06/09/2024
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Readings for Sunday, June 9, 2024
1 Samuel 8:4-20, (11:14-15)
2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1
Mark 3:20-35
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https://bible.art/meaning/mark-3:35
https://renew.org/who-were-jesus-brothers/
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And we have also arrived at one of Jesus’ basic insights which, by Mark’s account, is expressed as his first “parable,” or riddle. When Jesus is accused — Satan’s basic principle of power — of having his power come from Beelzebul, he turns their accusation into a riddle:
And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem said, “He has Beelzebul, and by the ruler of the demons he casts out demons.”
And he called them to him, and spoke to them in parables:
♦“How can Satan cast out Satan?
◊ If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand.
◊ And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand.
◊ And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but his end has come.” (Mark 3:23-26)
Jesus is not here denying that Satan does cast out Satan, which is the usual reading of this riddle. No, Satan casting out Satan is precisely what the scribes from Jerusalem have just tried to do to Jesus — though they, of course, don’t see it that way. The scribes see themselves as doing God’s work, not Satan’s work. But, in accusing Jesus with being of Beelzebul, (which is another of Satan’s names), they are not only manifesting the nature of Satan by definition (Satan means "the accuser"), but they also use the mechanism of “Satan casting out Satan.” They are acting out the ultimate principle of satanic power, namely, the joint accusation they bring against Jesus, as an attempt to cast him out by identifying him with one of Satan’s names. They think they are doing God’s work, but Jesus’ riddle cleverly suggests otherwise.
What Jesus is trying to help us to see with this riddle is that “Satan casting out Satan” is precisely the shape of all our unholy human interactions since the foundations of our world.
Jesus is not challenging the reality, because, Satan does cast out Satan. The mechanism which generates a kind of peace within human community is activated by the majority doing the work of Satan by accusing a minority of being the "satanic" trouble-makers, the tempters, and so they justify the violence of casting them out. And the traces of violence by the majority are veiled, or justified, to themselve by the idolatry of seeing their satanic casting-out as something commanded by God. Whatever the accused said or did is labled violence against the community, but the violence of the community against the accused is seen as a righteous or sacred act in obedience to higher powers.
Thus, rather than challenging the reality, Jesus is affirming the reality of Satan casting out Satan yet he is also challenging the outcome: this mechanism will never result in a lasting peace as we think, but always end with a divided house that cannot stand. And later, in his death on the cross and subsequent resurrection, Jesus’ obedience to his Father will challenge that idolatry: what we mistakenly see as God commanding us to cast out Satan is actually Satan casting out Satan.
The God of Jesus, the God who is Love, would never ask us to base our relationships in acts of force or isolationism. But Satan tricks us into thinking that he is God, and so we continue to play his game.
The outcome of “Satan casting out Satan” needs to be challenged because humankind has unwittingly put its faith precisely in this kind of unholy interaction based on accusation and sanctioning violence. Meanwhile, we have remained blind to seeing that our form of "peaceful communion" is based on the violence of Satan casting out Satan.
Through his riddle Jesus is inviting us to recognize our unholy, and relationally destructive actions are unholy — as commanded by an accuser, Satan, not God, the one who is always extending an invitation to unity, love and peaceful coexistence — and as always, the road of accusations and condemnation is doomed to fail, always doomed to end in division. All our attempts at culture and community are, at their foundations, based on a being over against someone else, so that all our human communities ultimately end in division. Calling attention to how these satanic powers have operated is thus the first step in their reign coming to an end. And Satan falls from heaven like lightning (Luke 10:18).
God’s Holy Communion in Jesus Christ, represents the coming of God’s reign based on love and inclusion rather than another form of sanctioned of sacralizing violence. God’s reign comes through its opposite, that is to say, through the righteous suffering of religious violence at the hands of an accusing humanity in the cross, which serves, in the end, only to reveal the powerlessness of such violence by raising this Jesus from the dead.
