“There Is Only Us”
Mark 3:20-27, 31-35
I’m going to let you in on a little secret this morning:
The phrase “a house divided against itself cannot stand” did not originate with Abraham Lincoln; Jesus of Nazareth said it first.
Extra points for you if you already knew that. And if you didn’t, you get a pass, because what Jesus was talking about was a tad more subtle and complex than Lincoln’s reference to a nation deeply divided and brought to the verge of civil war over slavery and states’ rights.
It’s also worth mentioning that that the contexts and purposes of the two most famous uses of the phrase were different: While Lincoln used it as a warning of what would happen if the divisions within the country continued to deepen, Jesus was making a a rational defense against an early effort to marginalize him and his ministry.
Jesus’ public ministry, you see, had gotten off to a roaring start. After his baptism and his testing in the wilderness, he began traveling throughout Galilee, teaching and healing. According to the Gospel of Mark, he first healed a man with leprosy, and then word got out, and when he went back home there were throngs of people waiting to see him. The people’s hunger and need were so great that one group that had brought their paralyzed friend on a stretcher but couldn’t get through the crowd, climbed up on the roof of the house and lowered their friend down through an opening in the roof. Jesus not only got the paralyzed man walking again, but also told him his sins were forgiven, and that really upset the religious authorities.
And then he called his disciples, and began eating and hanging out with society’s outcasts, and all the while he continued healing people, and all the while he was mobbed by the people. He healed and he taught and he empowered, and he did it all with authority. Word on the street was that he had so much authority that even the demons listened to him, because he was able to cast demons out of people believed to be possessed (though modern science tells us they were probably suffering from something like epilepsy).
All of which is to say that, without trying to exactly, Jesus was making quite a name for himself and really shaking things up. The traditional religious authorities wanted to write him off as just another false prophet, but the healing business made that difficult. And so they did what those served by the status quo—which is to say, us—often do when they feel threatened by something or someone new and different: In the hopes of sowing doubt and undermining the movement that Jesus seemed to be building—that is, to divide the people—they attacked Jesus personally.
They criticized him for hanging out with all the “wrong” people. They were scandalized by his forgiveness of people’s sins; they believed only God or a priest could do that. And so they began planting lies and spreading rumors that Jesus was out of his mind. Even his family heard the rumors and realized what was going on, and, at this very early stage of Jesus’ ministry, began to fear for his safety. The religious elite went so far as to say that Jesus was able to cast out demons because he was the chief demon.
Now, this is pretty textbook stuff: divide and conquer. Undermine and disempower. Attack and belittle. Sow doubts and characterize enemies as sick or evil. Depict legal processes as witch trials. Deflect and re-direct attention from one person or one side’s flaws, weaknesses, and wrongdoings to entire classes of other people.
We see it all the time in political campaigns. We see it in attacks on judges and juries and the media. We see it in the demonization of people fleeing poverty and danger. We see it in extreme characterizations of people on the other side. We see it in binary, black-and-white thinking.
And, if we are honest and self-aware, we may see it even in ourselves—when we engage in us-and-them thinking, when we find it easier to criticize and stereotype folks with different views rather than try to understand them.
The filmmaker and historian Ken Burns addressed this kind of thinking last month when he delivered the commencement address at Brandeis University.
“There is only us,” he said. “There is no them. And whenever someone suggests to you—whomever they may be in your life—that there is an ‘other,’ run away. ‘Other-ing’ is the simplistic and binary way to make and identify enemies. It ’s also the surest way to your own self-imprisonment."
The religious authorities from Jerusalem had traveled to the hinterlands of Galilee to nip the Jesus movement in the bud, and their first strategy was to “other” him. Already the environment was so tense and threatening that Jesus’ own family was trying to get to him to lighten up and calm down, maybe just lay low for a while.
So let’s notice how Jesus responded to it all—to the attacks, to the attempts to divide and conquer, and to the well-meaning attempts to protect him by silencing him.
In a nutshell, he said to everyone: There is only us.
There is only us. We are all in this together. Come on in, and let’s do our best to love and help each other.
He delivered this message not as a screed, not as a counter-attack, but by engaging directly those who would attack and hinder him and telling them stories.
Jesus called his attackers to him and spoke directly to them, the scriptures say. And then, assuming the best in them, assuming that maybe they really did think he was Satan and were truly scared and genuinely trying to protect the people, he engaged their perspective with reason and logic, with respect and with care.
“Look,” he said. “Okay, say I am Satan. How could the chief of demons cast out demons from other people? That just doesn’t work. Just as a house divided against itself cannot stand, the chief demon can’t survive by getting rid of other demons.”
And then Jesus let his adversaries know that he was on to them and their ways:
“Look,” he said, speaking directly to the strong men of the temple religion. “No one can rob a house without first binding up strong man.”
While the religious leaders were trying to bind him up, Jesus was working to un-bind, liberate, and empower the poor, oppressed, and alienated people of Israel. While the religious system gave the people rules and judgment and tradition in the hopes of maintaining order, Jesus gave them God’s love, healing, inclusion, and power.
So when word reached Jesus that his mother and brothers were trying to extract him from all of this, he simply looked around and said, “Everyone here is my brother and sister and mother. There is only us.”
Now I know we all are aware and concerned about the deep political, social, economic, and spiritual divisions within our nation. The levels of polarization among us are truly distressing. A few years ago now a study by the Pew Research Center found that “more than 70 percent of all American voters think those in the other [political] party are ‘a clear and present danger to the American way of life,’ and almost 80 percent say the two major parties “fundamentally disagree about core American values.”
I know, too, that it’s hard for me and for most of us to not get caught up in those divisions these days, because we care about justice and peace and we want everyone to have an equal say in our society.
And so I simply want to point us to Jesus and encourage us to follow him in these ways:
First, let us remember who and whose we are. We are not Americans first, and thus our primary allegiance is not to core American values. First and foremost, we are children of God, and our primary allegiance must be to the godly values of love, community, inclusion, and empowerment.
Second, there is only us, and as long as we remain divided, we all suffer. In Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech of 1858, he went on to say: “I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other.”
In our time, we seem to be faced with the prospect of becoming a nation of haters and demonizers or a nation where there is room and respect for all.
And, finally, fear will never get us where we want to go. I am in awe of the Jesus’ centeredness and groundedness throughout his ministry. No matter what was happening, he made time for prayer and stayed connected to God, the source of life and love. No matter what was happening, he kept his eyes on the prize and lived from a place of extravagant love. Jesus embodied what the novelist Isaac Bashevis Singer called the “kinship of the soul.”
May we, too, let our lives be shaped and guided by God’s love. May we, too, come to understand that “there is only us.”
May our love for God, one another, the least of these, and the “house” itself inspire us to build bonds of trust and respect, and to persevere in loving and doing good—no matter how threatening the opposition.
