NOTES for Mar 3:20-21

Perhaps the most striking thing in the story by the evangelist Mark that we read today is that the Lord answers the outrageous statement of the scribes at all. A crowd gathers around Him. There are so many people that there is not even time to pause for a meal. One after another they come to the Lord Jesus with questions and pleas, and most of them need healing. It is hard even to imagine such a concentration of suffering in one place, and how terrible it must have looked from the outside... The possessed and the insane, the crippled and the ragged... One could easily become unclean there; one would not find profound theological insight into the law there; there was nothing respectable there. For an intellectual scribe, or even simply for a respected person with a position in society, it was somehow shameful even to approach this crowd. So even today people sometimes say about our Church that only old women and half-mad people go there...

The religion for which the scribes are zealous, by contrast, is very respectable. It does not concern itself with the fate of every outcast. Its goal is to raise man above the ugliness of a suffering world. Only the best, only the very best, are worthy to shine with virtue in the Kingdom of the expected Messiah. And this preacher from Nazareth... The natural conclusion for the scribes is that He associates with such people because He Himself is one of them. And even the obvious miracles, which cannot be disputed, He performs because He is possessed.

The incredible mercy of Christ is revealed in the fact that He receives and keeps receiving these crowds of suffering people, unattractive as all suffering is. He truly became one of us, though not in the sense the scribes think. He came to share this suffering and to bring His immaterial Light into this darkness. Yet even the scribes themselves, unaware of their own weakness and blindness, saying wild things offensive to any human being, are not strangers to Jesus. And in the midst of this crowd, He finds a way to address them too in their own language. It is the language of wisdom, the language of logic, the language of theology. Christ rejects only one thing: the mercilessness hidden behind the scribes' position.

Unwillingness to acknowledge the obvious sometimes gives rise to the strangest theories and assumptions. So it was with the Pharisees: some of them, unwilling to see the Messiah in the Messiah, tried to explain the miracles Jesus performed by saying that He was resorting to the help of dark powers.

To any unbiased person, such an assumption would have seemed at least strange: Jesus had repeatedly cast demons out of people, freeing them from the power of those very dark forces whose help He was supposedly using, if one followed the logic of the Pharisees who accused Him. Jesus points to this contradiction when He rejects the accusation brought against Him: the devil, He says, will not go to war against himself. At the same time, Jesus warns about the most terrible sin, the sin that is not forgiven: blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. At first glance everything is simple and clear: He casts out demons precisely by the Holy Spirit, while the people accusing Him regard and call that Spirit dark and demonic, thereby blaspheming God.

Yet there is also a second meaning here, less obvious, but completely clear on closer examination. This has to do with the lie to which a person often resorts in order to justify his own view of the world, his own attitude toward particular people and events. In fact, when a person acts this way, he deceives himself while also trying to deceive other people, and often even God, for all the absurdity of that attempt. This kind of self-deception ultimately turns out to be blasphemy against the Spirit.

Indeed, if a person can see the truth even to some extent, it is only insofar as God shows it to him. This concerns every truth in general, the very possibility of seeing something that really exists. This is God's world, and only God's will, God's action, and God's determination make it real and true. For a human being, the world is disclosed as something real and true insofar as God shows it to him as such.

Refusing to see the world as God shows it to a person is the beginning and root of lying as a way of perceiving reality. Self-deception like the kind people often resort to, and which Jesus' accusers resorted to in particular, means precisely a conscious refusal to perceive reality as God shows it to a person. This refusal becomes blasphemy against the Spirit and is not forgiven, not because God is merciless, but because, until a person renounces self-deception, he will be able neither truly to see God's world nor to meet the One who created it.

One of the greatest saints of our time, Therese of Lisieux, began writing her autobiographical notes, "Story of a Soul," by opening the Gospel at random and finding her eyes falling on the very words with which our passage begins: "Then He went up on the mountain and called to Himself those whom He Himself wanted." In her thought, the whole mystery of the calling to holiness is contained in them: "He does not call those who are worthy of it, but those whom He Himself wants."

The whole passage is about the "called" and the "summoned," about the Lord's relationships with those closest to Him. Why does He choose the circle of His closest disciples? Do we have grounds to agree with Therese's words, or are we inwardly convinced that among all the listeners those chosen by Jesus were the worthiest?

In verses 28-29 there is a warning, and one of the sternest in the Gospel. Let us note: it is not Jesus who condemns the scribes. Speaking in parables, He gives them the opportunity to look and test for themselves what from what has been said applies to them. Is not this respect of His for the human conscience the key to what it means to "blaspheme the Holy Spirit"? Every other blasphemy is external: a person may "not know what he is doing." But when he blasphemes the Holy Spirit, he knows, and he does it in spite of what his own conscience is crying out. Is this not why the condemnation proves eternal, because nothing remains in a person that could raise him up?

In the last verses of the third chapter one at first sees a bitter testimony to Jesus' rejection of family ties because His relatives did not understand Him, until one realizes: the Lord does not move away from His relatives, otherwise what value would there be for the disciples in being called His "brother, and sister, and mother"? He shares with those who do the will of God His most personal, most tender, and most caring love.

The human mind is resourceful; this has been known long and well. So has the fact that it is the greatest flatterer in the world: if a person very much wants to convince himself of something, prove something to himself, or justify something for himself, his mind is glad to try and please him. It will find the needed arguments and offer such interpretations of perfectly obvious facts that, if the person wants, they will allow him to see those facts as completely different from what they really are. This activity of the human mind turns out to be especially "useful" when certain facts simply refuse to fit within the framework of a scheme, concept, or theory devised by the same human mind.

Something like this happened when certain "scribes" (apparently learned rabbis or teachers of Torah from the Jerusalem academy) began to claim that Jesus supposedly cast out dark spirits by using the power of their own head, the ruler of the world of shadows and the kingdom of death, one of whose names was Beelzebul. The absurdity of such a claim was obvious, and Jesus immediately pointed it out to the scribes: if everything were as they claimed, that would be a tremendous stroke of good fortune, because it would mean that a split had occurred in the kingdom of darkness, so that fighting it would now be quite easy. It was obvious to everyone that nothing of the sort was to be expected.

The scribes simply proposed a theory that could explain what was happening without destroying their own concepts, above all their messianic concepts, and some others as well. This Man, they said, violates the Law given by God (in reality, the prescriptions invented by people and proposed as an interpretation of that very Law given by God); therefore He cannot be a man of God; therefore He cannot heal; and since He nevertheless heals, then... at this point the new theory came in handy: therefore, He heals by the wrong power, not by God's power. The logic is preserved, but it has no relation to reality.

Yet a person who wants to deceive himself tries not to notice this, and truly does not notice it, while the mind helps him remain in ignorance. A person's life is determined not by mind and not by logic, but by will, which compels a person to choose and decide. This includes choosing what he wants to see and what he does not want to see. And seeing what one wants or failing to notice what one does not want is not so hard; when needed, both mind and feelings will help with this. They cannot resist the will, which determines who and what a person will be before God and people.