A House Divided

January 30, 2009, 8:56 am by dc-agape.

Luke 2:23 – 3:35

This section of the gospel has a wealth of information, but I think I can boil it down rather quickly.  The first section of this section is “Who is Lord of the Sabbath”.  Jesus talks a little about what are appropriate actions of the Sabbath.  The next section is about how popular Jesus has become.  It’s a good thing he didn’t need Secret Service Agents back then, I guess YHWH really did have a reason to protect him.  The third section is one that I will focus on the most.  It is about a “house divided”.  Jesus applied it to Satan, but it can be aptly applied to Christianity today.  The final section covers how Jesus treats his own mother (the Virgin Mary) as an equal to everyone listening that day.

In my last post I mentioned that the phrase “Son of Man” in Aramaic means us…humanity.  So with that in mind, Jesus is saying that not only he, but all of us, is “Lord of the Sabbath”.  He even says as much:

Luke 2:27 Then he said to them, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.  So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.”

Reading the “Son of Man” as Jesus meant it has profound meaning to most of what is written in the four Gospels.  When Jesus throws out demons and when he calls himself the “Son of Man”, he is not referring to his divinity.  He is claiming that all humanity can do the same things he did.

In the next section in Chapter 3 the crowds follow Jesus from the village of Capernaum to the “lake” (Sea of Galilee?).  Remember the size of Capernaum…basically Jesus walks about 3 city blocks to the “lake”. He is still overwhelmed by the crowd and must retreat to a boat near the shore.  The main reason he has to do this is the pressure to heal the sick and throw out demons.  I guess at some point even the Most Holy gets tired of helping people.  The odd thing about this “throwing out of demons” is this:

Mark 3:11-12 Whenever the evil spirits saw him, they fell down before him and cried out, “You are the Son of God.” But he gave them strict orders not to tell who he was.

If crying out “You are the Son of God” is not telling everyone in the crowd at the “lake” who was Jesus, what is?  It also shows that Jesus did not have control over demons…they told everyone who Jesus was…“the Son of God”.  I am having some trouble, as well, with the switch from Sea of Galilee to the “lake”.  It seems odd to me, and makes me wonder if some things have not been garbled over the millennia.  Luke does call it the Lake of Gennesaret (Luke 5:1).  So is this a problem of the people at the time of Jesus (mostly Israelites) not having a standard naming of places they have possessed for thousands of years, or is this confusion over where the event took place, or is it just that only certain audiences called the Sea of Galilee by this name.  This last case would imply that each of the Gospels was truly meant for different people.

My favorite part of this section is where Jesus describes a “house divided”. 

Luke 3:24-25 If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand.  If a house is divided against itself, that house cannot stand.

Here he is referring to the power of Satan, because the Pharisees think that he is possessed by Beelzebub.  So here we have an ancient religion that is “God inspired” that believes not just in YHWH, Jesus, Satan, but also in the Prince of demons (a separate entity from Satan).  But Jesus counters them with the concept that if he were “of Satan” how and why would he throw out other members of his team.  Unfortunately, that is exactly what many Christian sects do this very day!  The Kingdom of God on earth is divided against itself, and Jesus declares that in this condition the Kingdom of God will not stand!  It is estimated that there are over 28,700 denominations as of right now and by 2025 it will have grown to 55,000.  This is a house/kingdom divided.  Your own “Lord and Savor” has warned you about this condition, yet nothing is being done to bring the Kingdom of God back to Jesus’ original plan.  Christianity will fail directly because of the fact that you ignore what your source of Salvation tells you!

I almost forgot the interesting part of this section:

Luke 3:28-29 I tell you the truth, all the sins and blasphemies of men will be forgiven them.  But whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven; he is guilty of an eternal sin.”

So go ahead and cure YHWH and Jesus, that’s just fine with the creator.  But don’t you dare say a single bad thing about the Holy Spirit.  I guess the Trinity is not quite what we expect.  Since the Holy Spirit is supposed to guide us here on earth, and we know how well that’s working out, Jesus wants to protect the weakest link from our verbal abuse.  Is it not odd how we can blasphemy the great creator and our salvation, but not the guiding force of the Trinity?  So don’t forget to take the Blasphemy Challenge!

The final section is about how Jesus treats his own mother, the Virgin Mary.  We also get to a glimpse into his family life before the ministry.  He had brothers and a mother that:

Luke 3:21 When his family heard about this, they went to take charge of him, for they said, “He is out of his mind.”

This was not just his “brothers” this included his Virgin Mother:

Luke 3:32 A crowd was sitting around him, and they told him, “Your mother and brothers are outside looking for you.”

The Catholic venerated “Virgin Mother” who was certainly not a virgin after Jesus, believed he was “out of his mind”.  Yet somehow she has become second to Jesus in their faith!  A funny thought just occurred to me: where is Joseph, Jesus’ adopted father after YHWH deserts him.  But Jesus’ response is even more telling about Mary’s part in the story:

Luke 3:33-35 Who are my mother and my brothers?” he asks.  Then he looked at those seated in the circle around him and said, “Here are my mother and brothers! Whoever does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother.”

He basically lays it on the line…Mary and his biological brothers are NOT his spiritual family.  It would even seem from these verses that the Biblical family was not even doing the will of YHWH!  Do you not believe that Jesus would invite his own family in and introduce them to his new friends?  Instead he completely ignores his “virgin mother” and the rest of his family.  Now this is Biblical Family Values!

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