January 23, 2023 – Mark 3:22-30
We have seen how the religious leaders tried various ploys to expose Jesus as a transgressor of the Law. Now they try a new tactic to discredit him by making two charges:
1. He is not possessed by just any demon, but by Beelzebul, the prince of demons.
2. It is through the power of the demon in him that he expels evil spirits from others.
Jesus responds to both charges by showing their internal contradictions. If the devil acts against himself, his power eventually collapses, like a family divided in itself. Casting the demon out of someone as Jesus did meant freeing that person from the powers of evil. Why would the demon
would want to do such a thing? The accusation makes no sense. It could only be done by a perverted mind.
If we want to denigrate someone, one of the most effective ways is to call him an evil person so that, from then on, everything he says and does will be viewed and interpreted with prejudice. This is the same attempt that the scribes in today’s Gospel make with regard to Jesus: “He is possessed by Beelzebubl and casts out demons by the prince of demons.” But Jesus, with stringent logic, dismantles piece by piece the prejudice of the scribes who, instead of accepting the evidence of the facts, give it a malicious reinterpretation: “How can Satan cast out Satan? If a kingdom is divided in itself, that kingdom cannot stand; if a house is divided in itself, that house cannot stand. In the same way, if Satan rebels against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but is finished.” In this way Jesus not only tells us in what way evil stands, but also in what way good stands. So if on the one hand evil acts as a kind of organized crime and its strength is precisely in its uniting to do evil, on the other hand we can say that good in order to stand up needs the same organization and unity. A kind of organized holiness. The secret of a “standing house” is in the unity of its components and different structures. If evil to be evil needs to act in unity, in the same way we can say that good to be good needs to act in the same way.
The worst that can happen is, in fact, division, and one of the means that evil uses to ruin the good is precisely to operate divisions. Thus families, friendships, communities, environments, associations, situations are destroyed. If even evil must have the shrewdness to defend unity, we should ask ourselves whether the thing we must most defend against is not perhaps division.
For good workers…
– Love is not love unless it is free. But the corollary of that freedom is the ability to choose the opposite. This was the choice of the scribes.
– The Lord gives us a lesson today on the importance of unity. When we participate in the Eucharist we must think about it: we offer Christ’s sacrifice for the unity of all believers in him.
P JOBY KAVUNGAL RCJ