Homily on Mark 3: 20-35
 
There was a man who had been stranded on a remote island all by himself for years. He would send up smoke signals and such, but he was there for maybe 10 years before a passing ship saw the signals and rescued him.

As the man was getting on the ship that rescued him, the captain of the ship noticed that there were three huts on the island. So the captain turned to the man who he just rescued and said:

“I understand you were living on the island all by yourself. Why did you build three huts?”

The man said: “Well, the first one over there—that’s where I lived.
 
And the second one was where I went to church.”
 
“But what about that third hut?” the captain asked.
 
“Oh that one,” the man replied, “that’s where I used to go to church.”

We can be people who are divided, even internally, aren’t we? I go to this church, used to go to that church.

And we hear a lot about division these days. Seems like every news broadcast or commentator has to start off a discussion with a statement about how divided we are—red states, blue states; politics, religion, gender, morality--you name it.

As I was working on this homily I saw an op-ed in the Strib on Wednesday that started off: “What creates a community? The question bears consideration when we as a country seem to be driven farther apart daily, cast into foxholes of our respective belief systems.”
Or the article in the on-line version of the National Catholic Reporter, also on Wednesday, that starts with the question: “What role can Catholic social teaching play in bringing together a divided country?”

So much talk about division.
 
We see the origin of division—among humans and between humans and God—in the first reading, a portion of the creation story from Genesis.

We pick up the story after Adam and Eve have sinned—eaten the fruit they were forbidden to eat at the urging of the devil. And what is the first thing Adam does when he has sinner—he goes and hides, separates himself from God, does not want God to see him. Not only that, but when God asks Adam what has happened, the first words out of Adam’s mouth are an attempt to blame God for the sin. It is your fault, he seems to say, as he explains that “the woman you put here with me” is the reason why he sinned.
And beyond blaming God, Adam also blames Eve—“she gave me the fruit from the tree, and so I ate it.” So far from uniting the two of them in the fact that they have both colluded in the same sin, the work of the devil divides one from the other as aspersions of blame get thrown around. And finally the sin drives a wedge between humans and the animal world, as Eve blames the serpent.

We see division appear again maybe in a surprising way in today’s Gospel reading.  Jesus goes to his home town, where you would think everyone would be united in honoring and supporting Him and all the miracles which He has worked—home-town hero and all that.

But what happens?
 
There are some who support Him, but His relatives “set out to seize him, for they said ‘he is out of his mind.’” They seem to be in agreement with the scribes who have come from Jerusalem and believe he is possessed by the devil.

Of course we don’t know why the relatives can’t see what is truly going on with Jesus—that He was truly a prophet working miracles through the power of God, in fact, that He truly was the son of God. But maybe it was that they thought they already knew who Jesus was—a sort of bias or stereotype—and couldn’t open their minds to something new. They had their minds made up. In a real sense they were prejudiced by their prior experience with Christ.

And so Jesus tells the several parables about how a kingdom or a house or even the kingdom of Satan cannot survive if it is divided against itself. His point, of course, is that He is defeating the devil in casting out evil spirits, and that such miracles can’t possibly be the work of the devil for Satan is smart enough to know that his kingdom will not survive if it is divided against itself. And, of course, Jesus is right in the parables He tells—a faith community, a civic community, a state, a nation—can’t survive if it is divided against itself.
 
So what is the solution? If we have a spiritual problem here, a problem that has its genesis in failures, human evil, maybe we need a spiritual solution. So, how do we get past all this division, separation, tribalism (as some call it)?

Jesus gives us an answer when responding to the statement that his mother and brothers have arrived. It is a statement that goes past those associations that some say divide us these days—where you were born, how you look, your family, your community. What Jesus essentially says is that none of those relationships really matter—that the most important question is not where were you born or how do you feel about President Trump or the Second Amendment. The most important question is: “do you do the will of God?”