Mark 2-3 - The upside-down world

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Malcolm Lithgow

Burleigh Church of Christ

The Gospel of Mark • Sermon • Submitted 2 months ago • Presented 2 months ago • 36:21

Mark 3:31–35

Mark 2–3

Kingdom

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As recorded in Mark 2-3, Jesus does not muck about as he begins his ministry. Rather he starts at full strength, refusing to ease either himself or his audiences into the radical changes he was demanding. Join Malcolm as he explores why and how Jesus was so confrontational, and what impacts that might have on our lives today, two thousand years later.

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Intro

I was going to start this sermon by reflecting on the holiday period we’ve just had. But I think the drama of the last few days has usurped that. The fact that I’m not able to stand in the same room as you to share God’s word is a surprise, but it’s the sort of surprise that we’ve dealt with quite a few times in recent years.

I don’t know about you, but through these drawn-out days of Cyclone Alfred’s threatened arrival, and eventual arrival, I have had a number of texts and calls from much of my family, checking up on us and expressing their concern. My main concern was not for us, but more for my daughter, who was in no danger of flooding, but whose house is substantially older and more fragile than ours. Family is important, no matter where they live, and when they are not under the same roof, it can be difficult when danger is threatening.

You know, it’s interesting how traditional Christian culture really values family. And it’s not alone in that. In North East Asia, in countries like China, Japan, and Korea, Confucianism places a very high value on family.

I wonder what Jesus would say?

Well, we don’t have to wonder, we can just read the Bible. Let’s turn to the end of Mark’s third chapter.

Bible

Mark 3:31–35 NLT

31 Then Jesus’ mother and brothers came to see him. They stood outside and sent word for him to come out and talk with them. 32 There was a crowd sitting around Jesus, and someone said, “Your mother and your brothers are outside asking for you.” 33 Jesus replied, “Who is my mother? Who are my brothers?” 34 Then he looked at those around him and said, “Look, these are my mother and brothers. 35 Anyone who does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother.”

Huh? What? It sounds like Jesus is saying that blood family doesn’t matter, but that rather church family is the more important thing! That sounds radical, even a bit cultish, doesn’t it?

Well, before we dig into what’s going on here, let’s pray--it’s always important to pray before we look at God’s word, because we are, after all, talking with God.

Prayer

Dear Lord Jesus, as we spend time to think about your word, even in the midst of the chaos of crazy weather and uncertain circumstances, you challenge not just your blood family of two-thousand years ago, but us, today, two thousand years later. Help us to hear your message clearly and help us to obey it well.

In your name we pray, amen.

Method

Now, before we dive in, I just want to explain a bit of what I’m doing here. One of the most important things we can do in our lives is to read and understand God’s word, found in the Bible. But reading God’s word is an active thing, it requires our participation. And like anything that requires our participation, we can do it poorly or we can do it well. And to do it well requires skill and practice.

If I went to Burleigh Home+Life and bought a fancy electric mountain bike like this, that doesn’t mean that I can suddenly ride all the trails at Nerang, does it? I have to have already built up some skills before I can use this bike effectively. Admittedly, mountain bikers don’t often say, “It’s not the bike, it’s the rider,” but that’s because, well, it’s hard justify that expensive new bike if it’s not the bike that matters! Nonetheless, there is a bit of truth to that saying. A bit.

The same is true with the Bible. You can have the biggest, fanciest study Bible (or you might even have Logos Bible software), but that alone won’t make you better at reading, understanding, and applying God’s word in your life. You need skills.

And so today I’ll be “showing my working” as we look at chapters 2 to 3 of Mark’s gospel.

I’m following a general approach known at COMA or, the way I’m doing it here is OCMA.

O - Observe the text

C - understand the Context

M - discern the Meaning

A - Apply it to your life

It doesn’t matter which order you put the observation and context in, so long as the last two are Meaning and Application in that order.

Let’s dig in.

Observe

The first thing I did to prepare for this sermon was to read Mark 2-3, several times, observing the text as a unit. It’s helpful to read a passage you want to understand not once, not twice, but at least three times. Pay attention to it. Try to visualise what the passage is saying, either as a story (which works for Mark), or as an argument (which works for Paul’s letters, for example). Think about what’s included and what isn’t included. Think about the order of things in the passage.Pay attention to the actual words used.

For example, the word “crowd” appears several times in both chapters 2 and 3, indicating that Jesus’ ministry was very popular. In fact, the crowd is so great it’s often an obstruction, as in the famous story of the paralytic lowered through the roof so that he can be healed.

Other common things are Jesus moving about and people following him and coming to him. These chapters are very dynamic, full of movement and motion.

Context

The next step in understanding the passage is to look at the context. There are several ways to do this.

First, it’s important to understand the book you’re reading (Mark, in this case). What genre is it? (Genre is the type of literature.) In Mark’s case, it’s a gospel, which is like a very focused biography. Mark is particularly focused, so much so that some commentators describe Mark’s gospel as a passion narrative—that’s the account of Jesus’ death—with a very long introduction.

Other questions of context include: who wrote it, when, for what purpose, in what language, to what audience, and so on. Steve addressed these questions when we started the series, so we already have this information.

Another important aspect of context is the immediate context of the passage you are studying—in this case that would be chapters 1 and 4, which surround chapters 2 and 3. Chapter 1 introduces John the Baptist, who is there to introduce Jesus, and then introduces Jesus, and shares his first, foundational steps in ministry. Chapter 4 shows us Jesus teaching in parables. That makes chapters 2 and 3 a transition between foundations and more advanced teaching. What might Jesus be communicating here?

Finally, it’s helpful to look at the historical or cultural background of the accounts. For example, what is the big deal about the Sabbath? Is it normal for a rabbi like Jesus to choose 12 disciples? What’s this stuff about fasting? And so on. This is where it’s handy to have a study Bible, like the ESV or NIV study Bibles, which are both excellent, or a commentary for the book.

I used Logos Bible Software’s general tools and also the commentary on Mark written by R. T. France from the series The New International Greek Testament Commentary.

Upside-down pericopes

So, from our repeated reading, the surrounding context, and the historical background, what we can pick up is that Mark 2-3 describes a wide range of scenarios in which Jesus is deliberately flouting convention, in other words, he’s turning people’s expectations upside down.

Here’s a list of the pericopes with a short summary of what Jesus is teaching in them. By the way, a pericope is a section of text that can stand on its own in some significant way. The passage I read earlier on Jesus family was a pericope.

Here is the list of pericopes in Mark 2-3:

Mark 2:1-12 Sin is the problem, not physical condition

Mark 2:13-17 “I came not to call the righteous, but sinners”

Mark 2:18-22 “Can the wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them?”

Mark 2:23-28 “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath”

Mark 3:1-6 Healing leads to hatred

Mark 3:7-12 Silencing the truth of liars

Mark 3:13-21 Choosing for the disciples

Mark 3:22-30 The only unforgivable sin is the one the holiest commit

Mark 3:31-35 “whoever does the will of God, he is my brother and sister and mother”

Meaning

Jesus is actually right-side up

These pericopes form an outline of the two chapters, they are another part of our observation of the text. They help us to start to think about what Jesus might be saying or doing in these chapters. In other words, we can now begin to discern the meaning of this section of Mark.

Given that Jesus introduces his ministry in chapter 1 by saying:

Mark 1:15 NLT

15 “The time promised by God has come at last!” he announced. “The Kingdom of God is near! Repent of your sins and believe the Good News!”

I believe there is a clear question to ask for each passage and the whole section: what is Jesus saying about the Kingdom of God and the Good News?

My reading of the chapters persuaded me, and you can see it in the outline here, too, that Jesus wants people to understand that the Kingdom of God is very different from the kingdom of Judea, or the land of the Jews. And the Good News is very different from the religious leader’s version of the Law of Moses. In fact, I would say that Jesus goes so far as to insist that everything the people were living by was upside-down.

Take a look at this image. Something is off about it, right? It’s beautiful, but something strange is going on. This is like the Jewish system of religion in Jesus time—it’s beautiful, but something is wrong somewhere. You might think you could fix the problem by straightening out a few lines, fixing a few patches. But that won’t work. Instead, what you have to do is this:

[Video of image rotating to reveal entire photo, of which first photo was just a reflection.]

The entire image was an upside-down reflection of reality. This is what Jesus is saying to the people, to the scribes, and to the Pharisees. You can’t just fix a few lines here and there, patch up a few holes, cover over some mistakes. The whole thing needs to be turned upside-down (actually, right-side-up), and only then can you see the truth.

Let’s take a look at how Jesus says just this in two of these accounts.

Jesus choosing for the disciples

Mark 3:14–15 NLT

14 Then he appointed twelve of them and called them his apostles. They were to accompany him, and he would send them out to preach, 15 giving them authority to cast out demons.

The first account I want to look at is Jesus choosing for the disciples. Jesus “choosing for the disciples...” You might wonder what the word “for” is doing in there, instead of me just saying “Jesus choosing the disciples.”

Well, the idea of discipleship has been around forever. In Jesus time there was a rich history of having disciples and being a disciple. There were two things you could focus on as a disciple: the primary one was to learn from your master, usually by following him around, listening and watching as he lived and taught. The second thing was to support your master somehow, maybe financially, but also by helping him in his work. You can see in these verses how Jesus called the Twelve to do both these things, to learn by accompanying him, and to support him by preaching his message and demonstrating his power.

So far, so normal.

However, for all of history before Jesus, and in almost every case since, it is the disciples who choose who they want to follow. We tend to take Jesus calling the disciples for granted. But imagine if, say, Uni lecturers wandered around your local shopping centre, demanding that shoppers start attending their courses. Or if a tradie rocked up to your house and, instead of offering their services, demanded that you become their apprentice! How ridiculous!

And yet that is precisely what Jesus did. He waltzed into Peter and Andrew’s daily workplace and demanded they follow him, roping in their friends James and John into the bargain. He wandered past Matthew’s busy tax booth and insisted that Matthew drop the lot and wander with him! What chutzpah! Who does he think he is? What gives him the right to choose for the disciples?

And now, in this account, he is selecting twelve of these random people to be representatives of the kingdom! How does he know that they’ll work out? Mable (with a tiny bit of help from me) has just spent weeks selecting a property manager for our rental place, and we’re on our second try for the right agency. How could Jesus be sure these untested men could be trusted with this most important of tasks? We struggle to even get a decent property manager!

The point is, of course, that Jesus thinks he’s God—the one who knows a person’s heart. And not only does he think he’s God (that’s common enough), but he actually is God! He does know how these guys will work out. Even the one who will fail: he knows that.

Not only does Jesus act like God, but he makes demands like God. He calls the disciples to him, for life—their life. No chance to try another rabbi when this one gets difficult. And he calls them to follow immediately. We see this expectation in Luke:

Luke 14:26 NLT

26 “If you want to be my disciple, you must, by comparison, hate everyone else—your father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even your own life. Otherwise, you cannot be my disciple.

Wow! Radical! And yet Jesus didn’t just say this once. He said it in a slightly different way at the end of Mark chapter 3, the passage we started with. Let’s turn there now.

Jesus and his family

Mark 3:31–35 NLT

Looking at this in light of the idea that Jesus is turning expectation upside-down, it’s easy to see what he is trying to do here. He’s not abandoning his mother or brothers. In fact, in John’s gospel we read that Jesus was caring for his mum even from the cross, and in Acts we find one of his brothers leading the Jerusalem church. Indeed, the letter of James in our Bibles is from one of Jesus’ brothers. So clearly Jesus was not cutting his family adrift.

Rather, he was saying, in the strongest possible way: the Kingdom of God takes priority. Blood relationship is important, but far more important is spiritual relationship.

Our number one priority is to God:

Mark 12:30 NLT

30 And you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength.’

If we do this, there’s nothing left over, right? If you take all your heart, and all your soul, and all your mind, and all your strength, what’s left? Nothing! We must love God with all we are!

So that means that our love for neighbour has to somehow fit inside our love for God. And, of course, it does! And our love for one another has to do the same. And, of course, it does! And all these other things Jesus asks us to do—preach the gospel, care for the stranger—they all fit into our love for God.

In fact, there is only one question that we ever need to answer when we are wondering whether we should do something or not: if I do this, am I loving God? All other questions just serve to answer this most important question.

And that’s why Jesus points to the fact that the intimacy of the relationships within the kingdom of God are greater than the intimacy of relationship between blood relatives.

Jesus turns the world upside-down. He doesn’t throw it away.

Application

So, we have examined the text and made observations of it, we have looked at the context, and we have discerned the meaning. Now we must apply it to our lives. Without application the word is dead. And God’s word is not dead—it’s alive! That’s why application is an integral part of experiencing God’s word.

Perhaps it would help to summarise Mark’s purpose in chapters 2 and 3 in a nice, pithy sentence. We might say,

An encounter with Jesus is also not just an “addition” or a “repair” to what we already have. Rather it is turning our upside-down world the right way around, completely renewing it.

How might our world be upside down?

So, to apply God’s word to our lives, we must then ask: how might God want to turn our lives upside-down?

Like Jesus’ family, we might be prioritising relationships of this world over relationships in the kingdom.

Like the scribes and the Pharisees, we might be prioritising tradition over Jesus’ radical demands, and so be in danger of rejecting Jesus.

Like the Pharisees, we might be struggling to understand that Jesus is calling us, not because we are healthy, but because we are sick.

Here in Australia we are particularly spoilt with our lifestyle, culture, and wealth. For most of us, most of the time, our world is so beautiful, it’s sometimes hard to recognise that it is fundamentally broken and destructive. It’s so much easier to cling to what we know, what is comfortable, or at least familiar, rather than throwing ourselves on Jesus’ upside-down mercy.

And, perhaps more importantly, we refuse to believe that our own autonomy, our own control of our lives, is inherently doomed to cause pain and suffering to ourselves and others. We want to hold onto at least a bit of control and so we pretend that there is no cost to that. We blame everyone but ourselves when our selfishness hurts us or those we love.

Like the Pharisees and the scribes, like Jesus’ mother and brothers, we want things to continue the way they are, no matter how broken they are. As Christians, there are even times when we get angry at Jesus for messing up our lives, turning things upside down. “Don’t you care?!” we scream at heaven. But while we treat Jesus as an add-on to our existing lives, rather than letting him turn everything upside-down, we will never find peace.

How Jesus can right our lives

When the scribes from Jerusalem accused Jesus of being the head demon, just before Jesus’ family confronted him, he responded patiently, “all sins will be forgiven the children of man, and whatever blasphemies they utter, but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness.”

Jesus’ grace is limitless—all sins will be forgiven. There is only one way to step outside his grace, and that is to deny the divinity of Jesus’ Spirit. If we deny that Jesus not only knows what is best for us, because he is the all-knowing God, but also deny that he wants what is best for us, denying his goodness, then he cannot save us. We have placed ourselves outside his love.

Jesus explains how, by clinging to the past, we deny his power and goodness. He talks about new wine in old wineskins. If we try to bring our old life, with all its practices, religious and otherwise, into the new kingdom, the power of that new life will explode our old practices.

Rather, we need to find new practices, a new life, new wineskins, to contain the new wine of the Kingdom of God.

For the Pharisees this meant letting go of the Sabbath rules to recognise that God made the Sabbath for people, not vice-versa. It meant accepting that God’s forgiveness was key, not our faithful rituals.

For us, it often means recognising that the discontent that our materialistic culture breeds, in order to sell us more stuff, is actually sinful. Discontent is a sign of rejecting Jesus presence, while contentment, even in the midst of material suffering, is a sign of joy in Jesus’ presence.

Allowing Jesus to right our lives means recognising that God’s people are a higher priority than our blood family. This is not a license to neglect our relatives, but a call to value and love the church and its people. Too often church is an add-on to our lives. An extra social activity. No, Jesus says, these are your most intimate companions, even more important to your life than your blood family.

Following Jesus means focusing our lives on hearing Jesus, and when he calls, dropping everything and following where he goes. That’s scary.

When I think about all this, it just seems so big—like a cyclone coming to smash everything. It’s important to get the right perspective. When Jesus called Peter and Andrew, they responded instantly because they saw something of greater worth in Jesus’ call than in their existing lives. If our lives are super-comfortable, and we work so hard to make them that way, how are we going to see something better?

So there are actually two things we need to do. We need to embrace the disappointment we feel about our lives. All of us have disappointments. Often our relationships are a struggle. Or our jobs are frustrating or boring. Or perhaps that house or car we bought is turning into a burden. Or maybe our own bodies are betraying us. Whatever it is, our response is often to cheerily insist, “I’m doing OK!” But perhaps we should recognise that we’re not doing OK. In fact, we’re disappointed, maybe even angry. If we can admit that, if we can see that, then we have started prying our fingers off our upside-down view of the world. It’s hard to let go of that view, so prying our fingers away is where we start.

But at the same time, we must not simply be negative. That would make us miserable people, full of bitterness and . And that’s the opposite of what it means to be a Christian. Rather we must focus on the joy of salvation, as the Psalmist says:

Psalm 51:10–12 ESV

10 Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. 11 Cast me not away from your presence, and take not your Holy Spirit from me. 12 Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and uphold me with a willing spirit.

Choosing a discipline, like prayer, this month’s Transformation Trek discipline, and really working on it, will help us encounter God. Jesus will begin to right our lives. The Lord tells us, over and over again:

Matthew 7:7–8 NLT

7 “Keep on asking, and you will receive what you ask for. Keep on seeking, and you will find. Keep on knocking, and the door will be opened to you. 8 For everyone who asks, receives. Everyone who seeks, finds. And to everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.

Ultimately, as we grow in faith and love for our Lord, we will find that to be a Christian means to live a life that looks like it’s upside-down and back-to-front. We will value the effects of suffering (we will carry our cross daily), we will love others more than ourselves, we will throw parties for strangers, we will prioritise our fellow Christians over our families, we will be, to put no fine point on it, very weird. Weird, at least, to the world. But we will know the truth, and that it has set us free. This is a process, it is not an instantaneous event. It is the work of a lifetime. But it’s a work that progresses, or not, each day, including today.

So if you’re wondering what you’re missing, if you want to be closer to Jesus today than you were yesterday, if you want to throw caution to the wind and join Jesus in a journey to his radical kingdom, you just need to ask him. If you don’t know how to do that, call the church, talk to a Christian friend, go to church next week, read the Bible. Being a Christian is not a performance, it’s a transformation, it’s a joining, it’s a rebirth. Don’t waste more time on an upside-down world, let Jesus right your life.

Let’s pray,

Lord Jesus, we ask that you would come and interrupt our busy lives like you did with Andrew and Peter, James and John, or, perhaps more appropriately for our situation, Matthew. It’s a scary thought that you want to turn our lives upside-down. But we recognise that we are the ones that have got everything the wrong way round. Give us the faith to trust you through the turbulence of transformation. Help us to yearn more for you and your people than we do for the familiar comfort of home, family, work. Help us to let you make us real people, with fruitful, powerful lives of love and grace.

In your name, Lord Jesus, we pray.

Amen.

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