Today's Gospel has some troubling dynamics going on. First of all, the reality of evil is clearly named by Jesus. Whatever image or name you have for this presence, whether you personify evil as Satan or Beelzebub or a demonic presence, there can be do doubt that evil is present in the world and that Jesus is engaged in a battle with this presence.

For me, the most jarring part of this Gospel is when Jesus is told that his mother and his brothers are outside and he replies, “who are my mother and my brothers?” He answers the question himself, saying “anyone who does the will of God is my mother and my brother and my sister. In this reply he shakes up the whole concept of what a family is.

When I was a child, the concept of family generally held by ‘society’ was the idea of what was called the nuclear family: mom, dad and children. Anyone who didn’t fit that concept was somehow outside the circle of acceptance.  Our understanding of the term “family” has evolved quite a bit since then and is still evolving: first of all, we are recognizing, partnerships and marriages between LGBTQ2S+ people establishing a concept of family that was not understood for a very long time and is still not universally accepted. These partnerships also form families into which children are born, welcomed and raised, and the children come into families in a variety of ways, including surrogacy and adoption. Families today are often ‘blended’, partners who have children from previous relationships now forming a new family community. Extended family has changed too. Grandma’s and Grandpa’s, aunties and uncles and cousins don’t always live close by anymore, sometimes not even in the same country. So family as we have known it has changed dramatically during the last sixty years. And into this changed reality, we hear today hear Jesus’ words challenging the notion of family. Words that he spoke over 2000 years ago.

Can only certain kinds of families reflect or promote God's will, as Jesus articulated it in terms of mercy, love, justice, protection, holiness and well-being? Can only certain families express the belonging and solidarity that God desires to share with humanity? These questions are at the heart of today’s gospel.

If you're looking for examples of well-adjusted and happy parent-child relationships from the ancient world, the Bible probably isn’t a great source. Consider even Jesus' family, for example. The New Testament has examples of how Jesus' relationship with his parents had the normal tensions of a growing child and their parents. Remember when they lost sight of him at the festival and were worried out of their minds, only to find him speaking to a rapt audience in the temple? He  was quite dismissive of their concern. You could almost hear the words that a teenager might speak today “my parents don’t understand me!” (Can you see twelve-year-old Jesus rolling his eyes?)

The story sets Jesus' family in comparison to influential religious leaders. Both groups express an inability to understand who Jesus really is. The religious authorities conclude he is possessed by Satan. His family assumes he has lost his sanity. In an ancient setting, these diagnoses were roughly equivalent to each other. The scene underscores how those who presumably were in great positions to make sense of Jesus still were not immediately able to see him as God's agent. As Jesus announced and re-inaugurated God's intentions for human flourishing, many could not overcome the disorienting character of his message. Even close relatives and religious insiders were bewildered by what he said, which threatened to disrupt so many aspects of human society.

Maybe Jesus' relatives were dismayed that the first-born son wasn't supporting his family but was gallivanting around Galilee as a self-appointed prophet. Or maybe they wanted him, as Messiah, to have bigger and better ambitions, such as promising a revolution instead of preaching and healing the sick. The Gospel of Mark does not explain; it merely sets up a showdown of sorts when the family arrives to seize Jesus.

It's good news for those inside the house, who seek to identify with Jesus and his message. It's also good news for Mark's earliest readers who found themselves estranged from their biological families. Not such good news, perhaps, for his relatives on the outside, and for others who placed a high value on customary notions of honor and social stability because Jesus redefines the criteria for who constitutes his true family. This goes beyond striking back at his mother and brothers' opinion about his sanity. Most importantly, Jesus makes a claim about what it mean to belong to other people. He makes a claim about identity. Families, or households, were the primary social and economic units of first-century society. Jesus speaks to deeply embedded cultural assumptions when he determines his true family not by blood relations or kinship ties but by doing the will of God. For Jesus, family -- at least, one type of family -- is a community of people joined as an expression of their commitment to discover and manifest God's will.

Obviously, Christians have not found consensus on these topics, as discussions of sexuality and marriage have polarized many communities, including our Anglican church. Yet the discussions, impelled by the cultural urgency surrounding the issues, have also brought many into deeper understandings about what kind of living might be consistent with Jesus' life and message.

Jesus did not abolish the idea of family or household but he does consistently unsettle and sometimes redirect those values. When Jesus teaches, heals and makes pronouncements, everything gets put up for renegotiation. Old values aren't necessarily flawed, simply by virtue of their being old or established. But God's presence in the world, manifested through Jesus' words and actions, repeatedly upends conventional assumptions about what's "real" or what's "normal." It upends them, not to change them for change's sake, but so we might reconsider just how they can be authentic manifestations of who God is and how God can be known. For God wills to be known by us, in the particularity of our real lives and relationships.  

And here, Jesus condemns in no uncertain terms, the ‘household of Satan’ warning the crowd of the unforgiveable sin which is to mistake the Holy Spirit for Satan, pointing specifically to the scribes who recognize that Jesus must be drawing on great power to perform exorcisms but fatally misidentify its source because he does not behave as they expect a righteous person to behave, which is to say, most of all, that he is not one of them.  He associates with the wrong people, breaks Sabbath laws, and blasphemes by forgiving sins, and so they commit the greatest blasphemy of all.

Exorcisms, of which there are four in Mark in addition to many other references to them, point to the cosmic battle with Satan, a battle that begins immediately after Jesus’ baptism when the Spirit drives him into temptation.  The unclean spirits recognize Jesus from the beginning and know that Jesus can destroy them as others are plotting to destroy Jesus (3:6)

Now Jesus makes clear, in the form of a parable, the scope of what he is doing in his freeing of the demon possessed.  Jesus is coming to plunder Satan’s household and bring about his end, not by division from within but by stealth and force from without. Jesus’ stealthy binding of the powers of evil ultimately undermines Satan so completely that even when he appears to have succeeded in destroying Jesus in the crucifixion, the very destruction of the Son issues not in defeat but in the mysterious victory of God.

Moving out from there, we also see reflections in Jesus’ story of the community in which the Gospel was first told and read and proclaimed and the ones who in following Jesus have met similar resistance. These, like Jesus and his disciples, may have lost mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers and houses and fields for the sake of the good news and may have felt themselves under threat from powers and principalities as he was.  So for those people, then and now, there is comfort in the turn from restraint and threat to freedom, courage, and hope, even in the face of the ones who would kill Jesus.

Then here perhaps are we, the crowd pressing in to see him and touch him, maybe urgently and desperately, only to discover that our desperate desire has been more than met.  We also are claimed by him as his sisters and brothers and mother, no longer outsiders at a distance, but holders of the secrets of the kingdom, drawn into the inner circle of the mystery and unconditional love of God.  Amen

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