Monday in the Third Week of Ordinary Time, January 22, 2024

Mark 3, 22-30

The scribes who had come from Jerusalem said of Jesus, “He is possessed by Beelzebul,” and “By the prince of demons he drives out demons.”Summoning them, he began to speak to them in parables, “How can Satan drive 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; that is the end of him. But no one can enter a strong man’s house to plunder his property unless he first ties up the strong man. Then he can plunder his house. Amen, I say to you, all sins and all blasphemies that people utter will be forgiven them. But whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never have forgiveness, but is guilty of an everlasting sin.” For they had said, “He has an unclean spirit.”

St. Mark reports little of the scribes and Pharisees in comparison with the other Gospels.  Matthew links them with an almost continuous persecution of him by the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem.  St. Luke speaks of them to show that they are not the good Jews they claimed to be, and so explaining their opposition to Jesus.  St. John presents a more complex reaction of the scribes and Pharisees to Jesus, with some favorable to him.  St. Mark shows them as part of a group of enemies, along with the people at Nazareth and the demons.  When Mark does bring them up, he is showing Jesus as making or explaining a point about Jewish Law and practices, matters which Mark’s Gentile Christian audience would have found baffling in their Jewish neighbors.

In the present Gospel Reading, Jesus responds to accusations by the scribes and Pharisees that “He is possessed by Beelzebul,” and “By the prince of demons he drives out demons.”  (The first accusation is more literally translated as the very direct, “Beelzebul has him”).  Now, by this time the Gentile Christians understood that Beelzebul was the prince of demons and that the demons were wicked spirits who could enter and have power over a human being, but this was very much a Jewish concept and was mostly foreign to their own culture in Rome.  The Greek word from which “demon” is taken, daimonion, did not mean “a wicked spirit”.  It meant a sort of guardian spirit, or a force of nature.  These played almost no part in mythology and were not worshipped as gods but were mentioned by various poets, including Homer.  Early Greek-speaking Christians adopted the word for translating “evil spirits” or “devils”, which had no equivalent in Greek.  

“How can Satan drive out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand.”  Jesus uses “Satan” in place of the Canaanite name “Beelzebul”.  He takes the accusation and shows that it is ridiculous on its face.  The implication of the Pharisees in their accusation was that Satan was using Jesus to attack the Jewish religion and was attempting to show that Jesus had divine validation by forcing out his own demons, as though to mimic a successful exorcism.  We note that Jesus does not address the accusation of his being possessed as it is beneath contempt.

“But no one can enter a strong man’s house to plunder his property unless he first ties up the strong man.  Then he can plunder his house.”  This teaching can be understood in two ways.  First, Jesus could be speaking of a case of demonic possession, that a demon “ties up” a human, that is, “binds” him so that the demon can act within him and attempt to destroy him.  If the man is too strong through his faith for the demon, the demon will have no success with him and go on to someone else.  A weaker person might actually invite the demon in hoping to gain something but then becomes his captive.  Second, Jesus could be staying that the devil is a “strong man” but that someone stronger can enter his house and bind him and free those whom he has held captive and treated as his “property”: “And he laid hold on the dragon, the old serpent, which is the devil and Satan, and bound him” (Revelation 20, 2).

“Amen, I say to you, all sins and all blasphemies that people utter will be forgiven them. But whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never have forgiveness, but is guilty of an everlasting sin.”  Some early Christians misinterpreted this verse to mean that the Holy Spirit took the place of the human soul in Jesus Christ.  But if this were so, the Son of God did not assume a human nature, he would be a divine Person who had taken over the body of a human as though it were a puppet or a tool.  Jesus Christ is a divine Person, the Son of God, who assumed a full human nature and joined himself to a human body and soul in the womb of the Virgin Mary.  In the verse, Jesus states that anyone who “blasphemes against the Holy Spirit” will never be forgiven, though all other sins can be, with proper repentance and contrition.  St. Mark links to this verse his statement that, “For they had said, He has an unclean spirit.”  It is the Holy Spirit who reveals to our minds and hearts that Jesus is Lord, the Son of God.  Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, then, is the rejection of this revelation as though to deny that God could save us from our sins, or to deny his love, or to even deny his existence.  Jesus calls this sin unforgivable because those who reject Jesus whom God has sent cannot be saved.  Now, God never ceases to draw to himself even those who have rejected and mocked him and so we see some who call themselves atheists convert, but the Lord is speaking of those who maintain their hardness of heart at the time of their deaths.  

The Lord has rescued us from the powers of darkness so let us live in the clear light of faith, rejoicing in his mercy.