Mark shows us Jesus drawing circles. We don’t see him sitting on the ground and drawing in the dust. We watch him as he proclaims the message of the kingdom in the villages of Galilee, announcing its coming with mighty acts of healing.
Hearing all that he was doing, Mark tells us, people came in great numbers, a movement of multitudes. They came to him from long distances, drawn to him from all around Galilee, from Judea, Jerusalem, Idumea, the lands beyond the river Jordan, and the region around Tyre and Sidon. The names of the places Mark mentions let you draw a map in your mind, and the little red dot that tells you, “You are here”, that little red dot is glued to Galilee in the middle.
To Mark, this is the center of the world, because Jesus is there. But it is also the center of a world in the grip of evil - beautiful, yes, blessed with life’s diversity and the delights of living, but also ugly and oppressive. Many of us didn’t know about the Tulsa massacre of 1921 until Watchmen started streaming on HBO two years ago, or until news of the 100th anniversary made us wonder why we hadn’t heard about it before, why we didn’t learn about one of the worst acts of racial violence in American history in school.[1]
Our life together gives rise to inspiring accomplishments and moving ideas, but also to acts of violence and structures of corruption. In Mark’s world, such structures and the anonymous forces driving their creation and continuation are identified as demonic. They are evil powers that are incredibly resistant to being seen and named and driven out. Karl Barth wrote that demons “exist always and everywhere where the truth of God is not present and proclaimed and believed and grasped, and therefore does not speak and shine and rule.”[2] But now Mark shows us how in Jesus the truth of God is present, and how in him this truth speaks and shines and rules. Jesus begins his ministry, and the demons know their time is up. “Have you come to destroy us?” they ask him.[3] They know who he is, and they fall at his feet. In the presence of Jesus, Mark testifies, demons fall.
In the next scene, Jesus draws another circle. We see him on the mountain, surrounded by the twelve. “He called to him those whom he wanted,” Mark tells us. Twelve men, not a woman among them, they were the initial apostolic team, the ones he would send as co-workers in his kingdom ministry of letting the truth of God shine and rule. They were all men, but that wasn’t what qualified them. What qualified them was his call, and today we celebrate that the risen Christ continues to call to him those whom he wants. Just as we baptize those whom he has called, we ordain those whom he has called; and we do so with great confidence because it is Christ himself who has chosen them, and with great humility because we are just as flawed as those initial twelve were.
In the next scene, Jesus enters a house, and again a crowd has gathered. They are drawn to him just like we have been, drawn into the circle of his power, drawn to the life where God’s truth is spoken and believed, where true life shines and rules. And then his family shows up, and it’s like they don’t recognize him anymore. The things he does, the things he says, the way he spends his days - they’re convinced he’s gone out of his mind. They don’t recognize the power at work in him. They think it’s madness, and they’ve come for an intervention. They want the old Jesus back, and they’re here to pick him up and take him home, in chains if necessary.
In Mark’s own time, families were torn apart because some members embraced the kingdom message, while others didn’t. And this didn’t create merely tension. In Mark 13, we read about a period of persecution when brother betrayed brother to death, and a father his child, and children rose against parents and had them put to death.[4] The kingdom message is a message of liberation and healing, but its proclamation can create conflict and great suffering, even in the most intimate relationships. Mark wants us to know that. Live the truth of God to the degree that you know it, and let it shine, but don’t expect others to see the way you see or read the way you read or come to the same conclusions as you. But continue to live the truth of God as you know it, with confidence and humility.
In the next scene, the scribes appear, they are scholars and keepers of the sacred tradition, and they don’t recognize the power at work in Jesus. They can tell that he’s clearly in the grip of something, but neither his family nor these scribes know what to make of that powerful something that’s got a hold of him. We believe and confess that it is the Spirit of God, but this group of scribes accuse him of being in league with the master of demons.
But why would Satan cooperate with the eviction of Satan? And if Satan’s house is divided like that, it’s bound to fall, and this fall is the whole point of Jesus’ ministry: the liberation of God’s creation from the demonic forces of evil. So why watch him with suspicion? What could possibly be wrong with the fall of Satan’s house?
The conflict is drawn in stark, apocalyptic contrasts: In Jesus, the kingdom of God encounters not just a world that is sometimes easily distracted and often busy with other, seemingly more important things. In his ministry, the kingdom of God encounters a whole demonic system that is occupying the house of the world and is keeping its inhabitants - you and me and air and sea and all things - in captivity.
But for Mark and the church, this encounter is not a never-ending back and forth between two cosmic powers. Jesus’ ministry represents the beginning of the end of Satan’s domain. If God is to rule and life is to flourish, Satan must be bound. To illustrate the point, Jesus quotes from the burglary manual:
No one can enter a strong one’s house and plunder his property without first tying up the strong one; then indeed the house can be plundered.
Jesus compares himself to the thief who has come to rob the biggest thief of all. We belong to God; all living things and all of creation belong to God - and not to the strong one who sows lovelessness and division, and robs the world of life’s fullness. Of course Jesus isn’t on the same team as the master of demons. Jesus is the more powerful one whose coming John announced, and he has come to tie up the strong one and plunder his property - property that never was his to begin with.[5] We belong to God, always have and always will.
Jesus has come to set the captives free, and he continues to call to him those whom he wants in order to send them out to proclaim the message, with the authority to drive out demons. And because of who Jesus is and what he has done, his disciples are at work in the territory of a defeated enemy. The power of evil has not disappeared from the world, but its power has been broken. Christ is risen from the dead, and the truth of God shines. And because it shines with the light of love, the followers of Jesus can see demonic realities and name them and face them with courage. And yes, no longer teaching our children a whitewashed version of our history is a significant part of this ministry.
Mark shows us Jesus drawing circles, and in the final scene he’s in a house. It’s not the walls that define who is inside and who is outside, because a crowd has gathered around Jesus. His family, though, is said to be “standing outside.” They send for him and call him, which is sadly ironic, since he is the one calling and sending us.
The passage is saturated with the familial terms mother, siblings, brother and sister, and it illustrates a radical claim: the coming of Jesus as the representative of God’s kingdom makes family relationships the standard for how we relate to all in the one household of God; Jesus’ practice and presence challenge us to think about mutual belonging with the depth of obligation that we associate with being members of a family.
Jesus looks at all the humanity gathered around him, all of us with our hunger for wholeness and our thirst for life, and he draws the circle wide, saying, “Here are my mother and my siblings! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.” He draws a circle with a radius long enough to include each of us - a radius stretching so far, it reaches way past any line of exclusion we might draw or imagine. He is the reason why in this family we live in the hope that in the end not a single one of us will be left standing outside. In this family we believe and testify that the love of Jesus has bound the strong one, and that it continues to set the captives free. In this family we look to the day when the whole world is at home in the house that love built.
[1] See the column by Tom Hanks https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/04/opinion/tom-hanks-tulsa-race-massacre-history.html
[2] Karl Barth, CD III/3, 529; quoted in Placher, Mark, 66.
[3] Mk 1:24
[4] See Mk 13:12
[5] Mk 1:7