3^rd Sunday after Pentecost at Epiphany on June 21, 2009

Mark 3:20 Then Jesus entered a house, and again a crowd gathered, so that he and his disciples were not even able to eat. ²¹ When his family heard about this, they went to take charge of him, for they said, "He is out of his mind." ²² 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." ²³ So Jesus called them and spoke to them in parables: "How can Satan drive out Satan? ²⁴ If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. ²⁵ If a house is divided against itself, that house cannot stand. ²⁶ And if Satan opposes himself and is divided, he cannot stand; his end has come. ²⁷ In fact, no one can enter a strong man's house and carry off his possessions unless he first ties up the strong man. Then he can rob his house. ²⁸ I tell you the truth, all the sins and blasphemies of men will be forgiven them. ²⁹ But whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven; he is guilty of an eternal sin." ³⁰ He said this because they were saying, "He has an evil spirit." ³¹ Then Jesus' mother and brothers arrived. Standing outside, they sent someone in to call him. ³² A crowd was sitting around him, and they told him, "Your mother and brothers are outside looking for you." ³³ "Who are my mother and my brothers?" he asked. ³⁴ Then he looked at those seated in a circle around him and said, "Here are my mother and my brothers! ³⁵ Whoever does God's will is my brother and sister and mother."

That’s just crazy!

There are all sorts of euphemisms for being a little crazy, weird, or eccentric. He has a screw loose. He’s a taco short of a combination plate. A few clowns short of a circus. A sandwich short of a picnic. Out to lunch. Lost his marbles. Not firing on all cylinders. Not playing with a full deck. Knitting with one needle. The elevator doesn’t go to the top floor. The lights are on but no one’s home.

That was the opinion of Jesus’ own family! They thought he was “out of his mind.” They saw Jesus crammed in by crowds, unable to think let alone eat, and hordes of crazy demon possessed people were clamoring for Jesus’ attention. Too busy. Too overworked. Too popular. Mary and the boys wanted to take Jesus into protective custody. Let Him rest. Perhaps a little vacation at the shore. A little R&R to get things back in order.

The religious types, the teachers of the Torah, had a different view. They saw Jesus’ miracles, how He man-handled the demons with a word from His mouth. And their conclusion: “He’s in league with the devil. Casts out demons by the prince of demons, Beelzebub.” That’s a harsher assessment than calling Him crazy. It calls into question everything that Jesus was doing, all those signs that showed He was the Messiah of Israel. All the healings, the exorcisms, everything had a suspicious glaze on it. What if He cut a deal with the devil? He was tempted to do that. What if He actually did? What if Jesus and Satan were in cahoots with each other and all those great miracles were really part of a grand conspiracy to take over the world.

Do you ever call God evil for what He is doing in your life? Do you ever think that Jesus is in league with the devil? We suffer from financial struggles. We experience bitter family conflicts. We endure health breakdowns. We see mad dictators in Iran and North Korea gaining nuclear weapons. We endure our own nation of baby killers, perverts, deviants, unreliable politicians, and failing ecomony. So we charge God with evil. We blame God for not doing the right thing. We don’t think He’s paying attention. Even if God’s not causing the evil, He’s not doing anything to stop Satan from causing it. Plus we blame God for the load of suffering we bring upon ourselves by handling and eating forbidden fruits.

It doesn’t seem to make sense. We ask God for strength and He gives us difficulties to make us strong. We ask for wisdom and He gives us problems to solve. We ask for prosperity and He gives us humility by removing much of our nation’s prosperity. We ask for love and He finds troubled people for us to help. We ask for courage and He gives us persecutions to overcome. We receive nothing we wanted, but received everything we needed. How crazy is all that?!

Jesus responded to all this crazy, demonic talk with a little parable. “How can Satan drive out Satan?” Kingdoms in civil war don’t stand. Homes with family feuds fall. If Satan is actually opposed to himself, then his days are over. That would be really crazy. Satan casting out his own demons. Nuts. Nuts even to suggest it.

Actually, the truth is just the opposite. The devil met his match in Jesus. Jesus is the Promised Seed - promised way back in Genesis. You heard it. “I will put enmity (hatred) between you (the devil) and the woman, between your seed and hers. He (Jesus) will crush your head (a fatal blow), and you will strike His heel (the cross). (Gen 3:15)

The first promise of salvation, couched as a curse on the devil. God is not the one in league with the devil; Adam and Eve were. And we are in Satan’s All-Star League as the sons of Adam and daughters of Eve. God the Son, the Seed of a woman, would engage the devil in hand-to-hand combat. In the process, He would be bruised on the cross. But victory is found in His cross-bruised heel.

We heard of that victory from St. John’s Revelation. John saw an angel come down from heaven. That angel is Jesus. He throws the dragon, that ancient serpent, the devil into the Abyss, the deep pit of hell. Jesus holds the key to the Abyss in one hand and the choker chain around the dragon’s throat in the other hand. Jesus has bound Satan for a thousand years – a symbolic number for the New Testament age we are living in right now. This age began with the first coming of Christ in the manger and it will end with Christ’s second coming in the clouds.

Jesus cast Satan into the Abyss with His crucifixion and resurrection. The dragon roared in apparent triumph when the Son of God was hanging lifelessly on the cross. The ancient serpent hissed in perceived success when the Messiah’s dead body was laid in the tomb. But it was through the cruel cross and the open grave that the victim became the Victor. Christ’s heel was struck, but the serpent’s head was crushed. The Lamb overpowered the dragon. The King of kings conquered the prince of demons. The Lord of lords defeated Beelzebub, the lord of flies.

You could say that the death of Jesus is the exorcism of the world. Jesus taught, “No one can enter a strong man’s house and carry off his possessions unless he first ties up the strong man. Then he can rob his house.” Jesus is the Divine Thief who has come in the flesh to tie up the strong man of the devil. Revelation teaches Satan has been bound for the figurative thousand years. Now the Divine Thief is free to rob Satan of his possessions. We were Satan’s possessions. We are the plunder of Christ’s victory – snatched from sin, death, darkness and the devil. All that Adam’s sin and our own sin have done to us has been undone by the Son of Man, the second Adam, Jesus Christ.

We are carted off to freedom. Salvation is a hostage rescue effort. We were held captive by sin and death. Christ breaks into our world, overpowers our captors, and takes us along with Him into a life of freedom. We’ve been pulled out of an eternal hostage situation by the strong, rescuing hand of the Son of God, reaching out to you from the cross, holding you in the waters of Baptism, speaking to you in the Word of Christ, and feeding you at the table of His Holy Supper.

Jesus’ family finally arrived on the scene. There was a crowd gathered around Jesus so tight His family was stuck outside. The religious leaders had said Jesus was in league with the devil. His family had said he was crazy. But look at all those crazy people stuffed into that little house, packed in so tightly they couldn’t even eat – fishermen and IRS agents and political operatives and the derelicts, diseased and demon-possessed. Someone told Him, “Your mother and brothers are outside looking for you” and Jesus points to that cross section of broken humanity sitting around Him and says, “Here is my family.”

That’s just crazy. His family wasn’t His own mother, the blessed Virgin Mary or His brothers who wanted to keep Him safe. His family certainly wasn’t the religious with their hair-splitting theology. His family was this bunch of misfits who had nothing better to do with their lives than be packed like sardines in that little room with Jesus. Jesus calls them His family. He says that about you too. “Here are my brother and sister and mother.” (Note the singular, as if Jesus had only one – and you are that one!)

That’s just crazy. In fact, the world calls us Christians crazy. And when you stop to think about it, it is kind of crazy to get up early on a Sunday morning when most of Racine sleeps in or lounges with the morning paper or rushes off to work or play. Trusting Jesus’ finished work instead of your own works for salvation. Believing that your sins are forgiven gratis, free of charge. Going through ancient rituals that have no correlation with contemporary culture. Calling yourself a sinner and believing that the pastor’s word is Christ’s word forgiving your sins. Singing old difficult hymns, praying to a God you can’t see or hear directly. Gathering in an old building to sit at Jesus’ feet to hear His Word, to eat the Bread that is His Body, to drink the wine that is His Blood, to pray, praise and give thanks, money and service to a God you cannot see for a salvation that must be believed.

Talk about crazy! Beating the devil by dying. Foolishness to the world of religion. Try to figure that one out on your own. We think dying is defeat. The doctors treat it as failure. Jesus makes it His victory. He binds the devil by being bound to a cross. He descends into our death to unbind our chains, throws open the prison doors, and bring us out into the light of freedom. Death – the devil’s trump card, the big win he scored over Adam and Eve when he got them to choose death over life. Jesus takes death and makes it His own. His victory. And now our victory.

It was all this talk of dying, being the Son of God, being the Promised Messiah, and all the healings and miracles that caught the attention of the religious types. They recognized what was at stake. If you accepted Jesus’ healings as miraculous signs from God, then you had to accept His teachings as the words of God. Jesus was teaching that the kingdom of God had come with His coming, that He was the Son of God in human flesh, the Messiah of Israel sent to do His Father’s will and save the entire world. It sounds crazy, but that is His claim.

In his famous book “Mere Christianity,” C.S. Lewis makes this statement, “A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic - on the level with a man who says he is a poached egg - or he would be the devil of hell. You must take your choice. Either this was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us.” Jesus is either a liar, a lunatic or the Lord. There are no other options.

That’s what’s at stake in today’s Gospel. It’s at the heart of what you and I believe. Whether we think about it all the time or not, we’ve staked our whole lives, our eternal life, on this one man, a carpenter from Nazareth. We tell the world, “this is the One you’re looking for. There’s salvation in no one else. No one else is going to forgive your sin, raise you from the dead, give you eternal life. No one else defeated the devil, closed the gates of hell and opened the portals to paradise. No one else but this Jesus, whom His own family, at least for a moment, thought He was crazy.”

Some will say, “It’s of the devil.” Most will likely say you’ve got only one hand on the religious steering wheel, you’re a french fry short of a happy meal, you’re an odd ball, nutty as a fruit cake, on another planet. Crazy.

God calls it “faithful.” Amen.