A recording of today's gospel and blog can be found here.
****
Today’s gospel (Mark 3:22-30) revisits a passage we heard
almost exactly twelve months ago (22
January 2024). The scribes from Jerusalem – perhaps supposedly a better
class of scribe – deliver their judgement on Jesus with what might have been the
kind of scoff we should expect from high-placed talking heads in Roman
Palestine:
He is possessed by
the devil, they say.
Jesus’ refutation of their precipitately formed opinion is
swift and decisive: How can Satan cast out Satan? He replies. And if
a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand.
The final lines of this passage, however, are a warning of the ominous
confusion that had descended on these high authorities from the capital of
Israel: Whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit, Jesus says, never
has forgiveness. Let us consider these three movements of the gospel, like
three movements in a piece of music.
The first movement
He is possessed by the devil, say the scribes. Thus,
they become the malign patron saints of all those who, henceforth, in the history
of the Mystical Body will take scandal at her action and find a devil in her.
Their descendants might be traced today to those who accuse the Church of
wickedly barring women’s ordination or oppressing certain minorities. There is
a mystery here and it is a mystery of iniquity. It is a common enough
assumption these days that we take the Lord’s inunction not to judge as a
command to think everyone is inspired by the best of intentions. Judge not,
lest you be judged, is the Lord’s command, and yet He also tells us to be
wise as serpents; we cannot take this rule about not judging as an indication
that we will not face malice and opposition, for these are the lot of fallen
humanity. Christ asks us not to judge where people stand ultimately before God;
not to stick our heads in the ground and pretend there is nothing wrong. There have
been many devils in the Church, as the long lines of abuse victims can testify,
but let us not forget that the actions of abusers are a betrayal what the
Church is. Moreover, if they are devils who scoff at the Church from the
outside, is the same not true of those who scoff at their brothers and sisters
within the Church, who unthinkingly adopt spite rather than true discernment as
their mode of relating to others?
The second movement
And thus begins Jesus’ refutation of their scoffing nonsense:
a house divided against itself cannot stand. Actually, Satan’s house cannot
but be divided against itself. It was called to stand for God; it tried instead
to stand for itself, its own vainglory and security, and thus it forged a
bargain with the malice of dissent, leaving behind the logic of God’s charity. Yet,
the temporary unity of those in revolt against God – this is what Jesus here
alludes to - is ultimately founded on the shifting sands of radical selfishness
and, therefore, of division. According to the poet Yeats in the The
Second Coming,
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
Satan’s house cannot stand against itself, and such as it
is, it will fall, as everything founded on sand will fall. The only question
for us is whether anything in our own lives risks involving us in that
calamitous conclusion. No earthly power will hold us at the centre; no
privilege or perfection of our own can prevent the anarchy which sin looses
upon our souls if we, in our pitiable turn, choose to scoff like Satan rather
than to bless. How can we avoid such an outcome unless we ask ourselves with
honesty: where do I make myself weak? For none can enter a strong man’s
house and plunder his goods unless he first binds the strong man. Jesus
here refers to Satan, but we can apply the principle to ourselves. Weakened by
the flesh, compromising ourselves through the world, we are at every risk of
the deceits of the Enemy whenever we try to source our strength in ourselves,
rather than in the Almighty.
The third movement
And thus comes the conclusion: all sins can be forgiven
except the sin of blaspheming against the Holy Spirit, i.e. the sin of abandoning
hope in the goodness of God, of finding nothing but evil in the works He has
wrought to the point that one concludes God has an unclean spirit. This,
after all, is the fault that these scribes commit.
And before we find such a conclusion too obscure – for who
ascribes such uncleanness to God? - we should observe that this anti-God
nihilism surrounds us. It shapes the high, moralistic barracking of contemporary
liberalism for which the ten commandments are a kind of genocide against human
freedom. To say that God’s law is opposed to human freedom is indeed to say, He
has an unclean spirit, for who but an evil God would impose such burdens on
His children?
The only response to such accusations is to remember who it
is they really accuse, the one who stands accused in this very gospel. My
yolk is sweet, and my burden is light, He replies. Heaven forefend that we
should hold His law to be too high or too heavy to be kept by His grace, and
yet, is this not the meaning of the widespread abandonment of the Christian law
around us, where it is assumed that there is such an unbridgeable gulf between
our condition and the path He calls us to? That certain human actions are so
much part of human nature that God cannot really have intended to forbid them?
Here we should remember that encouraging humans to defy God’s command not to
eat of a particular fruit was in fact the devil’s original temptation.
All that remains for us to do, therefore, is to offer up our
“yes” and “thank you” to the one who can deliver us from the devils around us.
No comments:
Post a Comment