Binding the Strong One

Proper 5, Year B; Mark 3:20-35

Mark’s Gospel has been called “a passion narrative with an introduction,”¹ but while that description makes a fair point—the centrality of the Cross— it probably undervalues the “introduction.” If the second half of Mark’s Gospel is taken up with the fateful journey and its outcome, this does not mean the first half is about something else. From the very beginning Mark tells a single urgent story of the coming of Jesus to save his people, and presents that story not as a pastoral visit but as a campaign. Even in the first few chapters we are in the middle of a situation of conflict from which that climax will develop. In this short set of verses, a whole set of conflictual relationships is sketched, but a new social reality also emerges.

Mark often presents material in a sandwich form, either with a story divided into two parts and another set inside it, or as in this case with thematically-related material introducing and then following another episode. Jesus’ family are introduced, before the encounter with scribes from Jerusalem unfolds, after which the family reappear. We can therefore assume that these two parts—each with some complexity—inform and interpret one another.

The passage begins with Jesus and his disciples “at the house”—introducing subtly one of the themes that will run through this episode— being mobbed “so that they could not eat” (literally, “eat bread”). Jesus’ ministry is not much of a “Sabbath rest by Galilee” at all. Note also that Jesus has not really begun teaching yet. This was not the basis of the movement around him for Mark, because teaching is something that Jesus only subsequently does (see chapter 4), for and with his followers, to provide formation for the movement he has already begun. The reason people are with him is his demonstrated willingness to name and confront the powers of evil, both as manifested supernaturally and in the political structures of the day—if indeed it is right to separate these at all. His movement is coalescing.

So Jesus isn’t eating properly (!) when his family arrive, but their key concern seems to be his mental health rather than his diet. They hear he is literally “beside himself” (v.21). The Greek phrase for these concerned arrivals isn’t as specific as “family”—“his people” is closer—but this more general way of describing them makes it more a collective effort by those who cared about him, or sought to, rather than just by one or two individuals. This apparent conflict with his own family is omitted by Matthew and Luke, underscoring for us how sharp Mark’s point is. This scene-setting is then paused while another group appears.

In last week’s Gospel, Pharisees and Herodians had seen enough of Jesus after the controversy over the Sabbath to go off and plot. Now the antagonists are quite different, “scribes from Jerusalem.” These—bureaucrats as much as scholars— represent the political center of Judea, and perhaps the Temple as well. The scribes seem to invoke a traditional objection to witchcraft and other local means of dealing with evil relative to the centralized Israelite cult (see Lev 19:31). Use of the obscure term “Beelzebul” underlines the sense that the central authorities are dismissing the local freelancer, as well as stigmatizing him.² This however makes an ironic point: since these Jerusalemite ritual experts have misread where good and evil are at work here, these are really the inhabitants of the “divided house.”

The overtones of “house” in the passage (vv. 20, 25, 27) are more than architectural, but suggest a household, family, and wider social connections. “House” is also a common way of referring to the Temple itself, whose emissaries these scribes purport to be. In speaking of the “divided house” Jesus is alluding to the parlous state of the Temple under the authority of Roman rule and local collaboration.

Icon of the Resurrection and Harrowing of Hell, with Satan Bound; source unknown

We may be put off by the symbolic language of the demonic, or miss the point by imagining it refers to arcane supernatural matters far from our experience. In the world of the Gospels the forces of good and evil are both metaphysical and concrete; they are manifest in disease, oppression, and suffering of all kinds. We read best by holding these things together. The contest taking place in the realm of both religious and political power here is, Mark tells us, really a conflict between the Holy Spirit and Satan. It is not (just) Jesus’ miraculous power over demons that exposes who he is and they are, but the ways they (and we) place ourselves relative to what is manifestly good and evil, whether in personal or political terms.

The high point of the sayings is the mysterious reference to the binding of “the strong one.” There is no reference to an actual “man,” despite NRSV, just a masculine adjective. Leaving the ambiguity here is to be preferred, because this parable does not leave its actual reference far behind. The “strong one” is not a human but Satan, and so Jesus both reaffirms his analysis that the world (and Israel not least) lies oppressed under demonic power, and announces his bold intention to wrestle the enemy into submission and plunder his goods.

“Strong” could also have been translated “mighty” or “powerful” with the connotations of political and not just physical strength; John the Baptist had used the same language when earlier foreseeing Jesus as “stronger than I” (1:7). The image then suggests not so much a typical householder who happens to possess unusual strength, but a powerful person, an exploitative local landowner whose “house” is not just a dwelling but secure storage for plunder that has been taken from, and is needed by, others. This image is less a sort of burglary than a storming of the castle.

Jesus rounds out this discourse with the confronting saying about blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. The blasphemy to which Jesus refers is calling bad what is good, as the scribes have done; this of course reminds us of the modern political discourses that invite people to embrace their own dehumanization in the name of making something great, or the promise that ordinary people will be empowered by the authoritarian rule of the wealthy.

We return, at the end of this conflictual exchange, to the second part of the interaction with Jesus’ family, who have now reappeared in the more specific form of his mother and brothers. A great deal of interpretive anxiety lurks around the question of how Jesus’ own family really emerge from this difficult teaching, but this is certainly to miss Mark’s point. The way his family members fit into his movement is not addressed in Mark, although Luke and John both have things to say that we might find reassuring. Yet first we must read Mark.

At the beginning of the episode, the crowd had been imposing on Jesus so that his needs were unmet, and his family’s concern did not initially seem unreasonable. Now Jesus is surrounded (literally, v. 32) by those ready to be his “brother and sister and mother.” The scene concerns the new society that is coming into being around Jesus, to which “family” language is applied. So Jesus’ teaching is not about family life as we otherwise understand it, but about the fact that following him, doing the will of God, is to become a new kind of family. The significance of this for any reader is that they are offered this same relationship to Jesus, to be among those sitting around him, somehow brought into this undivided household where justice and truth are at table with him and us, and where we find that we too are “brother and sister and mother” to him.

1. Martin Kähler, The So-Called Historical Jesus and the Historical Biblical Christ (originally published in German as Der sogenannte historische Jesus und der geschichtliche, biblische Christus. George Böhme, 1896.) - and in a footnote no less (p. 80, n.1).

2. For more on this see Adela Yarbro Collins, Mark: A Commentary. Hermeneia. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2007, pp. 229-31.