There’s No Place Like Home…

I’m not sure what exactly caught my eye about this abandoned building in the middle of a lot in Apalachicola when Denise and I visited there one Friday afternoon a month or so ago. As I read Mark 3:20-35 though, the picture came to my mind again. While I am quite certain this old building had not been a home, at one point it had been some sort of structure with a purpose. The ruin stands in stark contrast to surrounding buildings which have been renovated and turned into boutique type shops.

While the oysters are still gathered in Apalachicola Bay and the Gulf, the industry is not what it used to be. It took a concerted effort on the part of the leaders of the city to capture a vision for their community and draw visitors to the area. It appears to have worked! Instead of it being a dead little town filled with run down buildings and nothing to draw people to visit or live there, it is a community reborn. For many it is home… and home is good!

I wonder what Jesus felt like when he came back home? Mark, in his typical choppy editorial style moved directly from the calling of the twelve disciples to the next scene with these brief words: “Then he went home…”. Why this isn’t included in verse twenty (the beginning of the passage) baffles me. It is the beginning of the sentence after all!

So Jesus went home… and it wasn’t a nice, quiet homecoming by any stretch of the imagination! The crowd came together and it soon overwhelmed the town. There were so many people in the village that they couldn’t even eat. Sort of a weird observation if you ask me, but then this whole passage is sort of weird in the way it is put together.

A massive crowd has come out to see Jesus and then his family comes out to see what all the commotion is about. This hometown carpenter’s son was turning the community on its ear and people were talking. After all, he was curing the sick, casting out demons, and healing in the synagogue. Yes, this small town boy was surprising everyone, including his family according to Mark’s account. “This is nuts! This guy is crazy! He has plumb gone out of his mind!” That is what the crowd was saying… and his family came out to restrain him! They didn’t come out to support him… they didn’t come out to tell the crowd that he wasn’t crazy… they came out to restrain him.

Then, as if the crowd shouting “crazy man walking” wasn’t enough, the scribes came down from Jerusalem to add to the insanity. They claimed that everything that Jesus was doing was on orders from Beelzebul, otherwise known as the ruler of the demons or Satan. Can you imagine the pandemonium going on? Stop for a minute and put yourself into the scene. The electricity is in the air… the crowd is whipped up… the family is up in arms… and in the middle of all this stands Jesus. The world is going crazy all around him and yet he remains calm and rational.

Wait a minute, folks… If I am crazy or working for Satan, how can I be casting out demons who work for Satan in Satan’s name? You are calling me crazy, but what you are saying is completely insane! Through a series of parables he drives his point home that he is not a minion of Satan. He restores some logic and calm to the situation. What the crowd and the scribes don’t realize, though, is the fact that Jesus is talking about their very own “house”. The division in Jerusalem between the haves and the have-nots… the division between the ordinary folks and the religious elite… the division between those who are coddling up to Rome for their own selfish gain and those who are trying to break free from Rome’s oppression… Yes folks, your house is divided. And a divided house cannot stand… it will fall.

In the middle of the insanity created by the crowd and the religious elite (I wonder how much of this whipping up was carefully orchestrated by the religious authorities?), Jesus speaks the truth. In the midst of all their bickering and backstabbing, the people were allowing their faith to be hijacked. Their house (spiritual house, synagogue, and/or temple) was weak and thus being overrun. In all of their fighting and feuding, they had forgotten whose house it was in first place. Jesus had come to “clean house” and re-establish God’s kingdom here on earth as it is in heaven, to use his words that we recite each time we say The Lord’s Prayer. A strong house cannot be plundered but a weak house can.

Then, as if this scene isn’t complex enough, Mark throws in a couple of doozies for us to ponder. “Truly I tell you, people will be forgiven for their sins and whatever blasphemies they utter; but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit can never have forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin…” (Mark 3:28-29) What exactly did Jesus mean by this? Is there such a thing as an unforgivable sin? I am not certain that this was the intent of Jesus’ words. Like the parables he shared earlier with the crowd about kingdoms divided and kingdoms falling down, I think Jesus is making a very strong point.

The key for me is found in the next phrase which is verse 30: “for they had said, ‘He has an unclean spirit.” Jesus could take all of the arguments about him being the mayor of crazy-town or the chief Loon in Loonyville… He could take even the comments from his own family about him being out of his mind. After all, when push came to shove and he was arrested, tried, convicted, and crucified; he was abandoned by nearly everybody who had followed him, including Peter who denied knowing him three times.

What I believe he meant by his comment about the unforgivable sin (which Jesus would later prove didn’t really exist) was that you were a fool to go up against the Holy Spirit! Jesus was not moving under his own power. He was not a simple carpenter’s son and rabbi who had delusions of grandeur like the religious elite. He was operating under God’s orders and was himself filled with the Holy Spirit. The blaspheming against the Holy Spirit, in my mind, has more to do with why in the heck would you be fighting against God? Hello, religious elite, anybody home? You are calling the Son of God a minion of Satan! The path you are walking down can only lead to one destination… destruction.

To wrap up the passage from Mark, we have the discussion about who is your mother or  brother or sister. I don’t believe that Jesus was intentionally dissing his own family. I think that he was actually enlarging his family. The crowd quite literally was saying, “Hey Jesus, your mom and your brothers and sisters are outside looking for you.” Yes, they were biologically and in every other way his kin. However, Jesus was beginning to reveal that his family was a whole lot bigger than simply a group tied together by genetics. His family is much larger that that and for that I thank God! Because if it wasn’t, you and I, dear reader, wouldn’t be able to be a part of that family which we often call, “Christ-Followers”.

So Padre, if you were preaching on this passage, what would you do? Would you exhaust everyone, including yourself by tackling every aspect of this passage? I have only touched the surface of the possibilities with this particular blog. There is so much that can be said about this passage of Scripture and there are many sermons that could be preached from it.

Let’s take the picture of the structure at the top of this blog, you could spend a lot of time speculating about what the building was actually used for. We could gather up old maps and photos from Apalachicola and even do some excavating around the site to discover what secrets the building holds. But for me, the building represents something else all together. A structure that was abandoned and has fallen into disrepair. Doesn’t that sound like the “house” or “kingdom” Jesus was talking about in the Gospel reading?

While there is no place like home, it is what we do with that home that makes the difference. I am not simply talking about historic buildings or structures or even church buildings though. What I am talking about when I say there is no place like home is completely different. My son and I were talking just today about the nomad life he had growing up as the son of an Air Force Chaplain. When he was 18 months old, we moved from Fergus Falls, Minnesota and began a 21 year journey that would take me to eight different installations and he and his mother to seven different homes. The longest we stayed in one place was four years and the shortest we stayed somewhere was one year. A joke is often told in our Air Force circles that home is where the Air Force sends you!

In the case of Jesus and the passage from Mark’s Gospel, the answer is somewhat similar. Home is where the Good Lord sends you! Just like the fact that Jesus’ family is not just biological. All who follow Christ… all who do claim him as Savior… Each one of us Jesus claims as family. I look around at the church today and sadly I see a lot of hatred, division, name-calling, back-stabbing, gossiping, and other actions that divide. What is the one thing that unifies? Love. Plain and simple, Love! Perhaps we who claim to be Christians should examine our own houses instead of throwing rocks at other people. Perhaps if we spent more time loving God, loving neighbor, loving ALL of our neighbors; our house might look a little bit different and others would want to move in with us.

I long for the day when a Christian is known by who they love rather than by whom they hate. When love isn’t talked about, but is actually lived out. That would be a strong house, united by the love of Christ, that would grow. Then we could gladly say, “There’s no place like home…”