Sermon preached June 9, 2024, at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla. Based on Mark 3:20-35.
A few times in the Gospel of Mark, and a few other places in the Bible, we encounter a rhetorical figure known as an inclusio. One of the most famous examples is the story about the woman who had a hemorrhage. In that story, Jesus starts off towards the home of Jairus, a leader of the synagogue whose daughter is dying. On the way, a woman with a hemorrhage touches his garment and is healed. Then Jesus gets to Jairus’s home and heals the daughter. So an inclusio is where one story is inserted in the middle of another one, like meat in a sandwich.
In today’s lesson, we start out with Jesus going into a house that was extremely crowded, so much that his family was worried about him. Then we have some interchange between Jesus and the scribes about casting out demons. Finally, we wrap up the story about Jesus and his family.
Whenever you encounter an inclusio, you should ask yourself, what do these two stories have to do with one another? I mean, Mark could have told the story in a totally different way. He could have told the story about Jesus’s family, and then told the story of the exchange with the scribes. You might say, Well, Mark was just telling things in the order that they happened. Wrong. That’s not how ancient authors told stories, or modern authors for that matter. When I’m telling a hunting story or a story about my childhood or college or whatever, the details are mostly correct, but seldom in the right order. I arrange the details to suit the purposes of the moment. In the same way, Mark constructs these inclusios to point us towards the connections between the two interwoven stories.
So first, let’s talk about the meat. The scribes are so incensed at what Jesus is doing that they travel from Jerusalem to wherever Jesus is calling home right now, probably Capernaum. They were upset at what Jesus was preaching, and at the signs he was performing, so they made up a story that he was himself possessed by a demon. Jesus points out the foolishness of this assertion. If he were working by the power of Beelzebul, wouldn’t he want his demons to keep causing mischief and misery? Why would he be casting them out from the people they had possessed?
In our post-Enlightenment way of thinking, we imagine that the people that Jesus healed were epileptic or had schizophrenia or something like that. But to the people that Jesus spoke to, the demons were very real. This was spiritual warfare, and Jesus was winning. The scribes were proposing that Jesus wasn’t on God’s side and defeating evil, but instead was like a general on the devil’s side telling his demonic troops to retreat. How ridiculous! A house divided cannot stand. If Beelzebul is telling his demons to retreat, then he has lost already. But if Jesus was who he said he was, he had Beelzebul on the run.
There is a larger message here, though. Not only is Jesus defending himself against ridiculous accusations, but also, he is telling us how important unity is. A kingdom divided cannot stand, and neither can the Church, which is Christ’s body. If Christ’s body is divided, where is its strength?
The last time the Jesus movement was really unified was probably during the Last Supper. Then Judas slipped out and splintered off from the movement, Jesus and the rest of the disciples went to the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus was arrested, and everyone scattered. After his resurrection, the movement lived on and there was apparent unity in the early part of Acts, but we can see signs of disunity later in Acts, in Paul’s letters, and in other New Testament writings. In the two millennia since then, the situation has gotten worse and worse: we have perhaps 200 denominations in America and 45,000 worldwide. At first, the divisions were largely about whether Christians needed to be Jews, too. Then there were a bunch of theological divisions, for example, Marcion’s followers being cast out, and Gnosticism being declared heretical. At some point, the Oriental Orthodox Church split off from the Chalcedonian church, and then later the Roman Catholic Church split from the Eastern Orthodox Church, partly over theological disputes and partly over power and authority.
In the centuries that followed, some of the controversies that led to division were about theology, some were about power, and some were about social issues. Often, all three were at work, such as a theological justification for what was really a power struggle between two groups with different cultural backgrounds. Lately, it seems that most of the splits are related to social issues. There is a great sorting going on, where denominations are becoming increasingly extreme—the liberal churches are getting more liberal while the conservative churches are getting more conservative. Few have managed to maintain a middle position. Most of the time, theological or social moderates simply opt out altogether.
We are all the worse for it. We are all better off when we recognize that each of us is just trying to follow God as best we understand.
Most of the differences among churches come down to orthodoxy: we believe different things about God, salvation, relationships, authority, the Bible, and so forth. Orthodoxy is a great way to sow division, since so much of theology is so difficult to understand anyway and it can be twisted to appear to support almost any position. I think it’s more important to focus on orthopraxy, which is to say, we should focus on how we act, not what we think. CrossRoads is an excellent example of a church built on orthopraxy. That’s the congregation that meets above the Mission, where the Vineyard used to be. CrossRoads is clearly Christian, but they have no faith statement that one member could use against another or that they could use against outsiders. Instead, they have core values: compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience, forgiveness, love, unity. These aren’t exactly the same as Paul’s list of fruits of the spirit, but there is some overlap. What I want to highlight, though, is that while their pastor, Patrick, preaches the Gospel, none of these core values rest on believing in, say, an inerrant Bible or a particular understanding of the Trinity. None of them rest on saying the sinner’s prayer or reciting the Nicene Creed, as we will do shortly. Yet all of them are core attributes of the kingdom of God. All of them are ways that we should treat each other if we desire to live as one big family, God’s family, God’s kin.
Which brings us back to the “bread” of the inclusio sandwich. The passage today starts with people saying that Jesus is out of his mind and asking his family to come talk to him about it. This is classic triangulation. Do you remember John Oerter talking about triangulation? That’s where person A has a problem with person B, but instead of going to person B, they tell person C to “do something.” Here the scribes enlist Jesus’s family to “do something” about this crazy guy who is messing up their plans. What does the family actually think? We don’t know. It appears to me that the family has been manipulated by gossip to serve as tools of the scribes. The scribes couldn’t get to Jesus any other way, so they use his family against him.
We don’t really know much about Jesus’s family or their relationships with him during his ministry. We know that after his resurrection and ascension, his brother James became a central figure in the early church. We know that his mother Mary was around at the start of his ministry, the wedding at Cana, and she appears periodically throughout the story, including at the foot of the cross. But we don’t know if they followed him during his lifetime. In fact, their absence from the narrative speaks volumes. Here he is, the Messiah, the Son of the Living God, with a dozen close companions and perhaps thousands of followers, but his own family isn’t among them. In Luke, when Jesus makes his first speech in his hometown of Nazareth, did his family step up to protect him from the crowd? No.
It seems to me that Jesus had kind of a difficult relationship with his family. In that way, he was quintessentially human. Many people have strained relationships with their family of origin. Some of us are blessed to have positive relationships with at least some portion of our family, but there is always a little bit of pain, too. Relationships are hard and people are inflexible at times, so the people who we love the most are the most likely to hurt us in some way. This is no criticism of anyone; this is just the way human relationships work.
We all bear the marks of our families of origin, good or bad. My mom always says, “We are destined to be like our parents,” and I definitely see both of my parents in myself and in my siblings. I definitely see both Rhonda and me in both of our kids. For good or for bad, families leave their marks on us. They form us into who we are, in ways that we can never truly transcend.
But then Jesus closes this scene by saying, “Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.” I will always be a part of the family that raised me, but I can also choose to become part of God’s family. Jesus has given us an invitation. We are already welcome in God’s family, just as we are. All that Jesus asks is that we choose to join it.
In a sense, the traditions that say you must invite Jesus into your heart are right about something: Jesus is ready to enter each person’s life, to transform each person’s heart, but he won’t force his way in. Just as soon as we choose to do the will of God, we become an active part of Christ’s family. We don’t have to change who we are, but we do have to change our actions, our attitudes, our behaviors. We do have to practice compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience, forgiveness, love, and unity.
In so doing, we become a part of Christ’s family, and more than that, we become a part of Christ’s body, which is the Church. Whether we call ourselves Presbyterian or Episcopalian or Catholic or Christian or none of the above, if we do God’s will, we become a part of Christ’s family. And what is God’s will? To spread the message of love, peace, and reconciliation that is at the heart of the Gospel. To spread this message in words and deeds. To spread this message through healing—healing the sick, healing the brokenhearted, healing the community, healing relationships.
As the Spirit works through us, healing the world, spreading God’s love, we become a part of Christ’s family, the kin-dom of God. We become an exhibition of the kingdom of heaven to the world. We continue the process of transformation that has been at work for thousands of years and that begins anew as each generation once again seeks the unity of the Holy Spirit that is at the root of a healthy community.
Who is my family? You. Each one of you, who are all striving to do God’s will. We all fall short, and yet Christ’s continual forgiveness enables us to remain connected to Him throughout our spiritual journey. Now may Christ continue to walk with each of us and with all of us together as we strive to build Christ’s family throughout the community and around the world. Amen.
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