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The scribes who had come from Jerusalem said of Jesus,
“He is possessed by Beelzebul,” and
“By the prince of demons he drives out demons.”
The scribes resorted to a tactic that we can recognize, as it is still common in our own time. Since they could not win arguments against Jesus as a teacher, and since they could not deny the positive effects of his miraculous deeds, they resorted to character assassination. They hoped that people would believe that the only way to have such power was to receive it from the prince of demons. Perhaps the crowds would at least become suspicious that Jesus was too good to be true and that there was something sinister below the surface. If those who heard them accepted this line of reasoning they would have the additional benefit of feeling clever themselves, of not having been taken in by an elaborate charade. It isn't too hard to dissuade people of something that seems to good to be true. But what about when it is true? How can people like ourselves, who are naturally self-protective and defensive, supposed to recognize it?
Summoning them, he began to speak to them in parables,
“How can Satan drive out Satan?
If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand.
And if a house is divided against itself,
that house will not be able to stand.
A genuinely rotten tree cannot bear good fruit. Genuinely good deeds ought never be undermined for that sake of political gain, as the scribes attempted. It is easy enough to manufacture the appearance of goodness. But then, in that case, the appropriate thing to challenge is not the actions but the misleading appearance.
This is all a little bit more complicated since we ourselves are and live among people not wholly good and not wholly rotten. We do some good, some bad, and probably some good things that appear bad, and some bad things that appear good. This means that when discerning the actions of people that aren't Jesus we can't necessarily assume that one good fruit means the tree is sound. Yet it is still actions and not appearances by which we ought to judge.
Jesus calls attention to the precarious nature of our position of being divided in heart and mind. It is not an easy position to sustain since we will be working against ourselves in all that we do, being pulled one way, then another. Satan is effective is his malice because he never does anything truly good, and is always about the business of trying to spoil God's good creation. To the degree that we are a house divided we are subject to his power and manipulation. Freeing ourselves from his grasp is never something that is naturally within the scope of our strength as human beings. We need to trust in the one strong enough to set us free.
But no one can enter a strong man’s house to plunder his property
unless he first ties up the strong man.
Jesus was the one who bound the devil and plundered his property, that is, us, by his cross and resurrection. Whatever claim the devil had on us due to sin was revoked by the redemption wrought by our Lord. Because this is so, we ought not linger in the darkness. We must not be like the scribes, so afraid of salvation that we mischaracterize it as darkness. If we refuse to recognize the possibility of salvation, if we close our eyes to the saving power of God, then the Holy Spirit will not enter were he is not welcomed, where he is, in fact, blasphemed, not by our words necessarily, but with willful opposition issuing from the hardness of our hearts.
Having learned from Paul and others, Timothy and Titus were examples of men with undivided hearts. But such hearts require maintenance and regular upkeep. It is not enough to not blaspheme the Spirit. We must stir up the Spirit within our hearts. This is necessary in order to avoid temptation, such as that of cowardice in the face of hardship. When the reality of the Spirit we have received, "of power and love and self-control" is active in our lives, we will progress, not on our own strength, but "with the strength that comes from God".
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