Mark 3:7-35

Bringing the sermon home:

First, we see great crowds from all around Israel coming to Jesus, the miracle-worker. This is in contrast with the religious and political leaders of Israel who, in the preceding verse, are plotting to kill Him. There is no room for indifference. As Jesus says elsewhere, “Whoever is not with me is against me” (Mt 12:30).

Both the opening and closing sections focus on who Jesus is. In verses 7-12, we see the demons confessing that Jesus is “the Son of God”. In verses 20-35, we see His family saying that “He is out of his mind” while the religious leaders from Jerusalem say that He is possessed by Satan. These are, in fact, the only three options. To use the language made famous by C.S. Lewis: Jesus is either a lunatic, the devil, or God in human flesh.

• I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg —or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon, or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. (Mere Christianity, 52)

Our membership in the family of God depends entirely upon who we confess Jesus to be and how that confession affects our lives. Who do you say Jesus is?

The middle section, verses 13-19, more subtly contributes to this same topic. Similar to the way the leaders of the twelve tribes of Israel met with God on Mount Sinai during the first Exodus (Exod 24:9-11), the twelve apostles meet with Jesus on a mountain at the start of the new Exodus, symbolizing the beginning of the new people of God and making clear the means by which God builds His church: through our evangelism.