Homily for Trinity 2, Mark 3: 20-end
Looking at Jesus, the scribes said, ‘He is possessed by Beelzebub’
Eye infection
So on Monday evening my right eye started to feel sore and tender. By Tuesday it was swollen. By Wednesday morning I was in the queue to see the Doctor at Ely Bridge Surgery. I had an eye infection. It’s clearing up now, but for a few days my sight was blurry and I was finding it hard to see things.
The eye: so amazing, and so vulnerable. The tiniest spec, the smallest particle of dust, can disable it.
What’s true of the physical eye, is even more true of the mind’s eye. When the eye of the mind becomes infected, that can lead to real trouble. When the way you look at the world is diseased, it’s hard for someone else to reach you.
How many people have learnt, or been taught by others, to see themselves as ugly? Millions. That’s an eye disease. We’re saturated by impossible, photo-shopped images that say, ‘this is normal, this is what you should look like’, and it’s making us feel sick. We start to see the natural quirks, lines and asymmetries of the human body as something that’s unacceptable.
It’s a virus. We’ve learnt to see something that is natural and good, as bad.
That’s just one example of eye disease, of seeing things the wrong way round. There are many others. For centuries, men were taught to *look* upon women as inferior and submissive; for hundreds of years we were taught to see people with a different skin colour in all sorts of crazy and idiotic ways. The hangover from all these things is still with us.
The mind’s eye can be so wrong.
In our gospel today, Jesus talks about an eye condition that makes us blaspheme against the Holy Spirit’.
Jesus is blessing the poor, healing the broken, raising up those who’ve been cast down, and there are people who look at this, and despise Him. They say: ‘Yes Jesus, you might be doing things. But it’s not through the power of God, but through the power of Beelzebub’.
Who is Beelzebub? He’s the Lord of the flies, one of the chief demons.
In other words, they are calling what is good, evil. Nice, decent, law-abiding citizens are looking at Jesus, and seeing something ugly, demonic, contemptible.
There are diseased ways of looking at the world.
The Jewish prophets said, ‘Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness’ (Isaiah 5:20). That’s blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. It’s to call something good, evil, and evil good; to see something that’s beautiful, and call it ugly.
Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. It’s unforgivable – in one sense – because your vision can be so distorted that you won’t even think there’s anything’s wrong. In this condition, forgiveness would have no meaning for you.
But it can be healed, because Jesus heals eyes. (Ask Saul of Tarsus). Jesus forgives the people who nail Him to a cross and who think they’re doing something good.
But eye disease is serious, and it must be treated. It can imprison us.
There are powerful forces that poison the way we see the world, and you need to recognise this: the whispering voices of the demons, stirring up our fears and resentments; a culture that celebrates competition, coming first, money, success, a shallow idea of physical perfection. These forces are powerful, and we are all very small.
The gospels talk about the strong man, the gaoler, who keeps us from seeing the truth, who keeps us locked up in a prison of the mind. But Jesus says He has come to overthrow that gaoler and shut him up. Christ has come to break into your prison, to heal your eyes, and set you free. (with or without your permission, He’s coming anyway, but it’s a grace to cry out – de profundis – to the Lord).
All of us can suffer from an eye infection that blurs and distorts the way we see things.
And so we sing, and so we pray:
‘Be thou my vision, O Lord of my heart’
Ely Soul 