How Not to Repent, in three lessons (Mark 6.1-29)

When I arrived in France in 2003, I was strangely surprised by a lot of things. One of those things is something that frankly makes sense, but that I’d never seen in America. It was the messages on cigarette packs. A big white box, with writing in huge, black, block letters: “SMOKING INCREASES YOUR RISK OF CARDIOVASCULAR DISEASE”, or “SMOKING CAUSES BIRTH DEFECTS”, or the wonderfully simple “SMOKING KILLS”.

Then in 2011, it got even more brutal. They started putting photographs on the sides of tobacco products, pictures that come straight out of a horror movie: deformed fetuses, cancerous open mouths, blackened lungs. Suddenly walking down the street and seeing someone with a pack of cigarettes in their hand was enough to turn your stomach.

I don’t know how efficient these things were—plenty of people still smoke today, because everyone is convinced it won’t happen to them—but the initiative was a good one: show people the risk, so that they might not take it.

Mark is doing something similar in today’s text. He’s going to give us several examples of the risk that we all run, and at some of the potential consequences.

But before we get into the text, there’s a bit of context that we need to help situate us. The first bit of context is historical, to help situate us in the story. Up until now, Jesus has ministered primarily in Galilee (the region in which he grew up). His ministry in Galilee comes to an end at the beginning of chapter 6 (today’s text), when he goes to his own hometown. After this, Jesus goes to other regions, and eventually even to Gentile—non-Jewish—regions.

The second bit of context is more thematic. We see three different preachers in our text (or rather three different groups of preachers): Jesus, the twelve apostles, and John the Baptist. These three groups did not preach three different messages. The meat of their message is the same across the board, and that is a message of repentance.

When John baptized people, his baptism was a baptism of repentance (we see in chapter 1, verse 4). Then we read a few verses later, in v. 14-15:

14 Now after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God, 15 and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.”

And then when the apostles are sent out, we read in today’s text (chapter 6, verse 12):

12 So they went out and proclaimed that people should repent.

The unifying call of all these messages is the call to repentance. But what is repentance?

The Bible tells us that for all of our variety and our distinctions, when it comes to people there are really only two categories that truly matter: those who are united to God, and those who are not united to God. Those who are united to God are defined by their union with him, and those who are not united to God are defined by their sin (which is rebellion against God).

Now in order for us to be united to God, God has to do a tremendous amount of work. He sends his Son Jesus, God the Son; Jesus gives us the perfect, sinless life he lived, and he takes our sin on himself and is punished in our place for that sin. He pursues us, he calls us from death to life, he gives us new eyes to see him and new hearts to desire him. We cannot understand, measure or overestimate the immensity of the work of Christ.

In comparison, our work is relatively small—but we do have something to do, and that is repentance. Repentance is how the Bible talks about the process by which we become united to God: we confess our sin—that is, we admit that we have sinned and deserve God’s wrath—and then we turn away from that sin to follow after God. Confess our sin, turn away from our sin—that’s repentance. And that repentance is an outworking of our faith—if we have faith in Christ, we will repent of our sin.

Here’s what we need to keep in mind as we work through this passage. We have three different episodes here, with three different preachers (or two preachers and one group of preachers). All three episodes highlight the message that Jesus has proclaimed since chapter 1: the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe the gospel.

But each of these episodes shows us how not to do this: what it looks like to not respond to the gospel, how not to repent.

Lesson 1: Unbelief (v. 1-6)

Let’s read again, at the beginning of chapter 6:

He went away from there and came to his hometown, and his disciples followed him. 2 And on the Sabbath he began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard him were astonished, saying, “Where did this man get these things? What is the wisdom given to him? How are such mighty works done by his hands? 3 Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon? And are not his sisters here with us?” And they took offense at him.

Jesus comes to his hometown (Nazareth), and he starts teaching in the synagogue. We don’t know what he taught exactly, but it certainly left no one indifferent. The people who heard him were “astonished,” Mark says. They ask themselves where this man got all this incredible wisdom.

They’re also amazed because of what they’ve heard about Jesus: they know that everywhere Jesus goes, miracles happen. He heals the sick, he casts out demons—these aren’t things just anyone could do. And no matter how much Jesus warns people not to tell anyone what he’s done, practically no one listens to him—everyone is talking.

Now all of this makes their perplexity understandable: Jesus is doing incredible things. But that’s not even the main reason they are perplexed. They are perplexed because they know him. In v. 3, they say, “Is this not the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon? And are not his sisters here with us?” Mark adds immediately after: “And they took offense at him.”

They don’t take offense at him because of what he’s doing or because of what he’s saying; they take offense at him because they know him. These people listening to him are likely people who have known Jesus his whole life. They knew him as a carpenter (which was his trade before going into ministry). They know his family. They’ve seen him in other contexts; they’ve seen him at meals and in conversation and in play. In other words, they’ve seen him as an ordinary person up to now—honorable, good, but ordinary.

But now Jesus has come along with this incredible teaching and this incredible ministry, and what they’re seeing doesn’t seem to match what they know about him. It seems too grandiose for a simple carpenter.

This isn’t hard to understand. My brother Jared is a great guy, a great dad, and he has a lot of talent. But he doesn’t have a musical bone in his body. He can’t sing, he can’t play an instrument. So if he sent me a message tomorrow saying he’s learned to play guitar, and then sent a video tomorrow of himself doing some amazing riff, no matter how real it might seem, my first instinct would be to not believe it. Because I know Jared. I’d know that can’t be him. He must have done some technical trickery to make this video; he’s got to be faking somehow.

That’s the dynamic at play here. All we know about Jesus’s life in Nazareth before he began his public ministry is that as he grew, he “increased in wisdom and in stature, and in favor with God and man” (we see that in Luke’s gospel, chapter 2, verse 52). So he was well-liked, well-respected, and wise. But apparently he gave no one a hint of everything he was actually capable of doing.

So when he finally came, doing what he was born to do, everyone was impressed except the people who knew him. Jesus said (v. 4),

“A prophet is not without honor, except in his hometown and among his relatives and in his own household.”

Why? Because the relatives know the prophet, and they can’t square what they know about him with what they’re seeing.

The end result is horribly sad—v. 5:

5 And he could do no mighty work there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and healed them. 6 And he marveled because of their unbelief.

Familiarity, if we’re not careful, breeds unbelief—which is the first reaction to Jesus’s message that we see here.

Lesson 2: Indifference (v. 7-13)

In our next episode, we see Jesus sending out the twelve disciples on a sort of missions trip. This is, in some ways, a test run for them, to prepare them for their lives and ministry after Jesus is gone. V. 7:

7 And he called the twelve and began to send them out two by two, and gave them authority over the unclean spirits. 8 He charged them to take nothing for their journey except a staff—no bread, no bag, no money in their belts— 9 but to wear sandals and not put on two tunics. 10 And he said to them, “Whenever you enter a house, stay there until you depart from there. 11 And if any place will not receive you and they will not listen to you, when you leave, shake off the dust that is on your feet as a testimony against them.” 12 So they went out and proclaimed that people should repent. 13 And they cast out many demons and anointed with oil many who were sick and healed them.

So Jesus sends out the twelve, in pairs. He gives them “authority over the unclean spirits”—that is, in the same way that demons possessing people have to listen to and obey Jesus, they now have to listen to and obey the apostles as well. He also gives them power to heal, as we see in v. 13.

Before he sends them out, he prepares them for their journey. He tells them to bring almost nothing with them: no extra supplies, no extra clothes to stay warm, no food for the road. They are to rely entirely on God’s provision.

But Jesus does give them something for the road: expectations, and an order.

He tells them that as they go on their way, some people will take them in. We might think that he’s referring to the common practice in Jewish culture of letting travelers stay in your home for the night, but it seems that there’s more to it than that. Likely, Jesus is suggesting that the apostles should stay with those people who have repented upon hearing the apostles’ message.

Here’s why I say that: Jesus says in v. 11 that if there is any place that won’t receive the apostles, when they leave they are to shake the dust off their feet, as a testimony against them.

The image is simple. What do you do if you have to visit someone, and their home is absolutely filthy, crawling with fleas and dog hair? When you leave that house, you’ll want to shake yourself off, brush off everything that stuck to your clothes when you sat down.

Here, the shaking of the dust off their feet isn’t just a sign of cleansing (as it was common practice for Jews to do this when they would leave a Gentile region); it is also a sign of judgment against that place.

The only thing God ever judges in the Bible is unrepentant sin. Sin is rebellion against his commands. So if the apostles are pronouncing judgment on these areas, it is because the people living there have heard the apostles’ call to repentance, and not responded to it. So it’s not hostility; it’s not open vehemence. It’s more like what you do when a homeless person is asking for money and you don’t want to be bothered, so you shrug your shoulders, give an apologetic look, and move on quickly.

This is simple realism on the part of Jesus. Some people will listen to you, and others won’t. Some people will accept your call to repentance, and others won’t.

The reasons why people won’t accept God’s call to repentance will vary; but most often it’s just because people don’t want to. They hear the message, and they even understand the message…but they want other things more. The gospel goes out, and it falls on deaf ears. Notice that these people aren’t openly hostile toward the apostles; they’re not persecuting them. They’re just…not interested.

And against those who remain indifferent in this way, the apostles are called to perform a visible sign of judgment. Nothing else. No militancy, no brow-beating—rather, a simple sign for those who will not listen: I won’t be carrying the responsibility for your souls with me. Your indifference is between you and God.

Lesson 3: Violence (v. 14-29)

The next episode, the story of the death of John the Baptist, is a bit of an aside, but Mark doesn’t only include it for biographical or chronological reasons. He includes this story to tell us what else to expect: if some will respond to the message of repentance by indifference, and others by unbelief, still others will respond by violence.

King Herod—the tetrarch of Galilee, an administrator of the region under Rome—had put John in prison because John had called Herod on his depravity: Herod had married the former wife of his brother (who was still alive). The wife, Herodias, held a grudge against John, but couldn’t do anything about it because Herod was keeping him safe—he put him in prison to keep him from speaking openly, but he still kept him safe there. Herod feared John, Mark tells us, because John was a righteous and holy man, and although Herod understood little of what John said and accepted none of it, he still enjoyed listening to him.

But then comes this famous banquet for Herod’s birthday.  Herodias’s daughter (Herod’s stepdaughter) comes out and does a dance for the guests, and Herod is smitten: he makes a twisted and foolish promise that he’ll give the girl whatever she wants. Prompted by her mother, she says she wants John the Baptist’s head on a platter. Herod doesn’t want to do it, but he doesn’t want to lose face in front of his guests, so he does it: he has John decapitated, and his head brought to the girl on a platter. Imagine: killing someone just to keep the party going.

The message here is pretty simple: the call to repentance will meet with resistance, and sometimes that resistance will be fierce. A call to repentance is a call to abandon depravity, but some people, who love their sin, will respond by digging even deeper into that sin.

The question is, what is the consequence? In the first episode, the consequence was that Jesus couldn’t do anything in his hometown, and left. In the second episode, the consequence was that those who rejected the apostles’ message would receive a sign of judgment against them.

Mark doesn’t tell us what the consequence was for Herod—which is kind of the point. After this passage, Herod disappears from Mark’s gospel. We see him mentioned in the other gospels, and incidentally, when Luke writes the book of Acts he tells us that Herod dies a spectacularly gruesome death because of his pride. (If you’re interested, you’ll find that story in Acts chapter 12.)  But for Mark, after this point, Herod is gone. He could have been a powerful figure as an ally of John the Baptist—and, by extension, of Jesus—but instead, he is written out of the story.

For all of his pride, Herod becomes a non-character in the story of Jesus—truly unimportant.

Which is how it goes most of the time. Throughout history, the gospel has always met with violent opposition. And yet the violence committed against some Christians only serves to anchor the faith of those who witness it. Rather than frightening Christians into renouncing their faith, historically speaking, Christianity has flourished under persecution. We see the faith of the men and women who have died for their faith throughout history, and while it is frightening, it is also fuel for our faith, because it helps us remember that the gospel is worth dying for.

And that is what we remember from the martyrs of the faith. We remember much about John the Baptist, but very little about Herod; Herod becomes totally inconsequential, while we still feel the impact of John’s ministry today. That’s how it almost always goes. We generally remember the martyrs, not the murderers.

There’s no real resolution to this passage, which sort of leaves us hanging. Of course that’s the way things often work in real life, so it’s not a surprise: we read what happens in this passage and we can easily think about it as a story. But nothing about the three episodes of this story we’ve seen is truly past. Everything we see here is always current, because people will always respond to Jesus, either with unbelief, or indifference, or violence—and really, they all come down to the same thing.

No matter how you reject the gospel, you’re still rejecting the gospel. It is simply impossible to “sort of” accept Christ. It’s all or nothing.

Lesson 4: Repentance (v. 12)

But there is a fourth way of responding to Jesus. We don’t see anyone really respond this way in this passage, but we definitely hear it called for. When the apostles go out, what do they do? V. 12:

They went out and proclaimed that people should repent.

This is the call of Jesus’s teaching, of John’s teaching, and the apostles’ teaching. It is the opposite of the responses we saw illustrated in our text. It is the first goal of all gospel proclamation: the kingdom of God is at hand; so repent, and believe the gospel.

Earlier we talked about what repentance is: it is confessing our sin and turning away from it in faith to follow after God.

The question is, how is it possible?

This is a more important question than we may realize, because we can understand the people in Nazareth who can’t get past what they knew about Jesus. We can understand the people listening to the apostles, who simply can’t buy what they’re teaching. And if we’re honest, we can even understand Herod, who wants what he wants and goes after what he wants and will do anything to keep it; we may not go as far as he did (thank God), but I think we can all identify with the temptation to save face and to pursue pleasure at all costs.

But it’s not just about what these people did or didn’t do—that’s not even the biggest problem. The biggest problem is that on our own, we can’t just “turn away” from our sin, because sin isn’t just what we do; it’s what we are. It is the nature that has been handed down to us ever since the garden of Eden; every cell in our bodies is infected with this cancer.

You can’t dress it up, and you can’t hide it, not from God. If a piece of meat has gone bad, it doesn’t matter how you marinade it to hide the flavor—it still will taste off, and it will still make you sick.

So if we can’t dress sin up to make it look better than it is, if we can’t hide it from God, what can we do?

John’s baptism was wonderful, but it wasn’t complete. It was a picture of purification and of renewal, but that purification and renewal is impossible unless God intervenes.

And that is the answer to our question. What can we do? Nothing. But Jesus can. He is the only one who can make repentance possible.

Jesus didn’t die as a symbol. He didn’t die as a way to throw some makeup on sin and pretend it was gone. He didn’t die so we could buy a cross on a chain that we wear around our necks to make us feel like we’re better than we really are.

Jesus died to kill our sin. He died to remove the sickness, to remove the cancer. To excise the tumor. He took our sin on himself and he was punished for that sin in our place. When he died, so did our sin. When he was buried in the tomb, so was our sin. And when he was raised, he left our sin there in the tomb. All of our sin, past, present and future, is dead if we are in Christ. The record has been canceled, the debt has been paid.

Which means that if we have faith in Christ, we are able to repent. We are truly able to turn away from sin.

Just imagine what it would be like to try to repent without Jesus! In fact, we don’t have to imagine it, not really. People try it all the time. And it’s miserable.

It’s a constant fight to pretend we’re something we’re not, to convince God that we’re better than we really are. It’s endless list-keeping: these are the things I did wrong, so let’s keep track of all the things I did right, because if the “wrong” list is longer than the “right” list, then I’m still not holy enough. And we’re always scared, because what if we forgot something? What if we think we’re doing pretty well, but when we come and stand before God, he’ll say, “Yeah, all that was good…but you forgot about this, didn’t you? Sorry—that’s a deal-breaker.”

Trying to repent without Jesus is endless vanity, endless fear, endless failure, because we can never be good enough to make up for our sin.

But now, in Christ, we’re free from all that! Think about it: how freeing must it be, to have no one whose approval I have to win? To have nothing to prove, even to God himself? In Christ, we don’t have to pretend we’re not sinners—in fact, our being sinners is exactly why we can come to God with confidence, because the one who repents in faith proves nothing to God except that he is good. We’re not saved by our own goodness, but by his.

So we can confess. We can come to God, warts and all, and say, “Yes, I am a sinner—but your Son has covered my sin. Thank you for sending him—I place all my trust in him alone.”

That is the first step of repentance, and it is gloriously simple.

And if we grasp that first part of the good news, the second part makes complete sense. What is the only logical and natural response to the realization that we have nothing to prove to God except that God is good?

It is to turn away from sin, and to follow after God.

We don’t do it to earn God’s approval, because in Christ, we already have it. We turn away from sin because faced with God’s incredible goodness to save us, our sin becomes distasteful. Why would I want to wallow in that for which I’ve been forgiven? Why would I want to find pleasure in the sin for which Jesus died?

I won’t ask you to raise your hands, but if I said, “Raise your hands if that question made you feel guilty,” I’m guessing most of us would. Because all of us have a tendency to do just that. God shows us immeasurable grace, and we thank him for it—and then some time later, we find ourselves having returned to the same tired sin again, and we wonder, “How did that happen?”

The answer is that we forget. We forget that God is good, and we forget that we’re forgiven. It is so easy for our old taste for sin to come crawling back. And this is why repentance isn’t a one-time thing: it is a habit of every minute of every day.

Every day, we put ourselves before God’s Word and we tell ourselves, once again, what he has done. Every day, we confess our sin to God in prayer. And every day, we remember the immensity of his grace, to remember why our sin is worth casting aside and putting to death, why Jesus really is worth following.

Conclusion

The bottom line is this: if we are not repenting of our sin, we are rejecting Jesus. But that rejection won’t always come in the way we expect.

Sometimes, it will be violent, yes, even if that violence isn’t always physical. Some people—perhaps even some people here today—will want nothing to do with Christ, and will reject him with much vehemence, slinging bitterness and insults.

But it won’t always be violent. Sometimes rejection of Christ will just look like indifference. We hear the message of the gospel, and it does nothing to us. We don’t see ourselves as sinners, so we feel we have nothing to confess, and you could talk to us until you’re blue in the face, it won’t change our minds on the matter. You don’t have to hate the Christian faith to reject Christ—you just have to…not accept him.

And some of you—especially if you’re in the church, and especially if you’ve been in the church for a long while—may fall into the trap of rejecting Christ without thinking you’re rejecting him.  You’ve spent most of your life hearing these stories, singing these songs… And what happens, far too often? You get bored. You get used to Jesus. And before you know it, without even realizing it’s happening, you’re just play-acting—and you do it well, because you know what being a Christian looks like. You’re doing a reasonably good job at pretending to be a good Christian, but your heart is cold; you’re unimpressed, because it’s all so familiar. If we’re not careful, we can become so familiar with the gospel that we just don’t fully believe anymore, not in any way that has any real bearing on our lives.

We should note well that in this passage, Mark never says that the people who heard Jesus’s message or John’s message or the apostles’ message didn’t understand their call to repent. Mark never tells us that it all went over their heads—it did to some people, sure. But in this particular passage, the people’s theological comprehension wasn’t the problem. The problem was that they didn’t accept the message—it doesn’t matter why, because the end result is the same: they didn’t fall on their knees before a holy God and repent of their sin.

This happens all the time. It happens to people who have spent their entire lives in church. It happens to pastors. It happens to theology professors. You can know everything you need to know, and still not know God.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Losing our love for God, falling into unbelief, or rejecting Christ—these are not foregone conclusions. There is another option, and that is repentance by faith in Christ. That is the call of this text: Don’t be like these people who rejected Christ. Listen to John’s message, and the apostles’ message, and Jesus’s message. REPENT. And follow him.

Don’t repent merely to escape judgment. Repent because repentance is better. Repent because we don’t have to do it alone. Repent because you can: because Christ opened that possibility to you.

It will be costly, for sure. Everyone in this passage who rejects the gospel thinks they are preserving something precious for themselves by saying no to Christ: their own idea of what makes someone important, the status quo of their daily lives, or their reputation with others.

But whoever loses his life for Jesus’s sake will find it.

Repentance is costly, absolutely—but it is better. And it is always possible.

The Kingdom of God: Promise and Process (Mark 4.26-34)

Christianity is a faith that has its eyes fixed firmly on the future, while keeping its feet firmly in the present.

That’s not an easy line to walk. Ask anyone who’s going to get married soon, or waiting for a baby to come, or preparing for a move to a new country… It’s a lot harder to pay attention to all the minute and mundane details of ordinary life when you have something massive on the horizon.

A lot of Christians have a hard time walking that line. They’ve got solid doctrine—they have a firm confidence in what God promises to do for us in the future. But at the same time, a lot of the time they struggle to make sense of the present. They really believe in what God says about the future, but they struggle with discouragement, when they look at the state of Christianity in our country today, the state of their own faith, the state of their own church.

We have these great promises from God… But man, the process of getting to those promises is a lot harder than we thought it would be.

We have these two poles of thought: the promise on one hand, and the process on the other. Both are essential, and both are illustrated in today’s passage.

Building a Kingdom

If you remember, Jesus is teaching the crowds by the sea, and he’s teaching them in parables. A parable, as we’ve seen the past couple of weeks, is a story meant to illustrate a greater point. But those points—those stories—aren’t necessarily meant to be easily understood. We see at the end of today’s passage, in v. 33:

33 With many such parables he spoke the word to them, as they were able to hear it. 34 He did not speak to them without a parable, but privately to his own disciples he explained everything.

So the people listening to Jesus’s parables didn’t necessarily understand them, and his disciples didn’t either; they needed Jesus to explain the parables to them. Joe told us a couple of weeks ago why that is: Jesus isn’t just teaching. He’s using his parables to separate those who hear the Word from those who pursue the Word, those who have faith from those who not.

He’s not just teaching, he’s building. He’s gathering raw materials, and he’s working to build a kingdom.

In today’s passage, we see the first time Jesus begins a parable by saying, “The kingdom of God is like ______.” It won’t be the last. Jesus will do this over and over again over the course of the gospels, and in each of these parables he explains a different facet of the kingdom of God, by comparing it to a situation or a picture. In today’s text we see him doing that for the first time in this gospel.

But before we look at what Jesus says the kingdom of God is like, we need to take a second to ask what it is.

What is the kingdom of God?

“The kingdom of God” is exactly what it sounds like. It is a kingdom—composed of many different people, with a King reigning over them, united with a common culture and a common purpose. But while it’s just like most other kingdoms in many respects, there are a few major differences.

This kingdom’s purpose is the glory of God, not the glory of man. It’s not values or culture or political power—it is God’s glory.

This kingdom is eternal, not temporal. Every kingdom will have an end except this one.

This kingdom isn’t limited by geography—it’s not limited to a specific place. The kingdom of God is a global, universal kingdom.

And lastly, this kingdom is centered around one central figure: Jesus Christ, God the Son, who is in fact the King. When Jesus tells the people about the kingdom of God, he’s telling them about his kingdom.

But here’s the trouble with the kingdom of God—or, rather, with our understanding of it. God’s kingdom is a kingdom that already exists—Christ is already the King, and he already reigns over it. But at the same time, this kingdom isn’t finished yet: God is still building it. This work is still going on…and it’s really difficult to see what that work looks like.

Which is kind of the point of this passage: God is building his kingdom. If you were to ask ten different people what they think that might look like—for God to build a kingdom—you’d likely get ten different answers. But this isn’t a subject that we want to be vague about. The kingdom of God, if it is coming, is the most important kingdom that has ever or will ever be established. And if that’s true—and it is—we need to know what it looks like, so we can recognize it; we need to know how it’s coming.

So that’s what Jesus is going to tell us. He’s going to tell us exactly what the kingdom of God is like: how it comes, and especially, how it grows.

To explain this, Jesus tells two parables: they both speak of a seed growing into something bigger, but they both hit on different aspects of that growth. Earlier I mentioned the mystery and the promise of our faith. The first parable we see here—the parable of the seed growing—speaks of that mystery; and the second—the parable of the mustard seed—speaks of that promise.

Process: The parable of the seed growing (v. 26-29)

So let’s look at the first parable.

V. 26:

26 And he said, “The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed on the ground. 27 He sleeps and rises night and day, and the seed sprouts and grows; he knows not how. 28 The earth produces by itself, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear. 29 But when the grain is ripe, at once he puts in the sickle, because the harvest has come.”

Even to people who aren’t familiar with farming, this picture isn’t difficult to understand. We all planted beans in a glass jar when we were in grade school. We saw how the bean would sprout, and then grow. And even though we were technically learning how it worked in school, there was still a kind of magic to it, watching it grow. (And if you’re like me, you’ve probably forgotten everything you learned in school about how exactly plants grow.) The point is, if a plant gets big enough, it will produce fruit, and when the fruit is ripe, you’ll come along and pick the fruit, or take the sickle to the grain.

The picture isn’t hard to understand. What’s a little more challenging is to see how the kingdom of God is like this plant.

And it would have been even more difficult at the time Jesus is telling this parable, because most people in first-century Judaism thought that that when God’s kingdom came, it would happen explosively, all at once, through the coming of this powerful warrior called the Messiah.

But here, Jesus describes something that happens slowly, progressively, in a way that’s almost imperceptible. He also describes something that happens in a mysterious way. The farmer sows the seed and watches the plant grow, but he doesn’t know how it happens. The earth does it all by itself: the plant grows and grows until it’s time for the harvest.

Right at the beginning of this gospel, Jesus said, “the kingdom of God is at hand” (Mark 1.15). The kingdom is here, because Jesus is here. The kingdom is starting.

But it’s not finished yet. And we know that because the harvest hasn’t come. The “sickle” and the “harvest” are typically metaphors for the final judgment—for the day when Christ returns, and judges the living and the dead, and banishes sin and its effects from the world.

That hasn’t happened yet. So right now, we’re in the middle. We’re like the farmer, watching it all happen, not knowing how it’s happening.

I spoke earlier of mystery—this is it. The kingdom is growing, but we don’t know how, and sometimes we can’t even see it clearly, because we’re in it. What happens if you sit in front of a pot and watch a plant? Nothing. You can’t see it grow. But if you come back to it the next day, and the next, and the next, you’ll see it grow over time.

The picture here is one of trust in mystery: the farmer plants the seed and watches it grow; he doesn’t know how it happens, he just knows that the earth does its job well, and he can trust that if he comes back tomorrow, the plant will be bigger, until it’s time for the harvest.

This is how the kingdom of God grows. We don’t know how God is doing it, and sometimes we can’t even see it happening. But it is growing. And a day will soon come when it is time for the harvest: one day, it will be abundantly clear what God has been doing this whole time: we’ll see the fruit of his labor.

Promise: The parable of the mustard seed (v. 30-32)

The second parable is similar, but looks at the question from a slightly different angle. If the last parable spoke of the mystery of the kingdom of God, this parable speaks of the promise of the kingdom of God. V. 30:

30 And he said, “With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable shall we use for it? 31 It is like a grain of mustard seed, which, when sown on the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth, 32 yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes larger than all the garden plants and puts out large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.”

The picture presented in this parable isn’t hard to grasp either. The mustard seed is tiny, he says, and even so, it grows into a very big tree.

The kingdom of God is like that. And once again, what Jesus says goes against what most people thought the kingdom of God would be like when it came. It wouldn’t be sudden, like they thought; it wouldn’t be spectacular, like they thought.

The kingdom of God starts very small—almost imperceptibly. The kingdom starts in a manger in Bethlehem; it starts in a baby, who would need time to grow; it starts in a small group of men called to follow a carpenter-turned-teacher; it starts with strange stories that aren’t very clear, but that make some people sit up and say, “What exactly is this teacher saying?” and want to know more.

The kingdom of God doesn’t explode on the scene in a way that is undeniable; it starts very small.

And that’s the way it started for most of us. One day, someone shared the gospel with us. Someone told us that we had rebelled against a holy God, and so deserved his judgment; but that because God loved us, he sent his Son to bear our punishment in our place and give us his perfect life in return; and that because of what Christ has done, God declares us righteous. Someone shared the gospel with us…and it just started working on us. For some of us, it happened fairly quickly, and for others it took a long time. But it started with that simple message of good news, and it grew in us, and kept growing until we came to the point where we couldn’t deny it anymore. It filled up all of our vision—even if we didn’t understand everything, we could no longer say we don’t see this big tree on the horizon, bigger than all the garden plants, that puts out large branches for the birds. Where we didn’t see it before, we see it now. So we came to faith in Christ, and God’s kingdom in us has been growing and growing ever since.

This is also the way it happened with the church on the whole. It started with one man teaching to a group of people, and it grew and grew—thousands of people in Jerusalem, and then in the surrounding areas, and then all over the world, to the point where we still have access to this good news today. God has made sure the kingdom grows over time.

Our God is an expert in taking things that have small beginnings, and causing them to grow for his glory. This is why we planted Connexion, and that’s why we’re investing in the church plant in the 11th. A small group of people, in a small space, coming together to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ in a specific part of our city. It’s a small beginning. But this is what God does. He starts small, and he causes growth for his glory.

One day, after Christ’s return, the growth of the kingdom of God will be complete—so huge that we will be unable to see anything else. This is the beautiful promise of this parable.

The Promise and the Process

But this growth isn’t finished yet—and that is why these parables are so important.

In the second parable, the parable of the mustard seed, Jesus gives us the promise of the future, by saying God’s kingdom starts small, but it is growing, and it will continue to grow until it is all-encompassing. That’s the future.

In the first parable, we see the process of that growth. It doesn’t happen all at once, but slowly, and there’s a lot of mystery involving how that growth actually takes place. We don’t know exactly how it all works out, all the minute details of God’s plan.

It’s really important not to get stuck in one parable or the other; both are important. It’s easy to get stuck in the future, to be so focused on the future promises of God that our faith can feel detached from our lives today; and it’s really easy to get stuck in the process, to be so focused on how long it’s taking, and how little we understand, and to despair that it’s really going anywhere.

But both things need to be taken into account: the process and the future, the mystery and the promise.

And the reason we need both things is because we live in a real world, which has been corrupted by sin. That means that we’ll have painful experiences, experiences that do not seem to match up with the promises we see in the Bible, and we’ll need to know what to do with those experiences.

For example, maybe you read the parable of the mustard seed, and you’re encouraged by its beautiful promise. Then you go online and you read the news. You go about your life and you interact with your colleagues, and it’s likely you’re the only Christian in your company. You may be the only Christian in your family. None of your neighbors know Christ, and they’re not terribly receptive when you talk about him. So you get discouraged. You look around at the state of Christianity in the world, and you think, Where’s the mustard tree? Where’s this massive growth? I’m not seeing it.

Or maybe we get discouraged when we look at our own Christian lives, our own growth in maturity and faith. We come into the faith with joy and enthusiasm, and we mistake that enthusiasm for maturity. And then, when we’re faced with suffering, or when we fall into sin, we’re face to face with our faith as it really is, and we’re crushed: “I thought I was more mature than this.” And we think, Where’s the plant? Is it even growing? Where’s the fruit? I don’t see it.

Or let’s take a more large-scale example—look at the church in Ephesus. In Acts 19, the apostle Paul comes to Ephesus, a city that was a center of idol worship and occult practices, and he plants a church there. But it doesn’t happen all at once. Paul has to stay there for two years—a particularly long time for him to stay in any one place—before the church is stable enough for him to leave. After Paul’s departure, Timothy takes over, and it’s not an easy go for him: Paul writes two separate letters to Timothy, encouraging him to persevere.

The last time we see the church in Ephesus is in Revelation 2, in which Jesus gives the church a stark warning, telling them,

I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first. 5 Remember therefore from where you have fallen; repent, and do the works you did at first. If not, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place, unless you repent.

The Ephesian Christians arguably received more solid Bible teaching than any single church in history (four hours a day in the school of Tyrannus, for more than two years). And even so, despite all their progress, despite all their teaching, Jesus says they lost their first love.

If I were Timothy, pastor of this church, or Paul, who started this church, I’d be tempted to look at the trajectory of this particular assembly and be profoundly discouraged, because after all that effort, where is the fruit? Where is the tree? God, you say you’re building your kingdom, and it really seemed like you were here for a while, but…where did it go?

Time and again, this will be our experience: in the world, in our churches, in our lives. We’ll have a firm idea of how things should go, what the will of God must be for this situation…and it won’t happen.

We’ll have experiences that are deeply painful, and have no apparent explanation. No rhyme or reason. We know why this is the case—because we live in a world that’s been corrupted by sin—but still, when we’re in the moment, that’s not a lot of help. We want answers, but the answers the Bible gives aren’t necessarily the answers we want in those moments. We don’t want to know why “the world” is hard in general—we want to know why this thing has happened. And we don’t know.

When we take a step back at the whole of the biblical narrative, when we look at it on the “macro” level, we know what God is doing (even if our minds can barely grasp it). We know where he’s bringing us: we know the destination. He’s building his kingdom.

But on the micro level, on the level of what exactly God is doing in my life today, or in the church today, we don’t have that perspective. When we look at individual experiences or periods of our lives, most of the time we don’t know what God is doing, or why.

And that’s normal—we can’t yet see what God is doing because the harvest hasn’t come yet. We’re in the middle, watching the plant grow. We know what the end result will be, but we don’t know everything that needs to happen to get to that end result. We don’t know what God needs to prune, what he needs to let alone, and what he needs to feed. We know the promise, but we don’t yet know every step of the process.

Honestly, that’s why I love this passage: it accounts for that mystery. It accounts for the unknown. It gives us a great promise, clothed in a great mystery. Jesus tells us we don’t know every nuanced detail of how God is building this kingdom. But we know that he is building it.

Jesus teaches us these parables because he wants to instill in us a patient confidence in his power and his will.

In the book of James, we find almost a companion piece to these parables. James was Jesus’s brother, one of his disciples, who was almost surely present when Jesus taught these parables, and so likely had his brother’s words in mind as he wrote.

James 5.7-8:

7 Be patient, therefore, brothers, until the coming of the Lord. See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, being patient about it, until it receives the early and the late rains. 8 You also, be patient. Establish your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is at hand.

Jesus wants us to have confidence in our God. He wants us to trust that God knows what he is doing, just as he wanted Timothy to be patient and trust what he was doing in Ephesus—that despite how things might seem, God made no mistakes with that church. He is the good God, the great Sower, the Master Builder. He is building his kingdom, and his kingdom is our ultimate home and our ultimate good. It started small, and it may still seem small at times—but it is growing. We should be supremely confident in our God.

But at the same time, he wants our confidence to be patient, and humble. We live in a world that has lost the knack for waiting. We want everything at the push of a button, and if we have to wait, we want to know why. But God doesn’t work like that. He doesn’t give us all the information we want right away, and he doesn’t always tell us why he makes us wait.

And we don’t need to know, because he is the builder, not us. It is his kingdom, and we are his subjects. We can trust, with absolute confidence, that he is a good God, a good builder, and he is faithfully building his kingdom. And we can trust that because he knows every micro-step of the plan, we don’t need to know.

We can wait for him.

We can sleep and rise night and day, and watch as God causes his kingdom to grow.

We can continue to sow seed, proclaiming the good news of the gospel around us, trusting that God will bring growth.

We can plant churches, and pursue holiness, and serve one another, even when it doesn’t seem entirely worthwhile.

We can trust our God, that his kingdom is growing, and his kingdom is good.

The Unforgivable Sin (Mark 3.7-35)

When I was a kid, about six years old, one day at school I decided to cut my own hair. I don’t know why I made this decision, why I thought it was a good idea. But I did. I took my little scissors, got a big chunk of hair right up above my forehead, and cut it off.

This was the day before school pictures were to be taken.

My mom did her best to try to fix it, but there was no fixing it: the mess I had made was unsalvageable. (The photo was horrendous, of course.)

There is a lingering fear in the minds of a lot of Christians, and that is they are, for some reason or another, unsalvageable. They remember their past rebellion against God so vividly, or they consider the sin they still struggle with after believing in Christ, to the point that there’s always this thought in their minds that maybe, despite what they’ve always heard in church, when they die they’ll stand before God and he’ll show them their past sin and say, “Yeah, I can’t have this in my kingdom.”

So is it true?

Is it possible to do something that in the end makes us“unsaveable”?

Our passage today tells us that there is, in fact, a sin like this. That’s scary. But the rest of the passage tells us what that sin is, and in the end it’s really good news.

So let’s get into it.

We’ve just come out of a turning point for Jesus. In the passage we saw last week, Jesus is repeatedly opposed by the religious leaders in Israel, to the point where he has to take strong positions on questions that were important to them, like the Sabbath. We see the result in v. 6—for the first time, the religious leaders start plotting to have him killed.

In today’s passage, we see a different kind of turning point—we don’t see Jesus taking strong positions on different issues, but rather different groups of people taking strong positions on Jesus. And the interchange between Jesus, people’s response to him, and his response to them, is incredible.

A New People: Delegation (v. 7-19)

In v. 7, we see a basic continuation of what we’ve seen before—crowds are following Jesus to be healed by him and to see what he’ll do. But it’s as if someone turned the volume knob up three or four notches: the fervor of the crowd is becoming far more intense.

V. 7:

7 Jesus withdrew with his disciples to the sea, and a great crowd followed, from Galilee and Judea 8 and Jerusalem and Idumea and from beyond the Jordan and from around Tyre and Sidon. When the great crowd heard all that he was doing, they came to him. 9 And he told his disciples to have a boat ready for him because of the crowd, lest they crush him, 10 for he had healed many, so that all who had diseases pressed around him to touch him. 11 And whenever the unclean spirits saw him, they fell down before him and cried out, “You are the Son of God.” 12 And he strictly ordered them not to make him known.

Mark explains why the crowd is gaining such intensity: he’s been healing many people, and the sick are coming to him in droves, to the point where his safety is in jeopardy. Jesus has to get into a boat and cast himself out into the sea, so that they don’t crush him.

So it’s like what we’ve already seen in the gospel, but brought to a fever pitch. Jesus healing people, people coming to him to be healed, and even people possessed by “unclean spirits” (i.e. demons). And here’s the crazy thing: before Jesus casts them out, these demons recognize Jesus for who he is—as they say in v. 11, “You are the Son of God.” But Jesus tells them to be quiet.

So all this is happening, and finally, at some point, he manages to get away—we read in v. 13:

13 And he went up on the mountain and called to him those whom he desired, and they came to him.

So this isn’t a general call he makes to the crowd; Jesus calls out specific people. V. 14:

14 And he appointed twelve (whom he also named apostles) so that they might be with him and he might send them out to preach 15 and have authority to cast out demons.

Essentially, Jesus is delegating. He can’t be everywhere at the same time, so he establishes these twelve men as “apostles” (the word “apostle” means “sent). These are people he is sending out kind of like ambassadors, but bigger: he gives them not only his authority, but also some of his power. He gives them the ability to preach the gospel and to cast out demons.

And the fact that Jesus names twelve of these men is no accident. There’s a good deal of mirroring here, which you’ll recognize right away if you remember the book of Exodus.

When God called the people of Israel out of Egypt and made his covenant with them, he brought them to a mountain to make that covenant. The people of Israel was comprised of twelve tribes, named after the twelve sons of Jacob. God took these twelve tribes, these descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and made them his people.

These people would be God’s people—they would be his representatives on earth, his ambassadors, the means by which he would make his glory known to the surrounding nations.

And that’s exactly what Jesus is doing here. Just like with the people of Israel, Jesus goes up on to a mountain, and when he does, just like with the twelve tribes of Israel, he calls twelve men to follow him.

When God brought his people to the mountain, he established them as the people of God. So now, when Jesus calls the twelve up to the mountain, he’s doing the same thing: he’s establishing a new people of God. These are the men—with one exception—who will represent him where he can’t go, and who will carry on his work after he is gone. Jesus’s people would be, in a much realer sense, God’s people, representing him in the world.

The Old People: Opposition (v. 20-35)

Immediately after this, we see a pretty stark contrast. V. 20:

20 Then he went home, and the crowd gathered again, so that they could not even eat. 21 And when his family heard it, they went out to seize him, for they were saying, “He is out of his mind.”

When Mark says, “his family”, he means Jesus’s literal family: his mother and his brothers. They’re looking at all the fuss Jesus is stirring up, and their response is, “He’s lost his mind.”

I can’t say that I blame them. People often say, “But surely his mother Mary knew better; she was visited by an angel before Jesus’s birth, who told her who Jesus is.” True…but even the angel didn’t give her every detail of what his ministry would look like. And we sometimes forget that at this point, she had an entire life of a parent behind her. For her, Jesus wasn’t just the Messiah—he was her boy. She had changed his diapers. She’d taken care of him when he was sick. She’d taught him to walk and talk. And his brothers had grown up with him too—they didn’t see him as a figure, but as their brother.

And now, he’s making himself really visible: he’s upsetting the religious establishment, and in so doing, he’s putting himself in a very risky situation. He must be crazy to go against the religious leaders.

So it’s understandable, but even so, the fact that they are saying, “He is out of his mind” shows that they don’t quite understand what it is he’s doing.

And a little later, at the end of the chapter, we see Jesus’s very blunt response to them. Go down to v. 31:

31 And his mother and his brothers came, and standing outside they sent to him and called him. 32 And a crowd was sitting around him, and they said to him, “Your mother and your brothers are outside, seeking you.” 33 And he answered them, “Who are my mother and my brothers?” 34 And looking about at those who sat around him, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! 35 For whoever does the will of God, he is my brother and sister and mother.”

We saw before that Jesus is establishing a new people. What we didn’t see is how deep that bond goes. Jesus is establishing a people that supersedes even his own blood relations: Here are my mother and brothers, he says!

Clearly his actual mother and brothers are missing something.

And they’re not the only ones. In v. 22, we see a group of scribes, religious leaders from Jerusalem, who have come down to see what Jesus is doing.

22 And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem were saying, “He is possessed by Beelzebul,” and “by the prince of demons he casts out the demons.”

Essentially, the religious leaders think Jesus is duping everyone. They think he’s using some kind of dark sorcery to cast out these demons, and that he’s claiming to be doing God’s work.

So in response to what they’re saying, Jesus calls them over to poke holes in their logic. Or at least that’s how it seems at first. V. 23:

23 And he called them to him and said to them in parables, “How can Satan cast out Satan? 24 If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. 25 And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand. 26 And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but is coming to an end. 27 But no one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his goods, unless he first binds the strong man. Then indeed he may plunder his house.

It’s important to see that Jesus’s parables aren’t just attacking the religious leaders’ logic. They’re getting to the heart of what he’s actually doing.When Jesus says that “if a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom will not stand,” he’s not just saying that it would be stupid of Satan to use such tactics. He’s saying that that’s not what’s going on. Satan isn’t divided against himself. Satan is waging a concerted war against God’s kingdom. Satan is trying to stand…but he’s going to lose.

And that’s what he means by the second parable, when he says, “No one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his goods, unless he first binds the strong man.” Satan is strong—no doubt about it.

But Jesus is the plunderer.

Jesus describes himself as a sort of invader, sneaking in behind enemy lines to take them apart piece by piece. In claiming that Jesus is acting in Satan’s power, the religious leaders are showing their deep and fundamental misunderstanding of who Jesus is.

So after throwing out these parables (which no doubt went a bit over the religious leaders’ heads), Jesus gives them a very striking warning. V. 28:

28 “Truly, I say to you, all sins will be forgiven the children of man, and whatever blasphemies they utter, 29 but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin”— 30 for they were saying, “He has an unclean spirit.”

I know this is the verse most of you have been waiting for, so let’s talk about it.

First, very quickly, why does Jesus bring up the Holy Spirit in the first place? No one was talking about the Holy Spirit—even Mark hasn’t mentioned the Holy Spirit since Jesus’s baptism and temptation in the wilderness in chapter 1.

But Jesus Christ is the Son of God; the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of God. The Spirit and the Son are inseparable—you don’t get one without the other.

So Jesus is taking advantage of what these religious leaders are saying about him—“He has an unclean spirit”—in order to teach them something much bigger about the Spirit who actually animates him, the Holy Spirit.

But there’s still a big question remaining, and it’s the question we’ll be spending most of our remaining time on: What exactly does Jesus mean when he says, whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness?

I myself grew up hearing that “blaspheming against the Holy Spirit” means to attribute the work of the Holy Spirit to the devil, as the religious leaders do here. I also heard it means to say something negative against the Holy Spirit, as if you can say something bad about God the Father or God the Son, and that’s okay, but you’d better not say anything negative about God the Holy Spirit, or else you’re not getting into heaven.

Lots of Christians have grown up hearing things like this, so we grow up with this nagging fear: Have I blasphemed against the Holy Spirit? Did I at some point say something about the Spirit, in a way that makes me guilty of this sin? Is there a chance I’ve already said or done something that has ruined my chances of getting into heaven?

And clearly there is a sin that is unforgivable, that keeps us out of heaven. So what is it? What does it mean to “blaspheme against the Holy Spirit”?

This text tells us what it means, but in order to see it, we need to take a step back.

Different Groups, Different Responses

What is really happening in this passage? What do we see? We see various groups of people responding to Jesus, and Jesus responding to them.

First, we see the sick, in v. 7-10. They come to him to be healed, they come to him for what he can do for them, with little regard for who he is (they almost crush him in their haste to get close to him). Jesus does what he can for them, but eventually has to retreat.

Next, we see the unclean spirits, in v. 11-12. They see him, and cry out, “You are the Son of God.” So they recognize Jesus for who he is, and they’re right. But they don’t accept him. They don’t love him. And Jesus responds to them by telling them to keep quiet—so clearly there is no unity between them.

We also see Jesus’s family, in v. 20-21 and 31-35. What do they say about him? They say, “He’s out of his mind.” Even if it’s understandable, they clearly don’t get what’s going on. So Jesus responds to them by saying, “Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother”—in other words, these people sitting around me are my real family. Pretty harsh.

And lastly we have the scribes in v. 22-30, who say, “He casts out demons by the prince of demons.” So not only they don’t recognize him for who he is, but they say he’s doing Satan’s work. Jesus tells them parables to defy their logic and show what he’s actually doing, and he says, “Whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness.”

The sick, the unclean spirits, Jesus’s family, and the scribes. What do they all have in common?

They don’t accept Jesus for who he is. They see what he’s doing, and they either misunderstand or outright refuse to accept what the evidence is telling them about what he came to do.

So that’s one side of the coin.

On the other side, we see his disciples in v. 13-19. How do they respond to him? When he calls them, they come. They follow him. And in return, Jesus appoints them as apostles and delegates his work to them, with his authority.

We also see the crowd gathered around him in v. 31-35. Jesus looks at them and says, “Here are my mother and brothers!” Why? Because they’re doing the will of God. Of course he’s speaking broadly here—there are surely people in the crowd who aren’t following him—but he’s making his point clear, in any case: it takes something more than blood relations to make you a part of my family.

So what makes these people different from all those other examples we see?

They are doing the will of God. They’re not just coming to him to be healed, or to see him do a magic trick, or even to hear some new and interesting teaching. They recognize Jesus for who he is, they accept him for who he is, and they follow him.

Who Is Jesus?

So the real question of this text isn’t, What is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, but rather, Who is this man?! That is the deep question Mark is driving us to ask in this text. The disciples and the crowd sitting around Jesus recognize Jesus for who he is, and accept Jesus for who he is. So who is he?

Jesus is the Son of God. Yes. Absolutely—we saw that in the very first verses of this book. But there’s more.

Jesus is the One who establishes a new people for God. He’s fundamentally changing what it means to belong to “the people of God.”

Jesus is the One who has all authority over every element in this world and the spiritual world—even the demons recognize that he has authority over them.

Jesus is the One who is plundering Satan’s house—the titanic Warrior-King who has arrived to set right everything that sin has made wrong.

Jesus is the One who is empowered by the Holy Spirit to forgive sin. All sins will be forgiven the children of man, he said. It’s easy to look at v. 29 and see the one sin that can’t be forgiven, and miss the incredible openness of v. 28: all sins will be forgiven the children of man, and whatever blasphemies they utter.

Remember what we saw a couple weeks ago? Who are the people flocking to Jesus, not for healing, but to listen to him? Who are the ones who are actually listening? Not those who are well, but those who are sick.

Not the righteous, but sinners—people who know they are sinners.

These are the ones he came for. These are the ones to whom he points and says, “These are my mother and my brothers!”

Do we see how astounding this is? It would have been so easy and obvious for Jesus to point to his apostles—these men to whom he gave the authority and power to preach and to cast out demons—and say, “These guys here are my people.” That would make sense—they’re the ones who are going out and doing extraordinary things.

But that’s not what Jesus does. He points to perfectly ordinary—and even “unsavory”—people, and says, “These are my people.” Not because they are doing extraordinary things—they’re not!—but because they have come to the extraordinary Savior, who forgives their sin.

So in the context of this passage, what can we deduce is the meaning of “blasphemy against the Holy Spirit”? What is the only sin which God will not forgive?

We see clearly in this passage that it’s much more than a matter of words. Usually “blasphemy” refers to an act of contempt against God, either by insulting his name or falsely claiming his authority. But everything in this passage points us to people who do more than just speak—they adopt a position that dictates the course of their lives. That position is expressed in their words, perhaps, but it’s not the words themselves that are the problem.

The problem, with each of these groups—with the demons, with the scribes, with Jesus’s own family—is their refusal to accept Jesus for who he is. And Jesus calls this “blasphemy against the Holy Spirit” because there is no greater act of contempt against God than to reject the Savior he sent, whom the Holy Spirit empowered, to save sinners.

Only One Choice

When you get right down to it, even though we see a myriad of different responses to Jesus in this text, there really is only one choice: either we accept Jesus for who he is, or we blaspheme against the Holy Spirit of God.

Whether we realize it or not, and however we may try to turn the problem in our hands to see it from a different angle, that is the choice before each of us: either we accept Jesus for who he is, or we blaspheme against the Holy Spirit of God.

Realizing this truth is incredibly freeing, because it does away with a lot of the fears we may have in coming to Christ.

What we see here shows us that no sin is “too bad” for Jesus to forgive. If we recognize Jesus for who he is, and accept him for who he is, his arms are wide open. Among those who are clearly shown to be forgiven in the Bible are tax collectors (commonly known to be traitors to their own people), prostitutes, a persecutor of Christians, murderers, adulterers, and many other people who have done far worse things than most of us. No one is too far gone, no one is “too bad” to be forgiven.

What we see here also shows us that it’s never too late. If you’re still alive, you still have time. We saw the harsh answer Jesus gave to his family when they were looking for him. But even they eventually accept Jesus for who he is. His mother later realizes and accepts what he’s doing, and follows him as well. And we know of at least one of his half-brothers, James, who does the same. (He’s the one who later wrote the book of James, which we find towards the end of the Bible.)

At this point in their story, they are not accepting Christ for who he is. But that can change. As long as you’re alive, there’s still time.

Conclusion

So what do we do?

First we see ourselves for who we are: very imperfect people who are in need of a perfect forgiveness.

We see Christ for who he is: the sinless Son of God who lived a perfect life in our place, who took our sin on himself, and who was punished in our place in order that we might be forgiven. The powerful Warrior-King who came to defeat Satan and sin and all of its effects. The loving Savior who came to the most miserable among us, and who said, “Here are my brothers and sisters.”

And finally, we accept Christ for who he is. This is not a one-time decision. It’s a decision for every minute of every day. If we find ourselves constantly returning to the same sins over and over again, and committing them with no hesitation and little regret, it’s worth asking ourselves if we’ve really accepted Christ at all. Because accepting Christ means not only accepting what he did for us, but who we are in him.

Those who accept Christ are really and truly the people of God. And the people of God are people who are growing to be like Christ.

I know that can be scary, because all of us can look at ourselves and see all the reasons why we’re not changing like we’d hope, as quickly as we’d hope. But remember Jesus’s mother and brothers: it’s never too late.

Maybe you’ve been claiming to be a Christian for years, and you’re only just realizing that you haven’t ever really followed him.

Maybe you’ve never accepted Christ and are only just realizing you should.

Or maybe you have accepted Christ, but you’re worried about what’s coming around the bend tomorrow, what might test your faith.

In every case, it’s the same choice before us: the choice to admit that we are sinners in need of a Savior, to see Christ for the Savior he is, to accept him, and to follow him. That is the Christian life: day after day after day. That is what it means to “do the will of God.”

Do you see how freeing that is? That Jesus doesn’t ask us to pass a morality test to belong to him? That all he asks of us is that we accept what he has done, and that we walk hand-in-hand with him until he brings us home?

Whatever weight you feel like you’re carrying, you can put it down. There is only one unforgivable sin, and as long as you are still alive, you haven’t committed it. If you’re alive, it’s not too late.

See him. Accept him. Follow him.

Get Up and Walk (Mark 1.40-2.12)

I love the show Survivor.

If you’ve never seen it, it’s almost always the same thing. A bunch of people get stranded on an island somewhere and have to survive for about a month. They play games to win rewards and immunity, and every other day they have to vote to eliminate someone from the team, until there is only one survivor left at the end.

In some ways, it’s very predictable, because it’s a game, and inevitably in a game, there is a winner, and there is a loser. You know what’s going to happen.

But how it happens is why it’s so fun. (I’m aware that what I’m saying is true about team sports too, but I hate sports and I like Survivor, so that’s the illustration I’m going with.) The “how” is what makes it great. The right bit of information, given at the right time, or the right challenge won at the right time, changes everything.

Essentially, in today’s text we see two very similar stories that play out in two very different ways. We see Jesus healing two different people: one is a leper and one is a paralytic. But how those two events play out could not be more different.

“He Began to Talk Freely” (1.40-45)

If you remember the context, Jesus is at the beginning of his ministry. He’s traveling through Galilee, preaching and healing and casting out demons. And people, as we’ll see, are starting to take notice of him.

V. 40:

40 And a leper came to him, imploring him, and kneeling said to him, “If you will, you can make me clean.”

Leprosy, as we know, is a skin disease that is often highly contagious. The important thing to know is that lepers were ceremonially unclean, perpetually: they were outcasts from society, isolated from those who didn’t want to become unclean themselves. So this leper was bold for even coming close to Jesus—or perhaps he was just desperate.

But Jesus’s response is predictably compassionate. V. 41-42:

41 Moved with pity, he stretched out his hand and touched him and said to him, “I will; be clean.” 42 And immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean.

What we see here are Jesus’s compassion and Jesus’s power. He reaches out and touches the man with leprosy—which was unheard of—and then he explicitly tells him that he wants to heal him. And with two simple words, “Be clean,” the man is immediately healed.

It’s extraordinary, but for Jesus’s it’s actually fairly standard. Jesus does what he does: he sees a person in need, he is moved with compassion, and he comes to the person’s help.

What is interesting is what happens next. V. 43-44:

43 And Jesus sternly charged him and sent him away at once, 44 and said to him, “See that you say nothing to anyone, but go, show yourself to the priest and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded, for a proof to them.”

This is the first time in this gospel that Jesus tells someone who is healed to not say anything about it, but it won’t be the last. He tells the healed man to go to the priest and give the offering required (usually a pair of birds to be sacrificed). There was a process to follow for this man to become ceremonially clean again, and thus re-enter society. His coming to the priest would also serve as “a proof to them”, a way of showing the priests that Jesus hadn’t come to go against the law of Moses.

But the man’s joy supersedes Jesus’s command. V. 45:

45 But he went out and began to talk freely about it, and to spread the news, so that Jesus could no longer openly enter a town, but was out in desolate places, and people were coming to him from every quarter.

This is usually why Jesus tells someone who is healed not to say anything. If someone runs up to you in the street and says, “That guy on the corner is giving out money!”, what will you want to do? You’ll want to go see that man, and maybe get some money. It’s not that Jesus doesn’t want to heal, but if he heals everyone, that’s all he’ll be doing, all the time. And he didn’t come mainly to heal; he came to preach the good news of the kingdom of God.

Because the healed man tells everyone what happened, Jesus can’t go into any town to preach the gospel, because people immediately swarm him.

Now, a couple of things before we move on. Mark doesn’t say that the healed man had bad intentions; he let his joy get the best of him. And Mark also doesn’t say that Jesus didn’t know what would happen. He knew perfectly well that the healed man wouldn’t listen to him.

Mark tells us about this exchange to show us one simple thing: that because this miracle is talked about in the wrong way, it makes Jesus’s primary mission to preach the gospel more difficult.

We know this because of what comes next.

“Your Sins Are Forgiven” (2.1-12)

At the beginning of chapter 2, several days have gone by, and Jesus decides to return to his home in Capernaum.

Chapter 2, verses 1-2:

And when he returned to Capernaum after some days, it was reported that he was at home. 2 And many were gathered together, so that there was no more room, not even at the door. And he was preaching the word to them.

So this story starts off just as it was at the end of chapter 1: Jesus goes into a town—he goes home—but he can’t get any peace there, because people find out he’s at home and they swarm his house. There are people crammed in everywhere, even standing outside the door.

But Jesus is a glass-is-half-full kind of guy: he takes advantage of the opportunity and does what he came to do. He preaches the word. For whatever reason, the people flocking to Jesus here happens in such a way that he can preach to them, so that’s what he does. He stands in his house and preaches so that even those outside can hear him.

Then the interesting thing happens—it’s a story people know well. V. 3-4:

3 And they came, bringing to him a paralytic carried by four men. 4 And when they could not get near him because of the crowd, they removed the roof above him, and when they had made an opening, they let down the bed on which the paralytic lay.

This was less violent than it might seem—often roofs were made of simple thatch and could be easily removed. But picture the scene: Jesus is in his house preaching, and suddenly sun is shining down through a hole in the roof, and a man on a bed is being lowered down through the hole in the roof. Of course, the paralytic coming down through the ceiling is essentially an interruption. Jesus stops his preaching and looks at the man, and then he looks up and sees the other men, these four friends who had lowered him down.

V. 5:

5 And when Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, “Son, your sins are forgiven.”

This is a really fascinating twist. First, because Mark doesn’t talk about the paralytic’s faith, but the faith of his friends. The believed Jesus could heal their friend, so they brought him to Jesus’s house, and Jesus responds to that. Compassion calls to compassion.

The second thing is that we don’t hear anything the paralytic says to Jesus. We don’t hear him asking to be healed, much less asking for forgiveness. Jesus is the one who decides what he’s about to do.

The third thing is that when Jesus makes that decision, he jumps from point A all the way to point Z. He doesn’t immediately say what he said to the leper—he doesn’t say, “Be healed”—but instead, he says, “Son, your sins are forgiven.”

This statement was shocking for a number of reasons. This man didn’t know Jesus at all—it’s not as if he had offended Jesus earlier and Jesus is forgiving him for something he did. He’s saying, more generally, “Your sins”—as in, all your sins—“are forgiven.”

The most basic definition of sin is disobedience against God, and not a single man or woman who has ever lived, besides Jesus, has not sinned. We have all rejected God in favor of our own desires.

And Jesus says that he is forgiving this man for his disobedience against God.

He knew exactly what he was doing. Before that man was lowered down, he was preaching the word to the crowd, and the good news of the gospel is that proclamation: “Your sins are forgiven.” He’s been saying that the kingdom of heaven is near, and although the people may not have realized it yet, the kingdom of heaven isn’t displayed through physical healing, but through forgiveness of sin.

It’s a shocking statement. V. 6-7:

6 Now some of the scribes were sitting there, questioning in their hearts, 7 “Why does this man speak like that? He is blaspheming! Who can forgive sins but God alone?”

“Blasphemy” in the Bible is, in a strict sense, speaking evil of God, or defaming God. This blasphemy can be either direct or indirect—it can be directly speaking evil of God, or it can be implying a link between something evil and God. The scribes accuse Jesus of blasphemy here in this second, indirect sense, because Jesus (a human being) is claiming to do something that only God can do—that is, forgive sins.

The thing is, they wouldn’t be entirely wrong…if Jesus was anyone else. But Jesus is who he is. And he’s not only going to say it; he’s going to show it.

V. 8-9:

8 And immediately Jesus, perceiving in his spirit that they thus questioned within themselves, said to them, “Why do you question these things in your hearts? 9 Which is easier, to say to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Rise, take up your bed and walk’?

Jesus’s response to the scribes is genius; it’s a pretty classic argument of “greater to lesser”, of harder to easier. If you can do the harder thing, then obviously you can do the easier thing.

So look at Jesus’s question in v. 9: “Which is easier, to say to the paralytic, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Rise, take up your bed and walk’?”

How would we respond to that question?

In a strict sense, saying “Your sins are forgiven” is easier. Anyone could say that, and you wouldn’t be able to prove them wrong, because there wouldn’t be any visible proof one way or the other. Saying something is not difficult.

So Jesus does the “harder thing”. V. 10-12:

10 But that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins”—he said to the paralytic— 11 “I say to you, rise, pick up your bed, and go home.” 12 And he rose and immediately picked up his bed and went out before them all, so that they were all amazed and glorified God, saying, “We never saw anything like this!”

In v. 10, we see the first time that Jesus refers to himself as “the Son of Man”—it’s his favorite title for himself, and it’s a provocative one. It’s a reference to a prophecy in Daniel 7, in which a hero comes, and God grants him dominion and authority over all peoples and nations. The Son of Man is the Lord of all things, and the people listening to him were all Jews. Every single person within earshot would recognize that title—the Son of Man—perfectly well.

This is the first time Jesus has gone this far in identifying exactly who he is. He says, “I am the Son of Man; I have the authority to forgive sins (an authority that—you were right—only God has)!”

It’s a pretty bold thing to say about oneself, but after what just happened, who could argue with him?

The Greater Miracle

Let’s take a step back and look at this passage as a whole.

When we read the Bible, we need to pay attention not just to what it says, but how it says it. When Mark wrote his gospel, there were no chapter or verse numbers; chapter 1 just immediately flowed in to chapter 2. And he says that “some days” have passed between the time that Jesus healed the leper and the time that Jesus healed the paralytic. Surely lots of things happened during those days, things he could have reported.

But Mark is very intentional: he puts these two stories back to back for a reason.

Jesus heals two people: a leper and a paralytic. And in both cases, there is a message communicated.

The first message is communicated by the leper, who goes out and tells everyone what happened. And that message is, “Wow, this man can heal diseases!” As it turns out, that message, even if it was well-intentioned, is counterproductive, because people from all over flock to him, to the point where he can’t preach the gospel effectively—he can’t go into the towns where the people are and proclaim the good news to them, because every time he does, he’s overrun with people coming to him for healing.

It’s easy to understand why some people would be more interested in being healed than in listening to Jesus preach. When you’re sick, it’s difficult to think of anything else other than your illness; so when you hear of a cure, it’s difficult to think of anything besides the cure. And what if the doctor with the cure wanted to talk to you, for a long time, about something else that seemed unrelated to your illness? You may listen to some of it, but it will be difficult to concentrate, because you just want to feel better.

We understand why people who are ill would come to Jesus, but coming to Jesus for that reason makes it more difficult for them to hear what Jesus is trying to say. The testimony of the healed man is counterproductive, even if his intentions were good.

Now, compare that to the second healing. There is a message communicated when Jesus heals the paralytic too. It is not only, “Wow, this man can heal diseases!” but also, “Your sins are forgiven.” You see, it’s basically the same message, but with one vitally important piece of information added: “This man can heal diseases, and therefore, this man has the authority to forgive sins.”

That final piece of information produces an entirely different sort of response. The first time, the people started to come to him from every quarter, to the point that his preaching of the gospel was hindered. This time, when the paralytic picked up his bed and walked out, what was their response? V. 12 tells us that “they were all amazed and glorified God.”

The first miracle produced spectators and consumers; the second miracle produced worshippers. The first miracle hindered the preaching of the gospel; the second miracle helped the preaching of the gospel.

And the only substantial difference between the two events was this declaration: “Son, your sins are forgiven.”

That was Jesus’s point to the scribes: it’s easier to say this man’s sins are forgiven than it is to heal him. So I’ll heal him so that you might see I can not just say his sins are forgiven, but that I can actually do it: that I really do have the authority on earth to forgive sins.

That changes everything, because even if saying “Your sins are forgiven” is easy, actually doing it is far more difficult.

Already it’s difficult on a simple, relational level. Imagine someone who has hurt you badly. How difficult was it, or how difficult would it be, to truly forgive a person who has wounded you? It is never easy to forgive, because there is a deep-seated desire for justice in the human heart, and forgiveness means accepting to not see justice done against someone who has committed wrong. Forgiveness requires us to take the pain that the guilty person deserves, and in a sense, accept to suffer pain ourselves—the pain of not seeing justice done. It’s far easier to punish than to forgive.

And that’s the simplest kind of forgiveness: very basic, relational forgiveness.

But that’s not even the kind of forgiveness Jesus is talking about here. Sin isn’t a simple offense against another person; it is divine treason. It is spitting in the face of a good, loving Creator, who made us to find our joy, to find our humanity, in him. It’s not about what the offense is, but rather against whom we have sinned. The only proper justice for all sin is eternal judgment, because all sin is committed against an infinitely righteous God.

What would it take for this infinitely just and worthy God to be able to actually “forgive” us our sins? Justice still needs to be done, otherwise God is not just. No—to forgive our sins, it would require a perfect human being to take the place of sinful human beings, and bear our punishment in our place. The only being perfect enough to do that would be God himself, made man.

That is the forgiveness Jesus is talking about here: he has the authority to forgive sins because he is the perfect God, the Creator of all things, come to earth to take our place and suffer our punishment, in our place. It is far more difficult to forgive sins; forgiveness is by far the greater miracle.

But he can do it—and the first proof that he can do it is this paralytic, lowered down through a hole in the ceiling, picking up his bed and walking.

That is the point.

The goal of Jesus’s ministry was the proclamation and understanding of the good news. The good news of the kingdom of God is the good news that finally, once and for all, our sin can be forgiven. That paralytic leaving Jesus’s house is a picture of the good news of the kingdom of God: it is a full-on renovation of humanity—new creatures, made whole, reconciled to God.

And that is why Mark tells us about these two miracles back to back. Without forgiveness of sins, his miracles are still good, but they’re only a temporary Band-Aid. Every single person whom Jesus healed still died one day. Jesus does it anyway—he keeps healing people, because he has compassion on those who suffer. But miracles in themselves get the people no closer to the heart of the kingdom. What gets people to the heart of the kingdom is the knowledge that we are sinners in need of a Savior, and that Jesus Christ has the authority to forgive our sin.

Conclusion

Now, it’s very easy to read these stories as stories, to read them and dissociate them from our own lives. We can not, we must not, do that. Because these stories aren’t just tales of something that happened a long time ago—nothing, nothing, concerns us more than what we see here.

Think about it for a minute, especially if you’ve grown up in church. We so often come to God differently than the way Mark invites us to come to Jesus in this text. All too often, we come to God because we want something. We want power, or we want joy, or we want healing, or we want an emotional high. Some will come to God the way we go on roller coasters: we come to God because we want to experience something we don’t get to experience in our day-to-day lives. Others will come to God the way we go to the doctor—we have something we feel is wrong, so we go to the doctor to get it fixed. I really like my doctor, but I don’t think about her during the week. I don’t have a relationship with her. Our interaction is purely transactional.

And without the forgiveness of sin, that is exactly what any “experience” of God becomes: it becomes transactional. If it does not drive us to repentance and a recognition of the forgiveness we have in Christ, any spiritual “experience”, even a good experience, even a healing experience, is a spiritual Band-Aid: it may feel good, and it may do us good, but it gets us no closer to the heart of the kingdom.

So this text invites us to ask ourselves a very serious and a very simple question: What are we looking for when we come to Christ?

Are we seeking experience, or are we seeking forgiveness?

Are we seeking relief, or are we seeking reconciliation with God?

Are we seeking a better quality of life, or are we seeking union with Christ?

We have to understand this. In this text we’ve seen leprosy, and we’ve seen paralysis. But sin is the greater sickness. A leper was outcast from society; sin separates us from God. A paralytique was forced to beg because he couldn’t work; a sinner is forced to work, to try to earn his worth.

In any illness, in a sense, our bodies turn against us; our physical weakness becomes a weapon that is wielded against us, and we feel very keenly. Ask anyone who has been sick for a long time. We should feel the illness of sin much more deeply, because sin is a corruption of our nature. It separates us from our humanity. What is worse, it is a voluntary illness. We have all chosen sin. Our cancer is a cancer we preferred over glory.

If we feel the horror of our sin as keenly as we ought, what should we feel when we hear our Maker say, “Son, daughter…your sins are forgiven”?

Mark wants us to seek forgiveness, reconciliation, union with Christ, because Jesus came not to bring temporary healing, but permanent healing. Sin is the greater illness, and forgiveness is the greater miracle.

And if Jesus stopped there—if he only died to forgive our sin—that would be quite enough. So it’s amazing, isn’t it, that Jesus doesn’t stop at forgiveness. He doesn’t just forgive; he also heals. He doesn’t just bring reconciliation with God; he also brings eternal joy in his presence.

He doesn’t just say, “Your sins are forgiven.” He also says, “Now get up and walk.”

And if we know that our sins are forgiven, we walk very differently. We walk, not out of a desire to get something new from God, but out of gratitude for what we already have in him. We walk, not out of a sense of obligation or duty, but out of a sense of awe, that God would be good enough to save someone as wretched as me. We walk, not to enter into a transaction with God—“I’ll do this if you give me this”—but to know the God who saved us.

Your sins are forgiven, Jesus says. Now, get up and walk.

A Day in the Life of Jesus (Mark 1.16-39)

Today's sermon is called “A Day in the Life of Jesus”, and you probably know that there are a huge amount of books, films, documentaries that have a title like “A Day in the life of something”. It's a title format that works well, because we assume that with a typical day, we can get an idea of ​​what someone's life is like.

Besides, I shouldn’t have been surprised to know that there is already a published book called “A Day in the Life of Jesus”.

This book was published by a historian and professor of the New Testament called Régis Burnet, and I don't know if the book is good or not, I haven't read it. But it shows, once again, the interest that we can take in someone's typical day to try to understand the person who experiences that typical day.

And that’s a bit of what we see in this text. In this text from Mark, we see a typical day in the ministry of Jesus with his disciples - at least a typical day in this phase of his ministry, at the beginning, in the region of Galilee. The story here describes a Saturday where a lot of things are really happening.

In three parts, we will see:

• What is happening Before the day that is described here;

• What is happening during this day;

• What is happening After this day;

Before the day: the Call

Last week we saw the very beginning of Mark's gospel, with the baptism of Jesus and the beginning of his ministry. We can read verses 14 and 15:

After John was arrested, Jesus went to Galilee. He proclaimed the good news [of the kingdom] of God and said, “The time has come, and the kingdom of God is at hand. Change your attitude and believe the good news!”

So Jesus began to preach, to proclaim the kingdom of God - he said that the time promised by the Old Testament prophets had arrived. These prophets promised that God would forgive and free His people from the oppression of sin, and that He would do this through a special person, the Messiah. So, according to Jesus' preaching, this moment had arrived. And the appropriate reaction to this arrival was to change one's attitude and to believe.

Then, in today's text, we see how Jesus calls his first disciples. Mark describes things so succinctly that one can have the impression that Jesus has hypnotized them: they drop what they are doing and follow without hesitation... But if we should not see hypnosis here on the part of Jesus, Mark still wants to show us to what extent there is something urgent about Jesus' call to his disciples.

It’s part of the “the time has come” momentum. The appropriate time to answer it is now. They leave an active life, with ongoing activities, to follow Jesus. They do not cut themselves off from society, but their lives have a new direction.

This introduction, with the call of the disciples, is also important because, in a way, Mark calls us to put ourselves in the shoes of these disciples. The way he tells us about the events is really a way of putting us in the shoes of Jesus' disciples. And it is not only a literary device to make the story more interesting, but also a way to make you ask the same questions and arrive, perhaps, at the same conclusions, as the disciples.

Now the team is assembled who will spend 24 hours with Jesus: Jesus himself, the disciples and, in a way, us the readers.

The day: the Authority…

Teaching

They will spend a day with Jesus but, certainly, not just any day of the week. Saturday was a day for them to go to synagogue, to read the scriptures together, to listen to someone teach the scriptures.

So they go to the synagogue in Capernaum, and it is Jesus who will teach. Mark does not say exactly what Jesus taught, but we can be sure that it is linked to what we saw before, in verse 15: the time has come and the kingdom of God is at hand. Certainly he taught this by showing quotes from the prophets.

And the people at the synagogue were impressed. Not only by the content of his teaching but by the authority with which he taught. Unlike the scribes, Jesus was not presenting a synthesis of a consensus of certain scholars who had debated for a long time. Jesus spoke of prophecies whose fulfillment passed through him. So it is not without surprise that he spoke in a confident manner, like someone who knows very well what he is talking about.

La reaction

But there is another reaction that was provoked by the teaching of Jesus: that of a demon. Here there is no real explanation of what a demon is. But Mark uses the expression “unclean spirit” and that communicates quite a bit. Already it is a spirit, therefore a supernatural entity, which we cannot really see or completely understand. And this spirit is impure. The word impure designates, in the Jewish world, a state of absence of possible communion with God and with others. So it is a spirit which is not in communion with God, and which acts against the communion of men with God.

So this unclean spirit reacts to Jesus' teaching. We can understand: if Jesus is announcing the kingdom of God, that is to say the restoration of communion between God and humans through the work of the Messiah, then it is really a program opposed to that of the spirit of non-communion.

He calls out to Jesus in an aggressive way, in an expression that is a bit like “Why are you bothering me? What do you want from me?” We see that the preaching of Jesus, for the impure spirit, is understood as a threat. In an attempt to gain the upper hand over Jesus, the unclean spirit shows that he knows Jesus' identity. But Jesus closes the debate, in a very simple way: he prevents him from speaking and he casts out the demon.

It’s interesting to see that Jesus doesn’t really have an exorcism “technique”. He has no incantation, no incense, no blessed object. He has his authority. He says, and the thing happens. And that’s what people still notice: his authority.

“What is this new teaching? He commands with authority even unclean spirits, and they obey!”  (v.27)

We see that this episode of exorcism gives authority to the teaching of Jesus. The two things are mentioned together: his teaching and his miracle. Indeed, the fact that Jesus can provoke an impure spirit through his preaching and expel it through his authority shows that we are not really in a status quo - the moment has arrived, hence the fact that they call “new” teaching.

Healing

After the synagogue, we continue this day with Jesus. Jesus and the disciples enter where they are staying: the house of Simon's family. There, Jesus performs a new miracle, which is both very different and very similar to that of the synagogue.

Very different because, already, it is not the same problem. Marc distinguishes illness from possession, they are two different things. And Jesus also has authority in this area. But this does not mean that possession is a purely spiritual phenomenon, and that illness is a purely material phenomenon. Illness, in the Bible, is a symbol of the consequence of lack of full communion with God.

This does not mean that the sick person (here, Peter's mother-in-law) is sick because she committed a particular sin. But that she is sick because she, like all of us, lives in a fallen world, marked by sin, which must be renewed. Here, in a much more private, much quieter setting, Jesus makes the mother-in-law's fever go away.

Let us look at this again as a continuation of what he did during this Saturday already: he announces that the moment promised by the prophets has arrived. He announces that the kingdom is near: communion with God will be restored, and as an example an impure spirit is expelled. What sin has corrupted in the material world will be restored: and, for example, a disease is cured.

Once again, this miracle is part of this new teaching of Jesus, of the good news that he comes to announce.

The crowd

But the 24 hours with Jesus continue, and at the beginning of the evening people, who have heard about what Jesus did in the synagogue, come to see Jesus to ask for healings, liberations or exorcisms of impure spirits.

So we see the two examples we have seen so far, an exorcism and a healing, multiplied. People with different illnesses are healed, other impure spirits are expelled.

Again, they recognize who Jesus really is, but he does not allow his identity to be proclaimed by demons, but rather through his teaching and actions.

If until now, this Saturday would have already been very impressive, now we are going beyond the limits. And one can imagine Jesus' reputation growing even more after people noticed that these were not isolated episodes but that, indeed, he still had the power to heal and liberate. Certainly other people will come the next day, maybe even more people. And that’s where Jesus does something the disciples don’t understand: he leaves.

After the day: Departure

Jesus leaves to pray before daybreak. Probably to avoid being blocked by the crowd. The disciples manage to find him - he was probably in a place where he used to pray.

The vocabulary that Marc uses here is interesting: Simon and the others are looking for him. We could also translate: they are chasing him. It is a vocabulary normally used with negative connotations, of hunting or persecution. We can imagine the disciples looking for Jesus, almost indignant or angry… “where is Jesus now… this is not the time to disappear, people are lining up in front of the house!”

There are still people to heal. But Jesus says his mission is elsewhere. He must continue to preach in other places, he must continue to announce that the time has arrived, that the kingdom is near. That's why he came out. Healings and exorcisms, these elements are part of the power of his preaching, they are concrete manifestations of the kingdom that he announces, but it is preaching that is the center of his mission. In this logic, it is natural for him to move to other villages.

So he said: “Come on”. The disciples must go with him. They must follow him in his mission, not pursue him. Jesus told them, during their call, “follow me, I will make you become fishers of men.” They are not yet. If the call requires an immediate response, “making it become” is a process. They must understand even better the mission of Jesus, the centrality of his good news. They will become people who boldly proclaim this good news, who live as citizens of the kingdom of God, and who invite others to a newness of life. Jesus is going to make them become fishers of men.

But for now, they must follow Jesus and bear witness to other days like this. We can imagine that days like this were spent in many of the small towns and villages of the Galilee.

Conclusion

So that was a day in the life of Jesus and his disciples, during the beginning of his ministry. I said at the beginning that the Gospel of Mark invites us to put ourselves in the perspective of the disciples of Jesus in its narration. So, if we do this exercise, what conclusion can we draw?

Here, for this morning, I list three.

The Teaching, Authority, and Identity of Jesus

These three elements are closely linked. We see here that people were struck by Jesus' teaching because he preached with authority. We also see that when people see that Jesus had authority over impure spirits, they are surprised by his teaching. And they wonder about the identity of Jesus.

His teaching emanates from his authority, his authority emanates from his identity. His teaching indicates his authority, his authority indicates his identity. We could approach these three concepts from different angles, it is a rope with three threads woven very tightly.

This has a particular consequence, for example, for someone, say, who is beginning to be interested in the Christian faith, who wants to know more about the teaching of Jesus. If this is your case, this point shows you that the question of the identity and authority of Jesus is not really separable from his teaching. We cannot, for example, isolate “principles of life” from the teaching of Jesus, from the consideration of who he is. If Jesus is not, as Mark says, “the Christ, Son of God,” then his teaching truly loses its value.

This point risks being a recurring point of application during the following preachings, because the question of the identity of Jesus is the central point of the gospel of Mark.

Miracles in Proclaiming the Kingdom

Another element that we can draw from this episode is that the miracles of Jesus have a role in his preaching, in his proclamation of the approaching kingdom of God. And they must be understood within this framework, otherwise they will not be understood.

Jesus is announcing that God, through his Messiah, will restore communion with humans and take upon himself the consequences of men's sins. That time has arrived, but kingdom is near - it will yet fully manifest. These healings and exorcisms show people that he was the person through whom the kingdom comes.

But it must be recognized that these signs, although extraordinary, are of a temporary nature, and have prophetic value - they point to the future reality of the kingdom of God. These people who were healed, all, without exception, died. After a few or many years later.

But it is believed that Jesus died and rose again. That through his death he cleansed the impurity that separates us from God and freed us from the powers of darkness. That through his resurrection, we too will one day be resurrected, with bodies free from disease and other consequences of sin on nature. This is the full fulfillment of the announced kingdom. Miracles are only a foretaste, only a way of announcing what is to come.

Of course, this announced kingdom invites people to experience it now. But the invitation to live the kingdom now is not an invitation to live a miracle-filled life, any more than one prepares for dinner by eating 35 pieces of appetizers... The appropriate response to the Kingdom proclamation is change of attitude (repentance), faith, and discipleship. Which leads us to our third conclusion.

Follow vs. pursue Jesus

At the end of today's passage we see the disciples' first misunderstanding of what it meant to “follow Jesus”. It won't be the only one in Mark's gospel.

Despite the fact that they testified in a very direct way to the authority of Jesus, they are there “managing” him. They assume they know what should be his priority, where he should be taking action.

And we need to know that we often act the same way. We have witnessed a Jesus who works wonders, who changes lives, who has power and authority and… our next thought stops on our impression of what he should do. On what he should heal, on what he should restore, on what he should correct, on what he should judge.

So we're chasing him because we feel like he's not where he should be. But our role as disciples is to be where he is. To follow him. In the same way as with Simon and the others, he will “make us become”. He has his mission, the proclamation of his kingdom of God which invites new life in him. It is by following him, it is by accompanying him in his priorities, that he makes us become. In this posture we recognize in him, not only the God who heals, but the one who is our healing. Not only the God who liberates, but the one who is our freedom.