Tenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Lectionary: 89

"How can Satan drive out Satan?
If a kingdom is divided against itself,
that kingdom cannot stand.
And if a house is divided against itself,
that house will not be able to stand.

There is some mystery about Jesus’s family, and it’s been around for centuries. Several years ago, Dan Brown exploited the enigma with his book – and a movie – The Davinci Code. Was Mary Magdalene the Lord’s wife? Perhaps his descendants are still among us with their ancestral seed of divinity. 

That’s nonsense, of course, but some mystery about the family of Jesus remains. We get a glimpse of it in today’s passage from the Gospel according to Saint Mark. 

Saint Luke says some of his family were with the Lord as he died on Calvary; and they were there with his Mother and the disciples at Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit descended upon all of them. Saint James, often called “the brother of the Lord," was one of the three closest apostles to Jesus during his ministry; he appears often with Peter and John. 

It would have made sense to a lot of people that the leader's family should inherit his leadership. The Church was never a democracy; perhaps it should have been a monarchy with a royal family to govern it.

The Fourth Gospel says nothing about the Lord’s family except that his mother was with him at Cana and on Calvary. His brothers (or cousins) are conspicuously absent in the Gospel of John, and we might ask, “Why is that?” 

Some scholars speculate that the family of Jesus tried to rule the early Church. And that’s why we hear an ugly story about them in today’s Gospel. Saint Mark didn’t like them. As he tells the story, long before his crucifixion and resurrection, the family were embarrassed by his campaign and tried to stop him.  

“When his relatives heard of this they set out to seize him, for they said, "He is out of his mind." 

Apparently there were still conflicts with his brothers forty years after Pentecost. And that’s why we hear today – twenty centuries later – a parable about a divided house. A divided church cannot stand. 

But we must look deeper into this mystery of Jesus Christ Crucified. Saint Mark consistently described Jesus as a lonely prophet. Although the Lord had disciples, they did not understand him or his teaching, they were too overwhelmed by his authority to ask him questions; and when he was arrested, they fled. He was harassed by his family, by other rabbis, by Pharisees, Sadducees, and Herodians. The establishment in Jerusalem – the priests, lawyers, and Levites – despised him, and the Roman authorities finally ordered his killing. He was causing too much trouble, and Rome hated trouble. 

Saint Mark tells the story of a lonely prophet who found no sympathy in heaven or earth. His abandonment was total. 

And the Holy Spirit has told us – through the Church – that his sacrifice would not be complete, finished, or consummated without his total abandonment. He had to suffer unbearable physical pain, psychological abandonment, and spiritual desolation. 

His cry, "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?" was the cry of a man from the infinite distances of an Ontological Universe. He spoke for all of us – "Why have you abandoned us?" – for we have all known his loneliness, desperation, and desolation. Somewhere, very far away, far beyond our human comprehension, a silent God the Father was listening for his cry of despair, he heard him, and saved him.

“In the days when he was in the flesh, he offered prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears to the one who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverence. Son though he was, he learned obedience from what he suffered; and when he was made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him. (Hebrews 5:7-9) 

The Church has had to learn a hard lesson from these stories of Jesus and his family, and Jesus and His Father. We must stand together; we must believe in and support one another, for a divided house cannot stand. When he talks about Satan’s house – a house divided – he tells us where our conflicts come from. 

We must stand together, and we must stand with the Lord who is truth and goodness and justice and mercy. We cannot abandon the truth in pursuit of solidarity. That would only copy the ways of the world, the ways of the priests, levite, lawyers, Sadduccees, Herodians, and Pharisees. There is no salvation there. 

The conflict in the early Church between Jesus’s family and the rest of the Church was resolved when everyone recognized Saint Peter and his successors as the true Family of Jesus. They remembered what he said when his family tried to contain him: 

"Who are my mother and my brothers?"
And looking around at those seated in the circle he said,
"Here are my mother and my brothers.
For whoever does the will of God
is my brother and sister and mother."

Saint James, the brother of the Lord, was the first to recognize and honor Peter. The Acts of the Apostles, chapter 15, tells us how he recognized that the Holy Spirit was leading the Church into uncharted territory through his revelation to Saint Peter. 

It was clearly God’s will that the Church should. be led by the Papacy; we must remain loyal to the Pope, whoever he might be at the moment. You might not like Pope Francis, or Benedict, or John Paul, or Paul VI; but you cannot walk away from the Church and its pope and remain faithful to Jesus. 

We stand together with the Pope in one Church as the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit stand together as one God. Either we are saved together as Church, or we are not saved at all. 

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P.S. We hear the story of Adam's betrayal every third year, and many preachers miss the Divine Author's irony entirely. I wrote an alternate interpretation of that passage several years ago. If you'd like to understand today's first reading better, try this suggestion from 2018.