Mark 3:20-35 - Christianity Is Crazy - June 20, 2021

There are certain truths of the Christian faith as it is revealed in the Bible that Christians are often hesitant to talk about, think about, or confront. They make us uncomfortable. Among them may be how a supposedly loving God would wash away humanity – with the exception of 8 individuals – in a Flood (Genesis 7-8) or command his people wipe out entire cities and peoples in clearing the Promised Land for their own possession. Other Christians are uncomfortable confessing that Baptism with water can save even infants and that the bread and wine of Holy Communion are really, truly our Savior’s body and blood. Our text brings up two more issues that even Christians don’t like to confront: 1) that the devil is real and really active; and 2) that faith matters more than family. And when you put all of these issues together, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that both Jesus’ enemies and his own family came to: Christianity is crazy!

At first glance, there might seem to be three different groups, different types of people in our text. There are really only two, but we’ll come back to that later. The first two groups – Jesus’ family and the experts in the law from Jerusalem take the spotlight in the beginning of our lesson. Jesus’ family thought that he was crazy; that he wasn’t playing with a full deck, that he was a few bricks short of a load. Here he is, so utterly obsessed with preaching and teaching something called the gospel of kingdom of God (Mark 1:14), calling disciples to follow him (Mark 1:16-21; 2:13-17; 3:13-19); surrounding himself with a crowd of religious fanatics and weirdos – that he doesn’t even have time to eat! It’s no wonder that his family had come, metaphorical straight-jacket in hand, to take him into protective custody. The heavy-hitting religious lawyers from Jerusalem had observed the same behaviors but came to a different conclusion: “He is possessed by Beelzebul,” and “He drives out demons by the ruler of demons.” They didn’t just think he was crazy, they accused him of being in league with the devil.

Why did they treat Jesus this way? Well, it’s often hard to tell the difference between brilliance and insanity. Many great poets, artists, inventors and philosophers were judged by their contemporaries to be crazy to one extent or another. Sabastian Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, Vincent van Gogh, Albert Einstein, Nikola Tesla, Steve Jobs – all of them seemed to have a screw or two loose. King Agrippa accused the apostle Paul of being insane because of his faith in Jesus’ resurrection (Acts 26:24). People in Luther’s day thought he was insane for challenging the most powerful men in the world at the time based on nothing more than his conviction that people are saved by faith in Christ alone and not by works. At the same time, we don’t exactly throw open the doors of the church to those who appear to be weird or crazy – ignoring the fact that in the 1st century these are the very people that seemed to be most drawn to Jesus. Crazy people tend to make nice and normal people feel uncomfortable. That’s why we pack them away into institutions where they can be both out of sight and out of mind.

One of the things that we might be forgetting is that the devil is real, he’s really powerful and he’s really determined to torment and terrorize mankind. How much of what we classify as “mental illness” is actually a result of the devil’s work? And I’m not referring to demon possession as it’s portrayed in the movies – where people float above their beds, howl in Latin, and have superhuman strength. I’m talking about the “normal” mental illnesses that seem so prevalent in our society today – depression, anxiety, PTSD, addiction – things that afflict even Christians. Who’s to say that those aren’t the work of demonic activity? Why are we so quick to classify these diseases as psychological afflictions rather than spiritual attacks? Well, if we treat them as spiritual attacks, then we have to admit that the devil is real – and it’s scary to admit that there’s an evil out there that is far more powerful than we are. But Jesus wasn’t afraid to talk about the devil. And he dealt with it the same way he dealt with any other illness. He viewed demon possession the way we view cancer: as something foreign that doesn’t belong there. Jesus never stigmatized those who were spiritually tormented – and neither should we. Jesus healed both the physically sick and the spiritually afflicted in the same way: with a word of grace, and often with a healing touch. And he wants to do the same today through the Gospel and the Sacraments!

It was those healings that caught the attention of the Jewish lawyers from Jerusalem. They knew what was at stake with this guy. They knew that if you accepted Jesus’ healings as miraculous signs from God, then you had to accept his teachings as the Word of God. And Jesus was teaching a bunch of things that threatened to undermine their power and authority: that he was bringing the Kingdom of God to earth, that he was the Son of God in human flesh, that he was the Christ who was sent to save the entire world from sin, death, and the devil. I know. It sounds crazy. But that’s what Jesus claimed. And he had the miracles to back it up. So, the question is: Who is this guy? Is he a demon possessed deceiver, playing on the devil’s team? Is he a stark-raving-mad lunatic who just happened to tap into some mystical power? Or, is Jesus telling the truth? Is he really the Son of God, the Savior of the world?

That’s really what’s at stake in our text this morning. Who Jesus is stands at the very heart of the Christian faith. Whether we always think about it in these terms or not – we’ve staked our entire lives and our entire eternities on this one man, this carpenter’s son from Nazareth. And not only have we staked our own lives on him, he is the one message we have to preach to the world. “This is the One you’re looking for – even if you’re not looking! There’s salvation in no one else (Acts 4:12). No one else died on a cross to pay for your sins. No one else will raise you from the dead or give you eternal life. No one else can drive the demons out of your life. No one else but this Jesus, a guy whom his own family, for the moment at least, thought was absolutely nuts.”

You can see why the religious leaders were a bit skeptical, can’t you? Jesus messed up their theology books. He messed up their whole religious system. According to their understanding, this wasn’t how it was supposed to happen. The Christ wasn’t supposed to come from the wrong side of the tracks and hang out with the riffraff. The Christ was supposed to be a strong, powerful figure; a leader and mobilizer of men – not a homeless guy with a bunch of stinky fishermen and fraudulent tax-collectors for followers. So, giving the experts in the law the benefit of the doubt – it’s hard to blame them for looking at Jesus’ miracles, listening to his teaching – and concluding that the only way he could be doing these things is by the power of the devil.

But Jesus does blame them. Jesus knew exactly what they were thinking and he met their accusation head-on: “How can Satan drive out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. And if a house is divided against itself, that house cannot stand. And if Satan has risen up against himself is divided, he cannot stand but is finished. On the other hand, no one can enter a strong man’s house to steal his possessions unless he ties up the strong man first. Then he can plunder his house. Jesus is doing two things here: 1) he’s pointing out the pure insanity of their accusation (if a general starts shooting his own soldiers, that army is doomed); and 2) he’s putting his entire mission and ministry in extremely vivid terms. Satan is the strong man who claims ownership of the world. Jesus is the stronger man who came to bind him up and plunder his house. He’s essentially paraphrasing the promise God made way back in Genesis 3: “I’m going to make war between you and the woman, between her seed and yours; he’s going to crush your head and you’re going to crush his heel (Genesis 3:15).” Jesus came into this world, into the devil’s own house, to defeat him by dying on a cross on his own turf.

But that’s the craziest part of all, isn’t it? You beat the devil by dying? We think of dying as defeat. Over the course of the past year, the media, doctors and politicians treated deaths linked to Covid-19 as failures of government and medicine (as if people had never died before). But Jesus turns the defeat of death into victory. He crushes the devil’s skull by being bound to a cross. He descends into our death to unbind our chains, to throw open the prison doors and bring us out into the light of freedom. Jesus rips death out of the devil’s hands and uses it to bring about the greatest good of all: salvation for sinners. And so our hope, our goal, our mission in life is to live and die and rise believing in this.

I know it sounds crazy. But it’s true. Easter is the ultimate proof. If Jesus didn’t rise from the grave, then he was just a raving lunatic or a pawn of the devil. But if he rose (as the empty tomb, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, Peter and 2000 years’ worth of Christians bear witness to) then we must take everything Jesus said – including what he says here – seriously. The devil’s been handcuffed, his house ransacked, his prized possession – a world of sinners like you and me – have been released out into freedom in the kingdom of God! And if the whole world – maybe even your own mother, brothers and sisters – call you crazy for believing it – welcome to the asylum; you’re in good company; they said the same thing about Jesus.

But Jesus has two more crazy things for us to ponder: Amen I tell you: Everything will be forgiven people, their sins and whatever blasphemies they may speak. Sheer insanity, isn’t it? Can you believe it? Every sin that has ever been committed has been paid for by the blood Jesus shed on the cross. Think of the worst sin in the world…what is it? Racism, abortion, rape, genocide, pedophilia? Jesus paid for it. Now think of all the insanely wicked things you’ve done…what are they? Whatever they are, Jesus died to pay for them. They’re dead and buried, once and for all. Or what about we fathers? How many times have we taken our wives for granted and treated our children as burdens to be endured rather than blessings to be cherished? Those sins, too, are forgiven, gone forever.

So what could go wrong? Why wouldn’t everyone – both normal everyday folks and the clinically insane – be flocking to Jesus, be racing here to receive this message? That’s the other kind of insanity: the insanity of unbelief. Jesus describes it this way: whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never have forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin. So what is the sin against the Holy Spirit? It is the willful and persistent rejection of the work of the Holy Spirit through the Gospel. It’s like having treasure in your backyard but refusing to dig it up; like having a winning lottery ticket in your hand but refusing to cash it in. The only unforgivable sin is the sin of refusing to be forgiven. I’ll say that again: the only unforgivable sin is the sin of refusing to be forgiven.

This point is illustrated in the last five verses of our text. Remember how while there appear to be three different groups there are really only two? Jesus’ family – who considered him crazy; and the experts in the law who accused Jesus of working for the devil – are really on the same side, they are on the outside, not only outside the house but outside of – at least for the time being – the kingdom of God. So who gets it right; who’s on the inside? All those crazy people stuffed into that little house packed in so tight that there wasn’t even room to eat – fishermen and tax collectors and diseased, demon-possessed people of every kind. Jesus points to that busted-up, broken, filthy cross section of humanity and says, “This is my family!” Not the smart and powerful guys from Jerusalem; not the biological relatives who are worried about Jesus’ mental state and want to keep him safe – but the bunch of misfits who have nothing better to do than crowd around Jesus and listen to him talk – those people who are doing the will of God, those are the people Jesus’ calls family.

And do you know what? Jesus is also talking about you. You who are doing the will of God by simply coming here to listen to Jesus are his family. Sure, the world may call you crazy. And, when you stop to think about it, there is something kind of crazy about waking up early every Sunday morning, to sit in a place with a bunch of people you don’t really know, to hear a guy in a robe call you a sinner and then to forgive your sins, to listen to some words from a book that’s thousands of years old, to eat bread that is actually body and drink wine that is actually blood and to pray, praise and give thanks to a God you cannot see for a salvation that can only be believed. Is that crazy? No, that’s Christianity. Amen.