NOTES for Mar 3:20-27
It is strange: why did the Pharisees, who were by no means foolish, resort to such an absurd argument in their dispute with Jesus? What Jesus said in reply to their accusations was perfectly obvious to any impartial witness. Of course, it is difficult to regard Jesus' accusers as impartial witnesses.
Yet anyone bringing an accusation, even a false one, always takes care at least to make it plausible. The accusers of Jesus mentioned in the account, however, seem not even to think about plausibility. Of course, there is still a certain perverse logic to such an accusation: someone who managed to enter into an alliance with the ruler of the powers of darkness would indeed gain a measure of authority over those powers. But what ruler would allow such authority to be used to his own detriment? It is this obvious inconsistency that Jesus points out to His accusers.
But it seems that the Pharisees accusing Him no longer cared much about logic. They needed to accuse Jesus of something, anything. Not out of some political calculation, as did the representatives of secular authority or the Temple leadership who accused Him, but simply from a sense of self-preservation. That same almost animal instinct which often obeys no human logic, demanding only one thing of the person who feels it: to ward off a blow that might prove fatal, to ward it off at any cost. The Pharisees' argument looks precisely like such a spontaneous reaction.
Apparently, Jesus' opponents were not only irritated but frightened. Of what? Of the possibility of losing their influence over people's minds and their power over souls? Hardly: Jesus never really laid claim to the positions held by the movement's leaders, although He often spoke quite harshly of those leaders. The reason probably lay elsewhere: Jesus' preaching, His testimony to the Kingdom, undermined the Pharisees' very religiosity, destroying their inner world.
Fallen human beings always react to such an encroachment upon their inner world just as the Pharisees did: instinctively, guided only by that sense of self-preservation which at such a moment drives all other feelings and thoughts from the soul. It is precisely this reaction that blocks a person's way into the Kingdom, if they allow it to take complete possession of them. And in such a state, a person is indeed ready to kill someone they perceive as a threat. Thus the way of the cross was being prepared for the One who brought the Kingdom into the world.