Gospel Reflection for 10th Sunday in Ordinary Time – 10th June 2018

This Sunday’s Gospel is a challenging one for us. There are several very difficult things about it, especially for us as Catholics. It is from the Gospel of Mark, Chapter 3. We see that Jesus comes home and people are saying that He is crazy, they ask if He is possessed by the devil and so Jesus has to respond to all of that.

To begin with, Jesus wants to counter from a rational perspective this accusation that He is working with the devil. Basically this accusation has been made because Jesus has been exorcising demons out of people and the people see that He has influence over these demons and so they conclude that Jesus is working with the devil. But Jesus shows how irrational this is by asking would the devil really empower Jesus to cast out the devil’s own legion? And then Jesus says that a house divided does not stand, a kingdom divided among itself falls. The simple point that Jesus is making is that the devil and his demons are not divided against each other. They are united against humanity and against the Kingdom of God. And so it does not make any sense to say that the devil empowers Jesus to cast out demons. By making this point, Jesus is also making a little dig to the Pharisees because when He says that a house divided against itself cannot stand, He is not quoting Abraham Lincoln, who quoted this passage later about the American civil war, but Jesus is quoting from Israel’s own story. Israel had its own civil war, it was a house divided against itself, where the northern kingdom of the 10 tribes was split from the southern kingdom of the two tribes. This division resulted in Israel being conquered by its enemies.   So the problem is that God’s people divide themselves into being conquered. The enemy does not divide itself against Israel. Jesus’ point is that if the Pharisees and scribes and priests fight against Jesus, the result is Israel dividing itself against itself again. Jesus is asking if the people of God will ever learn to stop fighting among themselves? This is a good question as we seem to do this even to this very day.

Now, as the conversation goes on, Jesus warns them that a blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is an unforgivable sin. This can be a confusing one for people. What does Jesus mean by the ‘unforgivable sin’? Well the unforgivable sin is in this Gospel. Once the Pharisees, scribes and priests say that Jesus is acting in the power of demons and the devil for His mighty deeds, then whatever mighty deeds Jesus does cannot prove to them that He is from God. So once they ascribe the devil to Jesus’ actions, His mighty deeds cannot prove to them that He is Divine. And so they have cut themselves off as seeing Jesus as from the Father and they cannot come to faith. They have cut themselves off. That is what blaspheming against the Holy Spirit is. Jesus is actually acting by the power of the Holy Spirit but by saying that He is acting by the power of the devil, they have blasphemed the Holy Spirit and called the Holy Spirit the devil. That is a big mistake.

Finally, we have the part of the story where someone comes into the house and tells Jesus that His “mother and brothers and sisters are outside asking for you”.   Of course these are the cousins of Jesus because in a family tribe you can call your cousins your brothers and sisters. This was typical in this culture. We even see this in the Old Testament where Lot, who was the nephew of Abraham, was called his brother at one point. So in this Gospel, Jesus replies by saying, “Here are my mother and my brothers.   Anyone who does the will of God, that person is my brother and sister and mother.” Now is Jesus denigrating Mary? Absolutely not because nobody fulfils the Will of God more than Mary.    This shows why Mary is the Mother of God in the first place because she always does the Will of the Father, and she keeps the Word of God in her heart. So Jesus is calling each of us to be intimate disciples. To be a disciple does not mean just to have a personal relationship with Jesus in terms of calling him a friend, but it means to have an intimate relationship in terms of being a mother, brother, sister of Jesus, to be in this deep relationship with God by keeping His Word. That is the challenge – do you keep Jesus’ Word so that you can be in Jesus’ family?