Throughout Mark, Jesus has been blowing up the religious and social structures and expectations. People continue to flock to him and His message about the nature of the Kingdom of God. In the previous chapter, Jesus points out that the Pharisees and other religious leaders have their understanding of the Sabbath upside down. “The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath.” Rather than a restrictive, claustrophobic thing, the truth of God bursts out into a more abundant life.
What do we have upside-down? Where does God want us to burst out rather than be restricted.
This passage has a chiastic structure, where topics come up in order, a crux is reached, and then the same topics are addressed in reverse order. Here, it proceeds: Crowd / Family / Scribes / Satan / Scribes / Family / Crowd.
The point of the broader passage is that Jesus does not fit within the structures of this world. The story opens with a literal problem of people fitting, as the crowds press on around Him and His disciples, so much so that they don’t even have room to eat. Then His family comes, clearly seeing Him as the black sheep of the family, off doing something completely insane, who needs to be taken charge of.
Then the religious-political structure of the day rears its head, responding to the disruption Jesus had brought both when His words and miraculous actions. If they accept His actions at face value they also have to accept His words, and that’s not something they are willing to do. So, naturally, they blame it on Satan.
This is what Jesus addresses at the crux of the passage. He has been out there forgiving sins by the power of the Holy Spirit, and if someone denies the power and efficacy of that grace and forgiveness, how can they accept it? It’s not Jesus who is evil, but the leaders who are seeking to keep the people from the truth of God.
The metaphor of the “strong man’s house” sits at the center of the passage, an understanding of the world as being in the midst of a cosmic struggle. Jesus offers victory in that struggle, and a world more vast and varied than that imagined by the scribes or His family or the crowds.
When was the last time we recognized that vastness? When was the last time we embraced the unknown that Jesus sets in front of us? The “I don’t know” moments are opportunities for God to show us things beyond what we could have imagined.
Jesus reveals some of this by showing a new mode of kinship. The nuclear family structure becomes subsumed into the broader family of God, those around us who seek to know and do God’s will. The world around us seeks to divide and label us, but Jesus seeks a unity and reconciliation that swells beyond our fragile human structures.
We live in an era of division, suspicion, assumptions and disunity. What can we do with all the opinions, all the expectations, all the news and anxiety and claustrophobic restrictions of this world? All we can do is lay then at the feet of the One who calls us brother and sister.
— Sermon Notes, Dave Sim, Renew Church Lynnwood, WA, October 29, 2023