The Die is Cast - Mark 3:1-35
3:1-6 The Die is Cast
3:1Again he entered the synagogue, and a man was there who had a withered hand. 2They watched (παρετήρουν) him to see whether he would cure him on the sabbath, so that they might accuse him. 3And he said to the man who had the withered hand, ‘Come forward.’ (Ἔγειρε εἰς τὸ μέσον) 4Then he said to them, ‘Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the sabbath, to save life or to kill?’ But they were silent. 5He looked around at them with anger; he was grieved at their hardness of heart and said to the man, ‘Stretch out your hand.’ He stretched it out, and his hand was restored. 6The Pharisees went out and immediately conspired with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him. (ὅπως αὐτὸν ἀπολέσωσιν)
1. This is a key point in Mark. At this moment, Jesus' future is settled. The Pharisees and Herodians despised each other; one group saw themselves as the faithful and the others as collaborators, the other saw themselves as realists enabling the nation to survive, and the others as what—unrealistic, or fanatics? But here they agree. The scapegoat is chosen, not by a mob in an unreasoned moment, but by careful reasoned planning. Scapegoating is done in austere suits as much as in heated rage.
This story of Mark 3:1-6 challenges a psychological undertone which challenges everything about Sabbath, and about us. In the culture of empire, the man deserves his withered hand, and the loss of power and agency which the withering symbolises (and which is very real in a manual culture). That he deserves it is still our enduring deep emotional suspicion when pushed: Illness is a punishment, a consequence of bad choices made before God. Even those of us who do not believe in God tend to blame the illness of others upon their lifestyle. What Jesus does here, and on the Sabbath, that key identifier of being Judean, is to give a sinner power and agency. He upends everything all over again. As he did with Levi (Mark 2:13-17), he has removed our scapegoats from us. When this happens, when those we love to hate suddenly receive the love that God has for them, it overturns our whole way of being, which is that God has favourites; namely, us. This is why they seek to destroy him.
2. The scene is carefully constructed. First, the original listeners and readers understand that Jesus and the disciples have come into the synagogue fresh from their infraction of the Sabbath in the grain fields. There the accusation of the disciples was an accusation against their leader; Jesus did not chide his disciples but, essentially, applauded their actions! Here in the synagogue, a similar upending of the Sabbath continues.
Second, a withered hand probably had overtones of paralysis about it. In 1 Kings 13:4, "Jeroboam stretched out his hand from the altar, saying, ‘Seize him!’ But the hand that he stretched out against him withered so that he could not draw it back to himself." We are meant to remember the beginning of this section of the gospel (Mark 2:1-12), where the paralysed man is brought for healing. And are meant to remember the prophecy against the temple.1
Third, James Alison points out that
... when he criticizes the scribes and pharisees it is, once again, not part of a new proposal that he is making in the light of which they look foolish. His concern about them is that in them, Israel is falling short of what it should have been from the beginning. Hence, in places it is suggested that they are Egyptians, who are holding up the real Exodus of God's people. This is done with particular subtlety at Mark 3:1-6. There the way in which Moses placed before the people of Israel the choice between good and evil (Dt 30:15), the way in which God took Israel out of Egypt with mighty arm and outstretched hand, and Pharaoh's hardness of heart, are all recalled in the incident of the cure of the man with a withered hand (which becomes outstretched) despite the hardness of the heart of the Pharisees, who did not understand the choice on the sabbath between doing good or evil, and went out to seek to destroy Jesus...2
The language itself is chosen carefully: The Pharisees watched him. The Greek word is paretēroun which Marcus points out is used only twice in LXX, including where Psalm 36:2 says: "The sinner will watch for the righteous, and gnash his teeth upon him." (παρατηρήσεται ὁ ἁμαρτωλὸς τὸν δίκαιον καὶ βρύξει ἐπ᾿ αὐτὸν τοὺς ὀδόντας αὐτοῦ) When we consider that the Psalms were the hymnbook of Israel, and constantly sung, this is unlikely to have been an accidental correlation, but an echo which would be noticed. Marcus says: "Through an intertextual echo... the same Pharisees who objected to Jesus eating with "sinners" (2:16) are now revealed to belong to the camp of sinners themselves."3
Finally, the man is brought to centre stage with Jesus. NRSV says, "Come forward," but the Greek is Egeire eis to meson. Egeire is exactly the same word Jesus uses in Mark 2:11 when he tells the paralysed man to stand up, and meson is middle. The listener/reader is being told that we are still talking about healing and freedom from paralysis, and the same players are present: the paralysed and disempowered, the religious establishment, the crowd, and Jesus.
We gather around a scapegoat, placing them in the middle, whether it be the little mob in the school yard or the dock in a kangaroo court. Then we place them to one side, in a handy exile, until we need to pick on them again. But now Jesus takes over and raises the man up into the middle, not to tip more violence upon him, but to heal him.
Meson has another implication: We cannot simply "drop out of empire" and quietly join the culture of God. To drop out means to invite the notice of the crowd. To follow Jesus, and be healed, always risks being in the middle of the crowd.
3. Now the argument over the Sabbath is replayed.4 "It is a good rabbinic principle that "saving life overrules the Sabbath". The point is that, from one perspective, the man with the withered hand is not in danger of death. As the leader of the synagogue said in Luke 13:14, "There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the sabbath day." In terms of the tradition, Jesus' justification is inadequate. There is a deep irony here: Deliberate infraction of the Sabbath could be punished by death (cf Exodus 31:14-15; Numbers 15:32-36). The transgression is about to happen in the presence of witnesses, and is deliberate; he has already broken the sabbath in the preceding scene. So, one observer will see that death is deserved, while another will see that on the sabbath when life should be preserved, sinners lie in wait plotting a murder.
The silence of the Pharisees means, I think, that they see the irony. They cannot ignore what Jesus is about to do for it upends everything. Hamerton-Kelly5 can say that "in the face of human need, the category of the sacred dissolves," but they cannot grasp this compassion of the kingdom of God, for it would mean to let go of everything upon which their world was built. So, they must make the choice of Caiaphas "that it is better ... to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed" (John 11:50).
In the context of public argument, to be silenced is also to be humiliated. The Pharisees will remind themselves that "putting one's fellow to shame publicly,"6 was itself "an offence that removes one from the world to come,"7 and this silencing will not be forgotten, for its humiliation threatens their being and self. Mark is exposing again the culture of empire, where we do what we need to do to survive unchanged and unchallenged, even though a part of us knows we are wrong. In John 13:30, Judas "went out immediately": exēlthen euthys. Long before him, Mark uses the same stark departure from Jesus: kai exelthontes hoi Pharisaioi euthys.
I have used the words where we do what we need to do to survive unchanged and unchallenged. At the historical location of this story is a group of Pharisees, deeply committed to serving God. At the current location of this story, there is always us: Does the category of the sacred dissolve around us as we meet human need, or will we, cloaking our words and deeds in religious piety, resolve to remain unchanged?
4. For the person looking at the scene from Jesus' perspective, the life of the man with a withered hand is at risk. Jesus' statement that is lawful to save life on the Sabbath is appropriate, for if the man returns for healing the day after Sabbath that act of itself means that he is still in the thrall of the sacred, and of empire, because he is observing the Sabbath. (cf Jesus' anger in 1:40-45 The Crowd arrives, Point 3, and 3b). The whole system of how we organise ourselves culturally is destroying us even as it pretends to save us from chaos. For at its base there is always the violence which destroys people. The text demonstrates this, for the only response they can find to Jesus is to destroy him. Only by destroying him can they keep the peace.
So far, in this commentary, we have observed the violence of empire working itself out as a direct rivalry with Jesus. As I said of the healing of the paralysed man, "If Jesus is a designated broker of God's forgiveness, then the monopoly of the current brokers is under threat." (2:1-12 Going into a town, Point 6) The rivalry with Jesus is clear and obvious. But in this pericope at the beginning of Chapter 3, there is a twist:
They do not desire something Jesus has; rather, their own inner-group rivalry can only be contained by the unanimous condemnation of the victim. Jesus attracts their envy to himself and so enables them to survive as a group. We have a clear statement of this phenomenon in Lk 23:12, "And Herod and Pilate became friends with each other on that day; for formerly they had been enemies." Jesus has done this all along as the roll of all the leaders shows. Leaders who otherwise would have been in competition with one another act in concert against him.8
Pastorally, I have often observed that while people may privately agree with a certain understanding of Jesus' call on a congregation, they cannot risk following that call because of their rivalry with others in the congregation, especially other leaders. They feel that to break from the status quo, and go in a new direction, will put them at a disadvantage. The only way to deal with this disruption of the congregation is to "act in concert against" the disruptor.
So, the Pharisees went out and immediately conspired with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him. Apolesōsin is the same word used by the demon in the synagogue in Mark 1:24: Have you come to destroy us? There is no middle ground. We are for Jesus, or against him. We step out of empire or we remain in its thrall. And Mark warns us here, that this stepping out needs to be a corporate decision, or our internal rivalries will undermine us.
5. The People: The Pharisees are drawn to look like Pharaoh (cf Exodus 7:3, 13, 22, etc) because they are hard of heart. Marcus suggests there is probably a pun in the back of Mark's mind given that Pharaō and Pharisaios have some similarity in the Greek.9 Jesus himself is angry and "grieved at their hardness of heart." (NRSV) But Marcus says the passive tense of the verb means Jesus grieves with rather than that he is grieved by or at the Pharisees, according to other uses of the word. But the context, as NRSV reads the scene, suggests that he is grieved at them.10 He concludes there is some complexity in Jesus' response to them—"a hint of sadness." How could we not weep for those who have tried so hard to serve God, and yet can be so adrift that they will form a murderous alliance with the empire's most blatant supporters? The answer, of course, is: We can very easily fail to weep for them! Typically, we do not weep for those folk. We demonise them. In showing us the stark choices to which we are called, Mark often sails very close to such behaviour himself, and unfortunately, I need little encouragement to go further.
Although Jesus has brought the man from the edges to the centre of the group, he is almost a prop for the drama between Jesus and the Pharisees. In reading the text aloud I take good care to look with kindness at the man as I call him to rise up and come to the middle; I pause after my flash of anger as I look around at us all; I let my voice weep for our hardness of heart, and I invite the man to stretch out his hand with all the gentleness I can find in my own heart, remembering my own pain and withered spirit. Otherwise, it is all too easy to use him as a weapon and a tool to demonstrate my own moral/theological superiority over those I take to be the Pharisees of my own situation. Which means, of course, that I, too, am a hard-of-heart Pharisee who uses the poor and maimed for my own justification and, worse still, has no real compassion for the poor and maimed.
6. Preaching Point: In one sense, we are all people with withered hands. We are of little power, unable to grasp hold of life properly. Mark shows Jesus reaching out to us, regardless of religious or social niceties, offering us a healing hand... The question for us is whether we will see the hand of Jesus reaching out to us. Will we see the way of Jesus presented to us as a promise of power and healing? Or will we not recognise the shrivelling of our hands, and of our grip on life, and go our own way? Perhaps we will not seek to destroy him, but it will be as if the man with the withered hand had pulled back, and would not let Jesus touch him.11
3:7-12 The Sea and Separation
7 Jesus departed (ἀνεχώρησεν) with his disciples to the lake sea, (the Greek is to the sea, πρὸς τὴν θάλασσαν) and a great multitude (πολὺ πλῆθος) from Galilee followed him; 8hearing all that he was doing, they came to him in great numbers (πλῆθος πολύ) from Judea, Jerusalem, Idumea, beyond the Jordan, and the region around Tyre and Sidon. 9He told his disciples to have a boat ready for him because of the crowd, (ὄχλον) so that they would not crush (θλίβωσιν) him; 10for he had cured many, so that all who had diseases afflictions (μάστιγας) pressed upon (ἐπιπίπτειν, "fell upon") him to touch him. 11Whenever the unclean spirits saw him, they fell down (προσέπιπτον) before him and shouted, ‘You are the Son of God!’ 12But he sternly ordered them not to make him known.
13 He went up the mountain (ἀναβαίνει εἰς τὸ ὄρος) and called to him those whom he wanted, and they came to him. 14And he appointed twelve, whom he also named apostles, [Other ancient authorities lack whom he also named apostles] to be with him, and to be sent out to proclaim the message, 15and to have authority to cast out demons. 16So he appointed the twelve: [Other ancient authorities lack So he appointed the twelve] Simon (to whom he gave the name Peter); 17James son of Zebedee and John the brother of James (to whom he gave the name Boanerges, that is, Sons of Thunder); 18and Andrew, and Philip, and Bartholomew, and Matthew, and Thomas, and James son of Alphaeus, and Thaddaeus, and Simon the Cananaean, 19and Judas Iscariot, who betrayed (παρέδωκεν, "handed over") him.
1. The Sea: We see here one of the weaknesses of the NRSV contextual translation. It speaks of the Sea of Galilee in Mark 1:16 and 7:31, but then consistently translates the same word, thalassa, as lake. This reminds us we are inland, and not speaking of the Mediterranean, but it hides the imagery and the danger that is associated with the sea. In Chapters 4 and 5, the great adventures of the storm and with the man living in the tombs, happen on and by the sea, not on a lake.
Like English, Greek and Latin did distinguish between lakes (limne) and oceans (thalassa). Josephus variously referred to the lake as the lake of Gennesar, the lake of Gennesaritis, or the lake of Tiberias. Pliny the Elder referred to it as lake of Gennesaret or Taricheae in his encyclopedia, Natural History.12
The fact that Mark so consistently says thalassa, and not lake, is a persistent reminder to his Greek speaking readers and listeners, of the theme that the chaos symbolised by the sea is confronted and overcome. NRSV hides this from us. "Mark consistently refers to the freshwater lake as a “sea” in order to invoke the most primal narratives in the Hebrew tradition: the Ark of Noah; the crossing of the Red Sea; and the psalmic odes to storms."13
A clear illustration of all this can be seen in the story of the healing of the Gerasene demoniac. (Mark 5) There, NRSV Mark says, "the herd, numbering about two thousand, rushed down the steep bank into the lake, and were drowned in the lake." In both cases—note the repetition—Mark uses the word thalassa. Luke removes Mark's repetition in Luke 8.33 and also uses the word limne— lake. Mark is trying to make a point about the chaos and evil still lurking within creation.
In the violence and struggle of the upcoming narrative, the sea may also serve another purpose. It is, according to Marcus14 "an appropriate setting for epiphanies, and this section [of Mark] presents Jesus increasingly as an epiphany of God." In Psalm 29:3,10, for example, sitting upon the sea is a sign of God's majesty:
3The voice of the Lord is over the waters;
the God of glory thunders,
the Lord, over mighty waters...10 The Lord sits enthroned over the flood;
the Lord sits enthroned as king for ever. (See also: Choosing the disciples, Point 1 for similar comments about thalassa.)
2. Judea, Jerusalem, Idumea, beyond the Jordan, and the region around Tyre and Sidon: This is not a hint of the restoration of some form of the Davidic empire, for although David's territory went a fair way north, it never included Tyre and Sidon. The text may hint at the spread of the gospel out from Judea and Jerusalem. It certainly intends to indicate the effect Jesus was having as people heard of him; he was even attracting Gentiles. The mention of Tyre and Sidon and it may also reflect a Syrian origin for the Gospel of Mark. Jesus will later go to Tyre (see 7:24, where there is a textual variant which adds: and Sidon), and Tyre is in the Syrian region currently considered as a likely life setting in which to interpret Mark.15
3. Separation: Jesus separates himself from the synagogue of the plotters. (Mark 3:7) But does anechōrēsen mean simply that he left, or does it mean that he withdrew from a place of danger? The text is able to bear both meanings.
"A great multitude" is a crowd by another name. When Jesus takes measures not to be crushed, it is not simple "crowd management" but a recognition that all crowds are a mob in waiting. The word thlibōsin can mean to press upon or crowd a person, but it also has the metaphoric sense of oppressing or afflicting.16 Even ignorant of this Greek nuance, anyone who is sensitive to crowds can see the danger of the scene at the edge of the sea. There is a strong hint that the supposedly safe dry land is as insecure and chaotic as the sea itself. The emotive weight of the passage is heightened by the word for all who had diseases: It is mastigas which, literally meaning a lash or a whip, also implied a "suffering sent by God."17 NRSV has the crowd pressing upon him, which continues the image of the crush, but the underlying word epipiptein means the text can be translated as fell upon him. This is clearly Mark's intention, for in the very next sentence, the unclean spirits fell down, which is prosepipton.
This is not the adulant beachside crowd sometimes painted in children's bibles, but one more akin to the city crowds of New Year's Eve, always only a moment away from violence, even in what appears to be celebration.
The crowd around Jesus is an anxious society where everything is being disturbed, as is the society of which we are a part. Unclean spirits are being confronted, and the settled way of doing things is being challenged. The unclean spirits, which include our own deep but unwelcome instincts, recognise who he is: "You are the Son of God" (3:11). So, all who know their status and security is enhanced by the current system of elites sense they are under threat as the kingdom comes near. At best, the crowd is confused, not yet sure if Jesus is good news or threat, and unsure if they should seek a scapegoat around whom to coalesce and expel.18
Jesus is already marked out as separate from the crowd: The Pharisees and Herodians have decided to kill him. He further separates himself from the synagogue by departing to the sea, and then from the crowd which follows him there, by the use of the boat, even if he does not embark at this point. And he separates himself by his withdrawal to the mountain where he chooses who will come to him.
We have here the delineation between the culture of empire and the culture of God, because "a small group... comes out of the crowd... to be the mediators and representatives of Jesus,"19 and the first fruits of the new culture of God. Not only is Mark's "great multitude" a crowd by another name, it is always "a symbol of the lynch mob" on which the culture of any empire is inevitably founded,
and therefore the narrative has to show Jesus to be clearly separate from it, and the disciples have to come out from it, [as do we ourselves] in order to perform their function as disciples.20
Mark is very clear that this small group is not the kingdom itself. For from within this very group, the first chosen, comes the one who will hand him over. Mark speaks in the past tense about this, not merely to relate an historical story, but speaking to the small group of which he is a part. "Who handed him over" is a word of warning about our default selves. As Hamerton-Kelly continues:
As long as the kingdom must exist in this world, it exists as a remnant within the overarching order of violence and is itself infiltrated by the treachery of the Sacred.21
Hamerton-Kelly is using Sacred to mean the violent control of the culture of empire, in contradistinction to what I call holy, which is the culture of the transcendent God who knows no violence at all. (cf here regarding the sensibility of Jesus with respect to violence, and also below.) Remnant is an apt description. Mark's community surely felt it was a remnant after the destruction of the temple and Jerusalem. And we are, always, a remnant, struggling to remain true to the culture of God, and yet compromised by our own violence.
4. You are the Son of God: It is thought that Mark was sometimes presented in dramatic form; certainly, as today, it was read aloud. In this gospel where Jesus is drawn as Caesar's superior, we hear "You are the Son of God!" being repeated over and again.
Even the unclean spirits know this. Jesus rebukes them because their desperate fealty to him is not something for us to emulate. Their worship is misplaced because they do not understand who he is. Yes, they bow down to him, recognising that he is their superior. But they understand his superiority as being of the same nature as themselves, only more powerful. They do not understand that they are to be brought to nothing by the culture of God. For they are not separate beings somewhat analogous to ourselves. They are the visible effects of our violence which take on a quasi-being or existence within someone. When the culture of empire is finally healed they will simply cease to exist, and we see the beginnings of this in injured people who have found a safe community which embraces them: Some of the symptoms of violence and abuse which so discomfort them, and us, begin to fade.
If we fall down before Jesus because we conceive that he is only a more powerful person than we are, we are still living within the culture of empire, and all our unclean spirits will persist. That is, all the outworking of our violence, which become a power greater than the sum of our parts, will remain unhealed and appear insurmountable. Jesus is calling us to follow him into a new reality or culture where he is no greater than us, and where violence is not overcome, but has no meaning or existence at all. We cannot conceive of such a reality until we see the crucifixion and resurrection, and begin to understand that the power of empire was brought to nothing by the powerless power of the Son of God in whom there is no violence.
5. The mountain: For Mark's readers, going up the mountain would have recalled the giving of the Law. Anabainei eis to oros (to go up the mountain) occurs twentyfour times in LXX and 18 of those are in the Pentateuch.22 Mountains are a place where we meet God. On the mountain, God will definitively identify and validate Jesus (see 9:2-13) And, of course, 12 is the number of tribes of Israel. The disciples are the beginning of a new Israel.
Jesus "went up the mountain" to call and appoint the twelve (3:13:14) and then "went home." He does not "come down." (Although, cf Mark 9:9 where "they were coming down.") Soon, we will read that the scribes "come down" (3:22) and Marcus points out that coming down, or descending, is not a positive movement in scripture, citing Israel's descent into Egypt (Isaiah 30:2; 31:1; 52:4) and the descent and fall of Satan and his angels (Genesis 6:1-4; Isaiah 14:12; Luke 10:18)23
3:20-35 Family and Beelzebul
Then he went home; 20and the crowd came together again, so that they could not even eat. 21When his family (οἱ παρ’ αὐτοῦ) heard it, they went out to restrain him, for people (ἔλεγον) were saying, ‘He has gone out of his mind.’ (ἐξέστη) 22And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem said, ‘He has Beelzebul, and by the ruler of the demons he casts out (ἐκβάλλει) demons.’ 23And he called them to him, and spoke to them in parables, ‘How can Satan cast out Satan? 24If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand (σταθῆναι, from ἵστημι). 25And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand. (σταθῆναι) 26And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, (στῆναι) but his end has come. 27But no one (οὐδεὶς) can enter a strong man’s (ἰσχυροῦ) house and plunder his property (σκεύη) without first tying up the strong man (ἰσχυρὸν δήσῃ) ; then indeed the house can be plundered.
28 ‘Truly I tell you, people will be forgiven for their sins and whatever blasphemies they utter; 29but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit can never have forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin’— 30for they had said, ‘He has an unclean spirit.’
31 Then his mother and his brothers came; and standing (στήκοντες) outside, (ἔξω) they sent to him and called him. 32A crowd was sitting around him; and they said to him, ‘Your mother and your brothers and sisters [Other ancient authorities lack and sisters] are outside, (ἔξω) asking for you.’ 33And he replied, ‘Who are my mother and my brothers?’ 34And looking at those who sat around him, he said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers! 35Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.’
1. If I were directing the movie Mark, I would seek to shoot this scene as afternoon clouds built up over the hills, and hope to capture the moment when an afternoon unexpectedly darkens as the clouds obscure the sun. (cf 15:33) The Pharisees and Herodians have conspired to destroy him (3:6). Even among his own, Judas will hand him over (3:12). The crowd is hostile, and now the scribes have come down from Jerusalem. As noted above, Marcus points out that coming down or descending is not a positive movement in scripture, citing Israel's descent into Egypt (Isaiah 30:2; 31:1; 52:4) and the descent and fall of Satan and his angels. (Genesis 6:1-4; Isaiah 14:12; Luke 10:18)24
The hostility of the crowd is seen in the words "for people were saying, 'He has gone out of his mind' (ἐξέστη)." Jesus is claimed to be exestē, (note the connection to our word ecstasy) but this is a projection of the crowd. The crowd is out of its mind. They are crushing and pressing against him again (cf 3:9-10). And they are, "penetrating even into Jesus' family circle."25 His family fear the attention of the crowd and join the circle of accusers in order to save themselves.
Something happens to the crowd. In the movie we have just seen the crowd crushing and falling upon him (3:9-10). In the present verses the crowd is almost "out of its mind," but then it is seated around him in the way that poor people would eat a meal, even though it is not possible to eat. His family who, because of their concern for self, have joined the crowd, are left standing outside.
Marcus26 points out that exestē is a compound form of histēmi, to stand, which is used in Verse 24 where a kingdom cannot stand (stathēnai). A crowd which stands outside of itself cannot stand. It will coalesce into violence. (The word play is likely much more obvious to a Greek reader, who would perhaps not notice an English word play between he ran and he will be running.)
Perhaps the movie would show the crowd surrounding the house and threatening destruction, and then move to show a community of shalom at the centre, in that place we recognise to be the most dangerous of all. We can only be true family if we join him there.
The kingdom divided against itself cannot stand, neither can a house divided stand, nor Satan rising up against himself stand. In this same pericope where Jesus says these things, we are told his family went out to restrain him, and that his family is standing outside. (They are twice outside.) But the crowd that is inside the house is sitting (cf Luke 10:39) around Jesus. The word-play is not subtle.
2. How do we translate the text? Is this text a Markan Sandwich? If so, the confrontation with the scribes and the crowd is sandwiched between two mentions of Jesus' family. A textual sandwich is a rhetorical technique. The writer takes a story and places it inside another story. The bread of the enclosing story helps interpret the meat of the inserted story, and the meat, or other filling, gives us an interpretive flavour for the bread.
Supporting the reading of the text as a sandwich, Byrne27 suggests the two slices of our bread are the failure of Jesus' natural family (3:20-21) and Jesus' true family (3:31-35), in between which we have the accusations of the scribes, and Jesus' response to them. Indeed, the elegon of verse 21, they were saying, is taken by Marcus28 to refer to Jesus' relatives, contra NRSV which translates it as the crowd.
In this understanding, which we might call The Family Sandwich, the emphasis is on seeing how the demands of family can call us out of the culture of God, and the stark contrast between the two is illustrated by Jesus' words about just who constitutes his family. This understanding guides the translation of NRSV, where hοἱ παρʼ αὐτοῦ... means his family.
But the text can be translated differently: Once Jesus has entered the house, and the crowd is pressing upon him again, "the ones beside him (hoi par’ autou) went out to restrain the mob because it was out of control." The αὐτόν which NRSV translates as him, is taken to refer to the crowd; ie, it. Hamerton-Kelly29 says that it does not make sense to say that while he is in the house they go out to control him. Marcus30 is aware of this option, but concludes that the context demands that those who do the restraining in Verse 21 are Jesus' family restraining him, whereas Hamerton-Kelly suggests the Greek means the disciples restrain the crowd.
In this second understanding, which we could call The Healing of the Crowd, the emphasis is more on what happens when people are called out of the mob and come to sit around Jesus. In both cases, Jesus' blood family does not show up well.
For those of us who wish to be Jesus' family, stepping out of the crowd does not mean going away from the danger. The crowd is the culture in which we live. We cannot escape it by standing apart from it in some way; no one can exist apart from culture. We can only sit at the centre of the crowd with Jesus. Do you see the poetry? Sitting here— undivided— we can persist. We can be a quiet centre, a focal point which enables the conversion of the culture from a crowd with a violent centre. So much is this so, that we can sit down in peace and be able to eat. (cf Ps23:5) But a crowd can so much more easily fall upon those who are seated.
Finally, there remains a reminder that the culture of God is not fully established among us. The text of verse 32 says, despite the fact they are his family, that a crowd was sitting around him. Even those who have joined him and sit with him are still crowd. We are always at risk of being crowd, and never far from our violent origins. We could say that Judas still sits within the church, and he is all of us. (cf 3:19)
3. The Family Sandwich: If we focus upon the sandwich interpretation of Marcus and NRSV, it is hardly surprising that Jesus has a difficult relationship with his family. In his culture, family owned you. We can see it in this text: The family is concerned, not for him, but for their reputation. What will it say about them in the eyes of the town if he has gone out of his mind? We know this because Jesus’ family is the bread which holds the Scribes. That indicates the family is on the side of the Scribes in this argument! “How dare you do this to us? Are you out of your mind? You shame us! Look what they will do to you... and to us!” He has brought trouble into town, and drawn them to the attention of the powers that be.31
This means that at the end of this section, when his brothers and sisters stand outside (they are not among those who are seated with him) they are being and doing the opposite of Jesus in Mark 1:16-20. There, Jesus calls the two sets of brothers out of their families and into the culture of God which he calls the kingdom of God. Here, brothers and sisters seek to call Jesus out of the culture of God.
There is a complete redrawing of loyalties in this culture where family is everything. The phrase “And looking at those who sat around him,” is code for us, his followers who sit around him. He is saying we are really only his family and followers if we do the will of God. Blood connection, church membership, community status, citizenship... none of these counts in the Kingdom. Only this: do we do the will of God?
Our loyalties essentially come down to what we define as The Good. Is God, and the will of God, The Good? Or is our pride, our comfort, or our success, The Good?
In the extreme example of a so called "honour killing," The Good is not God or the will of God. It is the pride or the status of the family. We know that there are thousands of small honour killings by family every day.32
I suspect that in our secular Australian culture family still often owns us. Ask people what is really important to them and family is sure to be mentioned.
4. Either or: The 'either or' claims of the culture of God go to the very heart of society. It cuts right down into our families. I examine this at length in Healing the Family Sandwich, which is too long to include in its entirety here. It is sufficient to say that when Jesus calls us to a new way of being, he calls our whole being. We are; that is, we exist, typically, as a member of a family. Malina33 says, "In antiquity, the extended family meant everything. It not only was the source of one's status in the community but also functioned as the primary economic, religious, educational, and social network. Loss of connection to the family meant the loss of these vital networks as well as loss of connection to the land." We do not escape this in our much more individualistic age. Family sticks, even if we are geographically distant, or estranged.
With family, we are dealing with forces which have a life of their own. My wife and I did our premarital counselling by mail— we lived 300 miles from the nearest town! Nairn Kerr, our minister, asked us on one sheet, how we would deal with the influence of our families. I, innocent that I was, scribbled in, "Not a problem. They are twelve hundred miles away!" Yet we were soon banging into ideas and forces that were outside of, or beyond us, in some way and which originated in our families of origin. I had, as my sister said in our father's eulogy, "a blessedly sane and secure upbringing – one that I now give daily thanks for." But that early banging into each other's family, I now begin to see, included— and still includes— stuff that was invisible in my childhood home, but came down from the grandparents… or beyond.
In this text in Mark, Jesus is calling us "to join his surrogate family."
"And looking at those who sat around him, he said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers!" The surrogate family, according to Malina and Rohrbaugh34 is the family structure that those who had to leave the family would join; a new group in which to have an identity and location.
But Jesus' new family has its values, just as our blood family has theirs. The new family will seek to assert itself, and to reassure itself of the rightness of its identity. Typically, what a group does when people go against the grain is validate itself. So Malina and Rohrbaugh talk of 'deviance labelling.'35 (Reading Scenarios: Mark 3:20-30)
Negative labeling, what anthropologists call "deviance accusations," could, if made to stick, seriously undermine a person's place and role in the community. In our society labels like "pinko," "extremist," "wimp," "psycho," or "gay" can seriously damage a person's career or place in society. In the Mediterranean world of the first century labels such as "sinner," "unclean," or "barren" could be equally devastating. Most serious of all were accusations of sorcery, that is, being possessed by and having the power of "the prince of demons," Beelzebul (Mark 3:22).36
The fact that Malina's words so easily describe the church is warning that the culture of God has come near, but that we are still immersed in the culture of empire.
5. And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem said... The scribes, who are part of the societal corrective against the disruptor. Their accusations about Beelzebul label Jesus as the deviant. His 'gospel' is defined as evil, not good news. After 3:6 he is now under surveillance from the central authority.
6. Beelzebul. The scribes cannot believe Jesus is working with God's power. He must be using the power of Beelzebul. Although it is common to link this name to the Philistine God of that name, Marcus suggests that in Mark and Jesus' milieu there is a more likely association. In 1 Kings 8:13, Isaiah 63:15, Habakkuk 3:11, and Psalm 49:15,
and in later Hebrew, zebul comes to mean 'abode,' and this etymology would fit Matt 10:25, "If they have called the head of the household Beelzebul... This interpretation also goes well with the continuation of our passage, which speaks of the earth as Satan's house (3:25,27); Satan, then, would be the "lord of the household" as "the ruler of this world." (cf John 12:31, etc.)36a
In other words, the scribes would be heard to say that Jesus is the Baal of the household. Jesus' argument is that he is greater than Beelzebul: How can Satan cast out Satan? What is really happening is that the strong man, the force that snarls up all our lives with its violence and misery, has been bound; Jesus is "plundering its house." Its end has come.
The implication of his statements, which would not have escaped the scribes, is that they are on the wrong side. In opposing him, they are taking the side of the ruler of demons.
7. Unforgiveable? What I have learned from James Alison is that the unforgivable sin is not unforgivable because God refuses to forgive us. Instead, we wall ourselves off from the forgiveness which is always there, determined to see that Jesus and Jesus' way of being is not from God, and so assigning him to being on the side of the demons. When we are in this position, we cannot see forgiveness, and we cannot grasp forgiveness, or healing. God cannot intrude into our fortress of refusal without riding rough-shod over our humanity, and that is something God will not do, for that is the way of empire.
8. A Way to Read Mark
When Jesus asks "How can Satan cast out Satan?" René Girard replies,37 "It happens all the time. In fact, that's what human culture is founded on. Our anthropology can be summarized by the phrase Satan casting out Satan."
What he means is that the human family's way of maintaining itself when violence threatens to destroy our cohesion is to find 'a satan' on whom we can pin the blame and then drive them out, or kill them. Then our own social solidarity and stability can be restored. This is how the world works. We cast out the deviants; they become 'a satan' to us.
The problem is that they never are the problem. The scapegoat is always innocent, or mostly so. The Old Testament recognised this in its way; animals used for sacrifice were to be without blemish. Jesus on the cross was innocent; even the Roman Centurion said so. (Luke 23:47) So when we scapegoat, we cast out that which we say is 'a satan,' but in fact, we are being the satan who is attacking the innocent to shield ourselves from our sin.
The truth that Jesus means us to see, then, is in the stated consequences: a house divided against itself cannot stand. The human way of trying to keep a house together will never ultimately work because it always relies on expelling someone, or being over against someone. Jesus comes proclaiming the kingdom, the household, of God which will build a household on the stone the builders rejected. Jesus will let himself be cast out under the satanic accusation and build God's household on forgiveness. Jesus concludes, "And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but his end has come." Satan's reign is at an end precisely because his age-old game is that of Satan casting out Satan, resulting in a house divided that cannot stand.38
Jesus is not merely asking us to "swap families," which is far too often all we have done as church. The meat in this Markan sandwich is a call to a whole new way of being human. It is not merely a sort of surface call to allegiance to Jesus; not merely leaving the Methodists to join the Catholics because you married a Catholic boy—and that was explosive enough. It is a call to a life which says retaliation, violence, scapegoating are off the table for negotiating the life journey. It is not simply leaving our family but, in fact, repudiating their way of being.
In the common course of events Mark is the sadly-too-true gospel. At the cross
There were also women looking on from a distance; among them were Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James the younger and of Joses, and Salome. These used to follow him and provided for him when he was in Galilee; and there were many other women who had come up with him to Jerusalem. (Mark 15)
But his family is absent. In Mark's view they stand among the mob who cry, "Crucify him!" or, at best, are among those who have deserted him...
I see truth in what Girard39 says
Satan's power is anthropological -- that is, it derives from the ways in which human beings organize themselves into community and culture. If we were to organize differently, Satan's power would disappear. Jesus came inaugurating that different way of organizing, around forgiveness rather than accusation, and his unveiling of the satanic powers has dealt them a death blow. Satan is losing his transcendent powers; he has fallen from heaven like lightning.
But Nuechterlein40 also says
Girard is saying that Satan has no real substance outside of our human relations. He is the name ancient peoples gave to those structures of human relations themselves. So when modern people declare the gods of ancient peoples to be unreal they throw the baby out with the bathwater. We no longer name those real structures as satanic, as having to do fundamentally with accusing and expelling. Jesus in this passage shows that he understood the anthropology behind the name Satan and continued to use the name in order to speak to the thinking of his time. We may choose to use other nomenclatures for the anthropological reality, but we must not throw out the anthropological insight or we risk perpetuating the perpetrators' mythic version of reality.
If we were to organize differently, Satan's power would disappear. This is why the call to discipleship, and the call away from the mores of family, is so critical. As long as we live in the way we have always lived, we are under the power of something eons old and far greater than us. As soon as we live in Jesus' way, we begin to bind the strong man.
The danger is if we think Satan is therefore nothing at all. Satan is real, and remains present. Nuechterlein can say
Satan has no firm ontology. Satan disappears if human beings come to organize themselves in another way — for example, the alternative way that Jesus has come to offer us by letting himself become the one accused and cast out. Jesus is the Forgiving Victim who is now the new basis for human community and culture.
But this only happens if we disciple ourselves to Jesus. If we do not focus on forgiveness, nonviolence, compassion and service, which are the way Jesus lived, and which open us to the presence of Jesus now, then we will be subject to the same old rivalries, and fall under the power of satan nonetheless. And no longer believing in 'him,' we will be the more subject to 'him' in our unconsciousness.41
9. He has gone out of his mind: NRSV has it that people were saying, ‘He has gone out of his mind,’ (exestē) which is true to the text. But Hamerton-Kelly42 correctly says the crowd is exestē . This is not a misreading on his part; rather, see the scapegoat's alleged guilt and you see the guilt of the crowd. The fear and vulnerability of the crowd is already being tipped onto Jesus.
10. Why do people not hear? Mark 3 ends with a clear distinction between those who are of Jesus' family and those who are not. This family bears no relationship to his blood family. And as the chapter closes it has been claimed, by some, that his authority over evil exists only because he himself is armed with the power of evil. The narrative destroys this argument in 3:23-30, and begins chapter 4 with "the biggest crowd yet," where we will be, three times, shown his authority over the sea, the proverbial place of chaos and evil. And three times we will be told that he teaches. That teaching will address another question about Jesus' power: If he is so powerful, how is that so many people do not see or hear the obvious truth of his gospel? The question must answer the grief of the divided families which is reflected in chapter 3, and again in 13:12.
Footnotes
1. I Kings 13:1-5 While Jeroboam was standing by the altar to offer incense, a man of God came out of Judah by the word of the Lord to Bethel 2and proclaimed against the altar by the word of the Lord, and said, ‘O altar, altar, thus says the Lord: “A son shall be born to the house of David, Josiah by name; and he shall sacrifice on you the priests of the high places who offer incense on you, and human bones shall be burned on you.” ’ 3He gave a sign the same day, saying, ‘This is the sign that the Lord has spoken: “The altar shall be torn down, and the ashes that are on it shall be poured out.” ’ 4When the king heard what the man of God cried out against the altar at Bethel, Jeroboam stretched out his hand from the altar, saying, ‘Seize him!’ But the hand that he stretched out against him withered so that he could not draw it back to himself. 5The altar also was torn down, and the ashes poured out from the altar, according to the sign that the man of God had given by the word of the Lord.
2. James Alison The Joy of Being Wrong, pp85
3. Marcus Mark, pp252
4. b. Yoma 85b, quoted by Marcus pp248
5. Hamerton-Kelly The Gospel and the Sacred, pp79
6. m. 'Abot 3:12 See https://www.sefaria.org/Pirkei_Avot.3.12?lang=bi
7. Marcus pp248
8. Hamerton-Kelly pp54
9. Marcus pp253
10. Marcus pp246
11. https://www.onemansweb.org/mark-3-1-8.html
12. Davidson https://isthatinthebible.wordpress.com/2016/08/29/did-mark-invent-the-sea-of-galilee/
13. Ched Myers et al "Say to This Mountain": Mark's Story of Discipleship, quoted by Paul Nuechterlein http://girardianlectionary.net/year_b/proper_7b.htm
14. Marcus pp256
15. cf Marcus, pp 33-37
16. Marcus, pp 258
17. Marcus pp258
18. Prior: https://www.onemansweb.org/satan-sabbath-and-original-sin-mark-320-35.html, edited
19. Hamerton-Kelly pp81
20. Hamerton-Kelly pp81
21. Hamerton-Kelly pp81
22. Marcus pp266
23. Marcus pp271
24. Marcus pp271
25. Marcus pp 255
26. Marcus pp 271
27. Byrne Byrne, Brendan, A Costly Freedom, (St Paul's Publications 2008) (pp 73)
28. Marcus pp269
29. Hamerton-Kelly pp 82
30. Marcus pp270
31. Prior: https://www.onemansweb.org/a-most-uncomfortable-invitation-mark-3-20-35.html
32. Prior: https://www.onemansweb.org/a-most-uncomfortable-invitation-mark-3-20-35.html, edited
33. Malina and Rohrbaugh Social Science Commentary on the Synoptic Gospels, Section on Mark 3:31-35
34. Malina, Section on Mark 3:31-35
35. Malina, Section on Mark 3:20-30
36. Malina, Reading Scenarios: Mark 3:20-30. Point 4: 4. Either or, can be read in much more detail at Prior: https://www.onemansweb.org/healing-and-the-family-sandwich-mark-3-20-35.html , from which it is heavily edited
36a. Marcus pp272
37. http://girardianlectionary.net/year_b/proper_5b.htm
38. Paul Nuechterlein http://girardianlectionary.net/year_b/proper_5b.htm
39. Ibid
40. Ibid
41. Much of Point 8. A Way to Read Mark is a taken from my post at https://www.onemansweb.org/satan-sabbath-and-original-sin-mark-320-35.html
42. Hamerton-Kelly pp78
