10th Sunday Year B
See Commentary on Mark 3: 20-35 in Mark 3:19b-21, Mark 3:22-30 & Mark 3:31-35
Homily 1 - 2018
Seven hundred years before Jesus, the Hebrew prophet Isaiah had strongly decried many of his contemporaries who, he said, called “evil good and good evil”, who were “wise in your own eyes, and shrewd in your own sight”, who “legislated infamous laws”, diverting “the needy from justice”. And in today’s Gospel passage, we have the “lawyers”, up from the capital, from Jerusalem, accusing Jesus of casting out devils “through the prince of devils” – the very ones “wise in their own eyes”, and accepted as such generally within the culture, declaring that “an unclean spirit is in him”, in Jesus, the truly Holy One, the human embodiment of the mercy of God. Jesus calls such judgment, such blindness, such behavior “blaspheming, or sinning, against the Holy Spirit”. Ominously, he warned that such shutting self off from truth and love rendered even God’s forgiveness empty, powerless. Forgiveness needs to be received, as gift, for it to operate. Sharing in divine life, after all, is precisely sharing.
Calling good evil, and evil good. Sometimes it is conscious and deliberate. More often, it is so mixed in with the culture, with “the way we always do things around here”, that it goes unnoticed, and indeed people flatter themselves as being “wise in their own eyes”. We have seen it writ large through the recent Royal Commissions into Sexual Abuse in Institutions and the Banking Industry. It has been unearthed in the Police Force, and just yesterday, according to investigative journalists at the Age newspaper, in the Defence Forces’ elite SAS Regiment operating in Afghanistan.
I wonder, too, about the plague of domestic violence. Do abusers see their behavior as acceptable? Are they capable of calling it abuse? Do Catholic abusers ever name and confess their violence as such in Confession? Do workmates or neighbours choose not to poke their noses in, seeing it as ‘none of their business’?
Cultural deficiencies are always easier to see by others outside the culture than by those within it; but they are there, and they are destructive. One of the factors leading to not seeing, to denying their existence, is having a stake in the ‘status quo’. Does that make us Christians with our interest in morality susceptible, almost by definition? And what about us so-called Church leaders and teachers, the “wise in our own eyes”? That seemed to be the problem in Jesus’ day. Among Jesus’ greatest opponents were the official lawyers, the “scribes from Jerusalem”, along with the powerful and ubiquitous lay proponents of orthodoxy, the Pharisees. They thought that they were even doing God’s will in opposing him.
The stakes are high. As the Gospel put it, “whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never have forgiveness”. I presume, I hope, that if I stop the behavior that constitutes such blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, if I can let go of the attitude of not needing forgiveness for my seeing “good as evil and evil as good”, and if I can stop considering myself “wise” and “shrewd” and having all the answers, then I can open myself again to the healing, unifying, reconciling working out of God’s forgiveness.
All that calls for humility. That is why the findings of the Royal Commission into Institutional Abuse can be so helpful to us as Church. It can get us freely opening our eyes, getting us to know ourselves better, finding ways to listen to others, to each other, learning to discern and to work together. I do not think that that will happen without our taking prayer seriously.
I hope that the two-year period we have leading up to the Plenary Council will provide opportunity for precisely such change. Personally, I think that the preparation time, provided we give it our best shot and are prepared to take a bit of local initiative, may be more fruitful even than the Council itself.
Homily 2 - 2024
In find it somewhat amazing that a group of scribes from Jerusalem had come north to Galilee and were spreading word around that it was “through the prince of devils” that Jesus “was casting out devils”. Jesus himself seemed to have been amazed, too, and did not hesitate to show how ridiculous their accusation was. He went further, in fact, to warn people of the dangers revealed in such conclusions that “an unclean spirit was in him”, when the reality was the exact opposite.
It is worth our while reflecting thoughtfully on what Jesus actually had to say: “Everyone’s sins will be forgiven and all their blasphemies; but let them blaspheme against the Holy Spirit and they will never have forgiveness: they are guilty of an eternal sin”.
The problem with the scribes was that something seemed to have thoroughly blinded them, rendering them unable or unwilling to discern the difference between an unclean spirit and the Holy Spirit.
The Spirit at work in Jesus was God’s Holy Spirit. Mark had already made that obvious in previous incidents of his Gospel. As a preliminary to Jesus’ public ministry, he had drawn attention to how the Spirit had descended on Jesus at his baptism by John. He then noted how the Spirit had immediately driven Jesus out into the wilderness where he had remained for forty days. Only then did Jesus commence his public ministry. He had become a changed man, filled with the Spirit, so much so that “his teaching made a deep impression on people because, unlike the scribes, he taught them with authority”. His activity had a similar effect to his teaching. On one occasion still early in his ministry, after casting out an unclean spirit from a man in one of their synagogues, people remarked, “here is a teaching that is new, and with authority behind it.” Mark left it to his readers to draw their own conclusion about the source of that authority: the Spirit that had descended on him at his baptism.
Without describing what Jesus’ authority was like or how precisely it struck them, Mark approved of the unanimous conclusions of the Galilean villagers in their discernment of the presence of God’s Spirit in Jesus. The scribes from Jerusalem, on the other hand, had already reached their negative assessment with no discernment at all. They had reached their radically mistaken conclusion based either on their unwillingness to make any changes to their familiar lifestyle (asked for in Jesus’ call to continued conversion) or based on the possible threat to their power and influence that they feared could come from Jesus himself.
Their prejudices and insecurity blinded and paralysed them. All they could see in Jesus was negative. They concluded that his message and call arose from an unclean spirit — and were unwilling or unable to see in him the liberating presence of the Spirit of God. And probably, they did not worry about or question their conclusion for a moment. In their minds, the problem lay with Jesus — “the unclean spirit” was in him!!
I find that quite disturbing. It raises a question for us: how to avoid the danger?
Personally, I would love to sharpen my spontaneous sensitivity to the presence of our creating God in everyone I encounter. By now I am running out of time to make it a habit — but I shall keep on trying during what time is left.