An honest sermon about the gospel of Mark: Chapter 3
Helping parishioners understand this chapter must be a real challenge for the clergy—especially those parishioners who have a grasp of how the world functions, and thus have little patience with ancient superstitions. The clergy are—more or less—obligated to promote the belief that the gospels were divinely inspired, despite the obvious evidence that this cannot possibly be true. There are just too many flaws and contradictions in the gospels.
Thus a basic rule for reading the gospels, with any intent of truly understanding what’s going on with these documents, is this: admit that their authors were promoting the cult of their holy hero, Jesus. Championing Jesus theology was their goal, and there is little evidence that they knew what it meant to write history. Over and over again, contemporary readers must ask: how did the gospel author know this or that event actually happened? How did he know this or that Jesus-script was authentic? They fail as historians because they never cite their sources. This is alarmingly obvious because Matthew and Luke copied most of Mark’s gospel without admitting they’d done so. It was plagiarism off the charts.
Mark chapter 3 opens with Jesus going to a synagogue on the sabbath, where he encountered a man with a “withered hand.” Mark says that Jesus healed the withered hand, thus our author brings magical folklore into his account: so many holy heroes in ancient cults established their credentials by the use of magical healing powers. Mark’s Jesus had to measure up to this status.
Once we’ve stepped into this mythical territory—gee, magic works! —then we have to wonder why Jesus didn’t track down all the other people with withered hands and perform his magic for them as well. In verse 10 we read that “…he had cured many, so that all who had diseases pressed upon him to touch him.” Healing by touch is an aspect of magical thinking, but there is no hint here that Jesus was hunting for people with withered hands or other disabilities. The modern reader who wonders why this didn’t happen, also has to question why god failed to include a huge book in his 1,000-page Bible about why diseases and deformities happen. On this issue, see especially chapter 3, “The Germ Warfare Question,” in Tim Sledge book, Four Disturbing Questions with One Simple Answer: Breaking the Spell of Christian Belief. So much suffering and pain have happened for thousands of years because god—supposedly infinitely wise and compassionate—thought it just as well that humans would have to discover, on their own, the causes of diseases one day in the far future. How does that possibly make sense? We might as well conclude that god didn’t care—or that god was missing in action.
But giving credit where credit is due, this text also represents one of the high points in Mark’s gospel. Jesus asked the Pharisees who were present:
“Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the Sabbath, to save life or to kill?” But they were silent. He looked around at them with anger; he was grieved at their hardness of heart and said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He stretched it out, and his hand was restored” (Mark 3:4-5).
It has often been noted that there is little ethical teaching in Mark’s version of the Jesus story, because his main focus was Jesus’ message that the Kingdom of God was about to arrive: that was the main thing he wanted to stress. The author of Matthew’s gospel noticed this missing element, and added the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5-7. In contrast to the Jesus-script in the Sermon on the Mount that the Old Testament law must be observed to the letter, here in Mark, Jesus asks a very relevant, ethical question: ““Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the Sabbath, to save life or to kill?”
We find more boasting about the cult’s holy hero in the next section of chapter 3.
“…a great multitude from Galilee followed him…” (v. 7)
“…they came to him in great numbers from Judea, Jerusalem, Idumea, beyond the Jordan, and the region around Tyre and Sidon.” (v. 8)
Since no historians at that time make references to a popular preacher attracting such massive crowds, we are entitled to wonder where the gospel’s author got this information. It’s not a stretch to suggest that his theological imagination was in overdrive mode.
Superstition is also very much in evidence with verse 11, “Whenever the unclean spirits saw him, they fell down before him and shouted, 'You are the Son of God!'” Mark’s author was certain that Jesus belonged to the spiritual realm, hence all sorts of beings who resided there would know who he was—such as demons, unclean spirits, angels. Since we read in Mark 1 that a Voice from Heaven had shouted that Jesus was the son of god, we are baffled by verse 12, “But he sternly ordered them not to make him known.” How does this tally with the main thrust of Mark’s message that Jesus proclaimed to massive crowds that the kingdom of his god was about to arrive?
In verse 22, we find this text: “And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem said, ‘He has Beelzebul, and by the ruler of the demons he casts out demons.’” In Mark’s Jesus-script, he lectures them that Satan would not empower Jesus to cast out demons—that would mean Satan’s own destruction. Mark must have also despised the association of Jesus with Beelzebul; that seemed an insult to Jesus, a being from the spiritual world, hence we find this Jesus-script—a hint that trinitarianism was making early progress, but also an unwelcome dose of vindictive theology— vv. 28-30:
“Truly I tell you, people will be forgiven for their sins and whatever blasphemies they utter, but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit can never have forgiveness but is guilty of an eternal sin”— for they had said, ‘He has an unclean spirit.’”
As a super advocate for the Jesus cult, Mark had to make it clear that loyalty to family did not mix well with religious fanaticism. Families just might not “get it.” Hence we read in vv. 20-21:
“Then he went home, and the crowd came together again, so that they could not even eat. When his family heard it, they went out to restrain him, for people were saying, ‘He has gone out of his mind.’” Chapter 3 closes with these verses, 31-35:
“Then his mother and his brothers came, and standing outside they sent to him and called him. A crowd was sitting around him, and they said to him, ‘Your mother and your brother are outside asking for you.’ And he replied, ‘Who are my mother and my brothers?’ And looking at those who sat around him, he said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.’”
The cult fanaticism gets worse in other gospel texts:
Mark 13, which is a description of the arrival of the kingdom:
“Sibling will betray sibling to death and a father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death, and you will be hated by all because of my name. But the one who endures to the end will be saved” (vv. 12-13).
Luke 9, again family is disparaged:
“And Jesus said to him, ‘Let the dead bury their own dead, but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.’ Another said, ‘I will follow you, Lord, but let me first say farewell to those at my home.’ And Jesus said to him, ‘No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God’” (vv. 60-62).
Luke 14, cult extremism at its worst:
“Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple” (v. 26).
So, so much in the gospels make it oh so hard for the clergy to preach honest sermons about their supposedly divinely inspired Bible.
David Madison was a pastor in the Methodist Church for nine years, and has a PhD in Biblical Studies from Boston University. He is the author of Ten Tough Problems in Christian Thought and Belief: a Minister-Turned-Atheist Shows Why You Should Ditch the Faith, now being reissued in several volumes:
· Guessing About God (2023),
· Ten Things Christians Wish Jesus Hadn’t Taught: And Other Reasons to Question His Words (2021). The Spanish translation of this book is also available.
· Everything You Need to Know About Prayer But May Not Want to Admit (2025)
His YouTube channel is here. At the invitation of John Loftus, he has written for the Debunking Christianity Blog since 2016.
The Cure-for-Christianity Library©, now with more than 500 titles, is here. A brief video explanation of the Library is here.
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