to label, sometimes even when I've only heard half the story, when I haven't done my own research, when I haven't considered the biases of the reporters—because we all speak from a biased perspective. Iran and North Korea and nuclear arms, health care and education, terrorism and gun laws and our criminal justice system, natural disasters and the care of immigrant children and abortion laws. The list of complex moral issues goes on and on and on. What is of God and what is not? Where is God at work—and not?
Our story from the gospel of Mark cautions us from too quickly slapping a label on anything, from too quickly answering our own questions. This story troubles me, and I hope it troubles you. While we look to religion to tell us right from wrong, right and wrong are never simple. The scribes thought they knew what was of God and what wasn't, but they got it wrong—at least from our perspective. They got it wrong because they assumed God would do same old, same old, but in Jesus, God did a new and unexpected thing. Grace, forgiveness, love, peace, justice, yes, these are the ways of God, and Jesus is the way that God enters the world. AND God may be doing something new and unexpected even here and now. Instead of being sure, let's be troubled. Then, we will see and hear what God has done.