“Are you with us or against us?” It’s a question commonly raised in public discourse, meant to force us to pick a side. There are no shades of grey, we’re told. Neutrality is not an option. Not choosing is actually making a choice. You can either stand with the oppressed or stand with the oppressor.
Jesus himself seems to engage in such thinking in Matthew’s Gospel, when he declares that “whoever is not with me is against me.” In other places, however, Jesus appears to make an entirely different claim. “Whoever is not against you is for you,” he tells the disciple John in Luke’s Gospel. In the passage from Mark assigned to this coming Sunday, he announces that “whoever is not against us is for us.”
Which is it? How do we make sense of those who don’t oppose us but also don’t take our side? Are they our potential allies or our sworn enemies? It may depend on the Jesus you ask.
Interestingly, in all three Gospels, such questions come up within the context of an exorcism. In Luke and Mark, Jesus advises his disciples not to worry about whether someone exorcising demons is a follower of Jesus or not. What’s important for Jesus is that an exorciser is fighting evil, not the absolute purity of the exorciser’s allegiances. In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus himself does the exorcism. Afterwards, he counters an accusation leveled by the Pharisees that he himself must be evil. In response, Jesus argues that evil cannot cast out evil. It would be harming itself. If Jesus is combating evil, then, he must, de facto, be good. The enemy of my enemy is my friend!
In all three Gospels, Jesus suggests that it is unwise to spend too much time focusing on an exorcist’s virtue or lack thereof. The exorcist’s ability to triumph over evil is what matters, not who that exorcist is or why they are doing what they are doing. The ultimate point Jesus makes in each Gospel is a similar one: we do not need to be on the same team in order to advance the same interests. We can work towards the same worthy goals even if we differ—perhaps even if we disagree.
Why do we find this so difficult to understand? In a nonbinary world, why do we engage in so much binary thinking? Why do we insist on subjecting one another to “purity tests” instead of forming alliances across lines of difference? In the midst of so many kinds of evil (violence, injustice, every kind of hate), perhaps we shouldn’t be so worried about who’s doing the fighting—or why they’re doing it, or even if they’re doing it the right way—as long as it’s evil that we're all fighting against.
