I’m not sure where Jesus is at the beginning of today’s Gospel reading. But he’s in a house somewhere, whose I don’t know; he’s not somewhere out on the road, or in a boat on the lake, the sort of places we often find him. He’s in a house; but wherever he is, you’re going to get a crowd: so many people, and so much going on that Jesus and his friends can’t even get a bite to eat.
The story Mark tells us focuses on two sets of people who really should have known who Jesus was and what he was about. But it seems they don’t. Firstly, there’s Jesus’ own family; and then secondly we have the scribes, or teachers of the Law, people who knew the faith inside out.
So the family of Jesus arrive, determined to save him from himself. They can’t get near; they’re somewhere on the edge of the crowd, and they have to send a message in to try and get Jesus to come out to them. Why? Because they really don’t understand what’s going on. In fact they think he’s gone out of his mind. “He’s beside himself,” they say. The verb used here in the original Greek of Mark’s Gospel means literally “to stand outside of”.
I suppose that was true in way, though not in the way the family were thinking. Jesus was beside himself. Or at least, Jesus was living in more than one world; yes, he was the carpenter’s son from Nazareth, living in the First Century equivalent of the world in which you and I live.
But was that world his real home? Jesus talked a lot to the crowds about somewhere else, another world that he said had drawn close to them as he spoke, as he forgave, as he healed. A world he called “the kingdom of God”. The Kingdom of God is anywhere and everywhere, and it’s the world how God always intended it to be. The world in which God is honoured as Father, the world in which people live together as sisters and brothers. And that was the world of Jesus’ true life, the world he told stories about, the world in which he invites us to join him.
But that was something that really annoyed the scribes, the teachers of the Law. They were there in the crowd, because it annoyed them so much that they’d come down specially from Jerusalem to challenge Jesus. You see, they also didn’t understand what was going on. Religion had to be done their way, or else it wasn’t real. I wonder if we really grasp just how radical all this talk about the Kingdom was? The idea that people could themselves talk to God, could call him “our Father”. Here I am standing here today in a Church, wearing liturgical robes, part of the “organised religion” of our times. We’re human beings, and we need to be organised, and Jesus himself went to synagogue and to the Temple. But when he talked about the Kingdom what Jesus was really saying is this: what we do in church and in the organised religion bit of our lives is less important than that we ourselves are right with God, and right with one another, right with our sisters and brothers, right with the other people God loves just as much as he loves you and me.
Now the scribes so couldn’t get their heads round that that they could only imagine that Jesus was in league with Beelzebul, with the prince of demons, with Satan himself. Or maybe they just wanted to persuade the people of that, so they could discredit this new and dangerous preacher who was such a threat to the way they did things.
What they hadn’t grasped, I think, was the difference between religion and faith. They’re two different things. Religion should be an expression of faith, the servant of faith, a way in which we share our faith, a place where we can encourage one another in faith. But faith comes first - the living relationship with the living God that Jesus called “living in God’s Kingdom.” That’s what it’s really about, much more than hymns or liturgies or ministries or venerable buildings, however much we may love all of that. Religion must never become an end in itself, and maybe for the scribes that’s just what it had become; a system which had God safely and securely locked up inside it.
So what’s the Church really about? The Bishop of Chelmsford, Stephen Cotterell, a very mission minded man and a pretty good preacher, once noted that “Christians have made a religion in the name of the one man who came to end all religion.” But that’s only if the Church isn’t being what it’s supposed to be. That’s only if Church becomes an end in itself. What the Church is supposed to be is a sort of outpost of the Kingdom of God, a community of people united in mission by his Holy Spirit.
Within this story there’s one really difficult bit, and that’s to do with the unpardonable or unforgivable sin, the sin against the Holy Spirit. What does Jesus mean by that? I still wrestle with this, and with the idea of any sin being unforgivable, for surely God’s love is greater than any sin. What exactly is Jesus saying to the scribes? Maybe that they know that what he’s saying is true - and yet for their own ends they continue to work against him. They’re working for themselves while they claim to work for God, and for as long as they do that, they’ll not be forgiven.
Anyway, Jesus dealt with the scribes. And he dealt with his own family, too - not by rejecting them, so much as by including everyone in as family. This is the picture of God the Father that Jesus always gives us: God who invites us in, and assures us of a place. So let’s become part of that crowd as Jesus speaks. Hear how he says “Here are my mother and my brothers and my sisters, for whoever does the will of God, and whoever lives in the Kingdom of God, is my brother and sister and mother.”
Where am I really in that picture? Where are you? God is always saying to us, “Come closer, receive more from me, do more with me.” What might that mean for me? For you? Where does his Spirit touch mine? Where is my heart being pressed? How can I grow to be what God’s wanting me to be? To live in the Kingdom is to love in the presence of miracle and mystery, and at the heart of it all, love. And just at this point in my life my task is simply this: to learn how to be, here and now, the person, the child, God says I am to him. Amen.
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