When Satan casts out Satan, he grows stronger: but in Christ we can unmask and bind him. A reflection on Mark 3:20-35 given to Westgate Baptist Community Church on 9 June 2024. Listen here.
I have a beloved friend whose church said she had a demon, and so they tried to bind and exorcise it. In the name of Christ, they said, she must be straight, yet over the days and years of fasting and praying and shouting and weeping they utterly failed to cast the demon out.
Despite their best efforts and hers, despite the terrible shame and trauma she experienced through this process, she remained gay. Eventually, she had to leave the church, and for a long time, she blamed herself.
We nearly lost her, just as so we have lost so many like her who have been driven to destruction. Maybe you know someone who has had a similar experience; maybe you’ve had a similar experience yourself. She’s certainly not the only person I know who has experienced a church in this way.
And so today’s story about Jesus and demonic possession is very important to me, because it was used to justify the way my beloved friend was treated in the name of Jesus. This story has often been invoked by people trying to cast out Satan from another person, or from the congregation itself. We must bind the strong man, they say, we must cast out the demon in this person. Satan cannot cast out Satan, they say, so we’ll do it in the name of Christ. And if the demon won’t be cast out, they say, if the person is so sinful that the demon persists, we must drive the entire person from our midst. We must shame them from the pulpit; we must publicly withhold communion; we must show them the path to the door.
Such people don’t seem to notice that, in this story, it is JESUS who is accused of having a demon. It’s not some rando on the roadside. Nor is it some precious person who is hearing voices or who suffers from epilepsy or who holds deep longings for queer love. Instead, it is Jesus who is accused of being demonically possessed, and it’s his own family and his religious leaders who are seeking to restrain him and to exorcise the demon.
So let’s back up and see how we got here.
The story tells us that Jesus is in a house, teaching, when his family and the religious authorities arrive. Prior to this, he’s been making a name for himself among poor people, sick people, possessed people, and rejected people. He’s been healing people and casting out demons, and the people have been ‘amazed by his teaching’ (1:22, 27, 39): for in Mark’s story, it is in Jesus’ teaching that his power resides.
But the result is that his family thinks he’s crazy, and the religious authorities think he’s possessed by the Lord of the Dwelling, Beelzebul: the spirit who controls the person or group in whom he resides. So both family and religious authorities are spreading accusations against Jesus. Both consider him dangerous. Both want to restrain him and silence him forever. And here they are now, outside the dwelling.
Jesus is inside, surrounded by the crowd of poor people, sick people, possessed people, and rejected people who are hanging on his every word and following him around. When Jesus is told his family and religious leaders are there, he speaks in a riddle. ‘How can Satan cast out Satan?’ he asks, then he talks about kingdoms, houses and the Accuser (which is how we say Satan in English). Jesus says that neither kingdom nor house nor the Accuser can stand if they are divided against themselves. ‘And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided,’ he says, ‘he cannot stand, but his end has come.’
We usually assume Jesus is affirming these words; of course Satan can’t cast out Satan. But I think he’s saying the opposite.
The next verse, verse 27, begins with the Greek word ‘alla.’ The NIV translates it as ‘in fact’, reinforcing what has gone before; but it actually means ‘on the contrary.’ ‘On the contrary,’ says Jesus. ‘No one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his property without first tying up the strong man; then indeed the house can be plundered.’ Jesus has been quoting a widespread assumption that Satan cannot cast out Satan because divided things cannot stand. But the ‘alla’—‘on the contrary’—tells us that now he’s offering a different point of view.
In the New Testament, what we see is that the demonic tears things apart. It fragments bodies, minds and spirits; it drives people from their communities; it rips communities away from God. The demonic is always tearing and dividing, and it’s seen most clearly in the practice of accusation and scapegoating.
Leviticus 16 describes the literal practice of scapegoating. On the Day of Atonement, the chief priest would lay the sins of the people onto a live goat, called the scapegoat. This goat would then be driven out of the community and into the wilderness, carrying their sins away.
We still use this concept to describe how human communities operate. We live in a world which tends to label and group people. Christians and atheists. Progressives and conservatives. Straights and gays. Doggies and Tigers. Demons and Saints. And whenever there is a build-up of fear or conflict or tension, we seek catharsis by accusing one person or group of being the problem, then managing them, silencing them, or driving them away.
We make their participation in the group conditional on conformity. We reject an essential part of them or compel them to live a lie. We say they are sinful, unrighteous, filthy, disgusting. We show them the door or drive them out of the country or even, as has happened in Germany and Rwanda and Myanmar and Gaza and so many other places, kill them. In other words, we engage in divisive behaviour, splitting people away from the wider group to create a temporary sense of cohesion among the remaining members.
In the New Testament, such behaviour is understood as demonic. Yet ironically, we often see this behaviour in churches, for example those which scapegoat LGBTQ+ people. This is what happened to my friend. She became the church focus, their little scapegoat, to be managed and fixed. And when that didn’t work, when a significant part of her had been rejected and her whole self fragmented and shamed, then her ongoing participation in the community became impossible. Their actions and approach and theology very effectively drove her out.
But it’s not limited to them. One way or another, most of us engage in scapegoating at times. Personally, I am sorely tempted to publicly name and shame my friend’s church, and the pastor who led the charge. Some churches scapegoat progressives; others scapegoat conservatives, or the prophets who hold up a mirror. Rather than work on organisational culture, institutions tend to scapegoat whistle blowers, or drive out individuals who have behaved egregiously. It’s easier to lock up Julian Assange than to ask what makes his work so necessary; it’s easier to jail one film director than to interrogate the culture of an entire industry.
Most families have a scapegoat, that cousin or sibling who is labelled troubled or toxic, narcissistic or a nutjob, or just plain annoying; the family system becomes united against that person. The left scapegoats One Nation voters; the right scapegoats the teals; the far right blames women and Muslims and trans people for pretty much everything, it seems. However you slice and dice it, we tend to form human communities by uniting against an ‘other’, then using them to define our boundaried selves.
Whatever the situation, the mechanism is always the same. It’s always Satan casting out what it believes to be Satan, dividing the group for what we believe is the good of that same group. This is why Jesus’ opponents included his own family and religious authorities. Jesus’ association with the poor, the suffering, the possessed and the rejected upset everything they’d ever known about what it means to be righteous. By trying to restrain him, they believed they were fighting evil and purging it from their midst; yet their accusations and actions were demonic, because they led to division.
This all has consequences. As Jesus said, those who accuse him of having an unclean spirit can never have forgiveness. It’s not that he’s not willing to forgive them: he desperately wants to. Jesus is all about refusing retaliation and offering forgiveness; even to those who turned him into a scapegoat and sacrificed him for the sake of the people (John 18:14); even to those who arranged to have him killed upon a cross.
So when Jesus says they can’t have forgiveness, he’s saying that when someone sees good and calls it evil and tries to drive it away, they are revealing the state of their heart. They are captive to the way things are; they are closed to questioning, transformation and change; they are engaging in the scapegoating mechanism and in doing so they embody Satan. Such a person sees no reason to ask for or receive forgiveness, and no one can have what they refuse to accept.
But those of us who recognise our own need, and who seek to reject the scapegoating mechanism, have forgiveness and find our place in the house with Jesus. And here he invites us to wonder, ‘Can Satan drive out Satan?’
We mostly assume the answer is ‘no’, but Jesus implies, ‘Yes, indeed.’ Because as Satan drives out Satan, that is, as we unite against someone to blame, to shame, to persecute and drive out and define ourselves against, we are engaged in the work of division and Satan grows stronger among us. Left, right, gay, straight, Doggies, Demons, Saints: Satan doesn’t mind who the enemy is. As long as there is an ‘other’, Satan still runs the show.
In other words, we cannot drive out Satan, because to do so makes us satanic ourselves. Our only option is to bind Satan and neutralise his power, and we do this by refusing to play his game.
What does this refusal look like? At this stage of Mark’s story, I suggest, it looks like good teaching, teaching which is ultimately liberating and healing. It looks like grappling with the scapegoat mechanism, and learning to recognise and step away from the powers and stories, attitudes and lies, which create scapegoats and fracture individuals and tear communities apart.
Refusing to play Satan’s game also looks like offering love and healing to all people, but particularly to those who are all too often shamed and rejected by the wider society. It looks like building bridges towards our enemies, and living at peace with diversity and difference. It looks filling the house with the spirit of the one who showers the world with forgiveness. It looks like a life overflowing with gentleness, and hospitality, and embrace.
Of course, refusing to play Satan’s game can have consequences. Our families might think we’re crazy, and sideline or even reject us. Religious types might say we don’t know our Bible, that we’re not really Christian, that it says such-and-such in Leviticus, that we’re possessed. We may even be scapegoated ourselves.
And we must stay alert to our own sneaking stories which seek to silence and shame, fracture and divide, and which erupt within us and between us from time to time. Over and over again, we must recognise our tendency to accuse as a quick but demonic fix to our discomfort. As followers of Jesus, we must instead keep seeking the slower, harder way of loving our enemies and those who are different, and working together towards Christ’s deep peace.
This might all sound a bit hard, but with Jesus in our midst we are never alone. The story tells us we have a new family centred around him: those who seek the will of a god whose only participation in scapegoating was to suffer it. This is a god who refuses retaliation and who breathes only peace; and this is a family which will never drive you away, but which surrounds you with gentleness and love. It’s a family which, like Jesus, doesn’t try to shame you or destroy essential parts of yourself, but instead cherishes you and delights in you and draws you towards healing. It’s a family which teaches you about forgiveness and generosity and peacemaking and grace, and which hopes you will teach them, too.
So don’t hover in the doorway. Squeeze through, and come right in: for there are mothers and brothers and sisters and siblings all crowded around Jesus, filling heart, home and church with love.
Let us pray:
Spirit of truth,
you alone can bind the powers
which fragment people and communities.
When we feel confronted,
when we feel challenged,
grant us your tender wisdom,
that we may know truly what is evil
and choose always the path of peace.
We pray this in the name of Jesus,
in whose spirit we seek to dwell: Amen. Ω
Reflect: When have you been scapegoated? When have you participated in the scapegoating of another? Are you called to any work of repentance and reconciliation?
A reflection on Mark 3:2-035 given to Westgate Baptist Community Church on 9 June 2024 © Alison Sampson 2024. Photo by Harry Quan on Unsplash. This reflection was prepared on the lands of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation.
Alison and the whale 