Bind the Devil

Propers: The Third Sunday After Pentecost (Lectionary 10), AD 2024 B

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Once again, Jesus Christ is causing quite the stir. At this point, in the Gospel According to St Mark, Jesus is operating as a rabbi, a healer, and an apocalyptic preacher in and around the region of the Galilee. This is His home turf. Jesus was raised in Nazareth. And that’s an adventurous address in the time of the Second Temple.

We’re in the mountainous north of the Holy Land now, a wild and wooly place: “Galilee of the nations,” due to the Gentiles settling there. It had long been a sparsely populated borderland, dotted with fortresses against the Itureans. But then under the Maccabees, and again under the Romans, waves of Jewish settlement repopulated the area. These Galileans tended to be tough, religious, nationalistic, and prickly toward their city-dwelling kin; yet also quite conversant in Hellenistic culture.

Of particular note were the “Men of Deeds,” mystical Jewish sages with miraculous powers derived from their esoteric study of the Torah; as well as the Nazarenes, poor yet proud descendants of horse warriors who maintained the ancient legend that the royal blood of David yet flowed within their veins. Put all this together and we get a very clear picture of Jesus as a consummate Galilean—indeed, as the Galilean: tough, smart, provocative, and more than a little bit spooky.

Once He begins His public ministry, Jesus moves His base of operations to Capernaum, where Peter’s mother has a home. This is a smart move. Not only is Capernaum on the Sea of Galilee, the only major freshwater body in the Holy Land, possessing incidentally a lakeside Roman resort; but it also sits astride the Via Maris, the Way of the Sea, a major route of travel and trade connecting Africa, Asia, and Europe.

From here the word of Jesus Christ can spread throughout the land, pumping like an artery north and south and west. Thus, according to Mark, people start to gather “in great numbers from Judea, Jerusalem, Idumea, Transjordan, and the region of Tyre and Sidon.” He is gaining greater traction, while thumbing His nose at the Romans to boot: taking, for example, the local tax collector, the local Roman agent, as one of His Apostles. Jesus’ combination of powerful preaching, prophetic provocation, and the public working of wonders has led a lot of tongues to wag: “Could He be the Messiah?”

Is Jesus the Christ for whom so many long and wait? Messiahs are dangerous things, as we know. They bring rebellion and unrest. Riling up the Romans is never a good idea; they eat messiahs for breakfast. Yet should He be the real deal, that might be even worse. God is many things, none of which prove terribly conducive to the status quo. Mark my words: this Galilean will be trouble. Which is precisely why the scribes have come up from Jerusalem. They need to see what the fuss is about. They need to slow the boil. Officialdom must determine whether Jesus ought to be condemned, constrained, or controlled.

They don’t like what He says about fasting. They don’t like what He does on the sabbath. They don’t like His association with John the Baptist, one of those kooky desert hermits who tend to criticize the Temple. And they definitely do not like the unrest He’s fomenting. He scandalously sups with sinners, then worst of all He goes about proclaiming forgiveness of sins—as though He Himself were God! What blasphemy! In short, this Galilean must be out of His mind: either mad or bad or both.

But then what are they to do, these learned scribes of God, with the wonders that He works, the miracles or magic He continues to perform? They cannot seem to deny that He possesses mystic powers. People come to Him for exorcisms morning, noon, and night. Yet they reason, as have many practitioners of the esoteric and occult, that lesser demons may be overcome by summoning greater. The bigger devil wins. Thus they conclude that Jesus must have the backing of the biggest of them all: Beelzbul, the “Lord of the Dungheap.” Jesus works for Satan in the judgment of the scribes. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Christ, for His part, brushes their opinions to the side. “Are demons fighting demons now?” He asks. “What good news that would be, that Satan might be overcome by Satan. Then we could all rejoice at the fall of his kingdom, to see that the world has been saved.” His sarcasm practically drips off the page. “No,” He says, “that’s not how it works. If you want to plunder a strong man’s house, first you must bind Him fast.” It’s a wonderfully cryptic and clever reply, containing within it a clear unspoken promise: the devil indeed shall be bound. Soon shall hell be plundered.

It is in this context, of things getting out of hand, of crowds gathering from the four winds, of officials from Jerusalem proclaiming Christ possessed, that His family arrives from Nazareth to find Him; a jaunt of some 30 miles over rough terrain by foot. We mustn’t judge them too harshly. They’ve come to see if He needs help: His Mother and His brethren, whosoever they may be. They’ve been told He’s gone out of His mind, denounced as a demoniac. If they have come to restrain Him, it is only for His good.

Yet as they approach, Jesus says to the crowd around Him—a gathering so thick that even Mary can’t squeeze in—“Who are my mother and my brothers? Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.” This is no rejection, though many have read it as such. Jesus never repudiates His family. James leads the Church after Jesus rises to heaven. And if we know nothing else about the Blessed Virgin Mary, we know that she did the will of God.

Rather, Jesus is expanding our conception of the family. Blood ties meant everything in the ancient and classical worlds. But by affirming the Fatherhood of God, Jesus asserts the Brotherhood of Man. All who do the will of God are mother, brother, sister. All of us are family, all of us are blood: a new community, new kin, in the Body in Jesus Christ. No longer simply servants, no longer even friends, we now share the Blood of God, as His daughters and His sons—still a scandalous assertion if we dare to hold it true.

Mark is building up the tension, building up the danger, from the very start. The path that Christ is on will get Him killed. But that was the trap all along; by death shall death be slain! And with the devil bound, the Risen Christ shall plunder hell, stealing from the Satan every soul.

Ah, but we would be remiss to ignore the elephant in the room: “Truly I tell you,” Jesus says, “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.” Now that’ll take the wind out of your sails, even if it is a parable. Forgiven all sins, forgiven even blasphemy, save for that against the Holy Spirit.

Now, in the time of Christ people did not have a fully developed Trinitarian theology. Nevertheless, the Holy Spirit and the Word of God were understood to be God revealing Himself in the world, however that may work. Apocalyptic literature, such as the Book of Enoch, treats the Holy Spirit as the divine power that creates a new community, like the Church. And in rabbinic literature, those who sin against the sanctity of the community have no place in the world to come. Thus Jesus, as both a rabbi and apocalyptic preacher, is perfectly in keeping with His context when He calls blasphemy against the Holy Spirit unforgivable.

But this does not mean that I would be cast off forever should I say something bad about the Holy Spirit, as though She would be eternally offended. God does not clutch Her pearls. Rather, God the Holy Spirit is the agent of forgiveness. She is the Spirit of the Sacraments, their actualizer, who takes the promises of Christ and makes them so.

What Jesus is saying is that we cannot be forgiven without the Holy Spirit, for the Spirit is the mercy of our God; not that the Spirit would reject a single soul. If we think the Holy Spirit’s work has really sprung of Satan, then we are hopeless wretches here indeed. But take heart! For that’s precisely whom our Lord has come to save. The Spirit is a huntress who pursues us to the last. Does any mortal think he can outrun the love of God? Good luck. For Christ has bound the devil, and has plundered even hell. And we have nowhere left to us to flee.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Pertinent Links

RDG Stout
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St Peter’s Lutheran
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Nidaros Lutheran
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