Thursday of Third Week of Lent
Jer 7: 23-28; Lk 11: 14-23
Dc. Larry Brockman
It seems sometimes that we, the people of God can work against each other. Because when you come right down to it, we can sometimes allow ourselves to embrace differences, differences that cause us to become factions- factions that divide us, and in so doing, also divide the Kingdom of God.
Now in the Gospel story, we hear that a group of the crowd claimed Jesus cast out devils by Beelzebub. Why? Because they did not want to accept that God could work through this righteous Man. Jesus message was too direct, too unconventional. Jesus didn’t follow all the customs, all the laws. Jesus preached a message of repentance, a message of turning away from the normal path of life. Rather, Jesus followed his heart, and what his heart told him the Father’s will was for him. Jesus was like one of those Old Testament Prophets that Jeremiah was talking about. Those prophets kept trying to get the Israeli people to listen to God. They wanted people to turn from their ways of the world, and return to the basics, the rules that Moses and the prophets wanted the people to write in their hearts: loving the one true God above all, and loving neighbor as self. And who was Jesus neighbor? Jesus was inclusive, not exclusive, in his message. Everybody could be Jesus’ disciple, independent of station in life or heritage. Jesus wooed Pharisees, and the uneducated in their faith; rich men, poor men, beggars, lepers, Jews, and even the dreaded Samaritans- everybody who would listen and turn to him. But society in Jesus time was broken into factions- those who were members of the “in crowd”- but even then in competing schools of thought like Pharisees and Sadducees; and then there were the outsiders- rejected beggars and lepers; tax collectors and prostitutes; and people who sympathized with the Romans.
And so, is it any wonder that a group of the crowd would use the argument that Jesus cast out devils by Beelzebub. It was a sort of a divide and conquer approach, one that would somehow cast Jesus and his followers as just another faction, but really a devil, a wolf dressed in sheep’s cloth.
I read recently where some group has studied religion in a dozen various countries in Europe and the Americas, and has come to the conclusion that organized religion is waning out, dying out. They base their results on numbers that show that people are rejecting the label of a designation- Catholic or Methodist or Lutheran or whatever. The statistics show that more than half of the people who say they are Christian don’t attend services- and so, the people doing the study claim the light is going out on Religion. That is what factions can do to us. Although the majority of the World is nominally Christian, the light appears to be going out. because without group support in Churches, our belief systems will erode and disappear. As Christians, we simply must build on what unites us: belief in Jesus and all that he did, and the commandment above all others- Love of God and neighbor. Because, as Jesus said in the Gospel: “Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters”.
