Jesus went up on a mountainside and called to Him those He wanted, and they came to Him. He appointed twelve that they might be with Him and that He might send them out to preach and to have authority to drive out demons. These are the twelve He appointed: Simon (to whom He gave the name Peter), James son of Zebedee and his brother John (to them he gave the name Boanerges, which means “sons of thunder”), Andrew, Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, Thomas, James son of Alphaeus, Thaddaeus, Simon the Zealot and Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Him. Then Jesus entered a house, and again a crowd gathered, so that He and his disciples were not even able to eat. When his family heard about this, they went to take charge of Him, for they said, “He is out of His mind.” And the teachers of the law who came down from Jerusalem said, “He is possessed by Beelzebul! By the prince of demons he is driving out demons.” (Mark 3:13-22)
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If you remember, a couple of weeks ago I shared some thoughts about friendship, based on the first part of Proverbs 17:17, which says that “A friend loves at all times but a brother is born for adversity.” After the service, someone commented that since I had concentrated on the first part of the verse dealing with friendship, maybe I should devote a sermon to the idea behind the second part of the verse dealing with family. It seemed like a good idea! Families are, after all, interesting things. I'm not going to deal so much with adversity, though. I want to think about the way families react to those who come to faith, because there are so many families now in which the family members believe different things – and many believe nothing in terms of faith.
For example, I was raised by a family of heathen! I say that with great respect and even affection. It doesn't change my love for those who raised me, but it simply points out a fact. They were a bunch of heathen. My family of origin was small – and apart from those I actually lived with (which was my mother and her aunt and uncle) it consisted essentially of various and assorted cousins living mostly in Eastern Ontario, who we didn't see all that often. None of them were “churchified,” if I may coin a phrase. None of them were Christians; none of them spent any great amount of time even thinking about religious or spiritual matters, and when they did think about it, it was usually to proclaim themselves to be atheists and to denounce both belief and believers. That was the basic environment in which I was raised. Now, as we all know, God works in the most mysterious ways. I ended up in the church; I ended up knowing and believing in Christ; I ended up going into the ministry. I suspect that my family (from the closest to the most distant) never really quite figured out what to do with that. But it was interesting to see how they responded. Shortly after I began studying for the ministry I went to a family dinner in Belleville with some of my cousins. The food was brought out and put before us. As always, I picked up my knife and fork to dig in – and I noticed that no one else was starting. Actually, they were looking at me. “What's up?” I asked. “Well,” said one, “aren't we going to say grace?” I was stunned, sat silent for a moment and then said, “well, we never have before.” I think as it turned out I did say grace before that meal. But it reminded me that family is a funny thing. You can never really be sure how your family will respond to you when you take a direction they wouldn't have anticipated.
Jesus would have understood. For Jesus, family was a complicated thing. There's even debate within the Christian church about who exactly Jesus' family was. We call Him the Son of God; we also call Him the son of Mary – which begs the question: where does Joseph fit in? The Bible speaks about Jesus' brothers; there are those in the Christian community who insist that Jesus couldn't have had brothers – that they must have been cousins. The Bible makes no reference to Jesus ever having been married; others say that Jesus could never have been accepted as a teacher in His society unless He was married. What more can I say – it's complicated! And, really, the Bible doesn't say very much about Jesus' family. Mary's a big part of the Christmas story, and also has a significant role in the Easter story. Otherwise? Just scattered glimpses; intriguing biblical hints at what the relationship between Jesus and His earthly family might have been like. And of all those interesting biblical hints, perhaps none is more interesting than this one today, recorded for us in Mark's Gospel.
One thing that comes across loud and clear in this passage is that Jesus' own family really didn't have a clue what to make of Him. Others did – or at least others made up their minds pretty easily. In the passage that we used this morning, we actually get a sense of how four different groups responded to Jesus, and of how they perceived Him.
The passage starts by talking about the twelve – Jesus' original disciples. They were apparently convinced about Him. To them, He was the Son of God, the one Who would reveal God's will and God's ways to them. When He called them, they came; when He sent them, they went. They were loyal; they were faithful; they believed. Then we read of the crowds that jammed into the house where Jesus went to eat. The crowds were interested in Jesus; even excited about Him. They wanted to see Him and hear Him. They may not have believed in Him – but they were interested. They were perhaps the equivalent of what we call today “seekers” - those we desperately want to get into the church. The passage ends by talking about “the teachers of the law” - not lawyers, but those who were responsible for teaching the Law of Moses to the people. They reviled Jesus. They not only disagreed with Him, they considered Him positively satanic, under the control of Beelzebul – another name for the devil! Those two extremes are still easy to find today. There are many (including, I hope, most of us in church) who are convinced about Jesus. We may not completely agree about who He was or what we should believe about Him, but He's the centrepiece of our faith; the one around Whom everything about our faith revolves. And there are those who consider Jesus (or at least we or the church who represents Him to the world) to be among the most evil organizations around. Those two extremes, I suppose, will always exist. But the most interesting group who responded to Jesus in this passage was His own family: “When his family heard about this, they went to take charge of Him, for they said, 'He is out of His mind.'”
Those are pretty harsh words: “He is out of His mind.” I wonder why they thought that? This might be where the passage really starts to apply to us. Apparently his family thought he was out of His mind – because He was allowing who He was to start making His life a little more difficult. The problem in this passage was quite simple apparently – Jesus had gone into a house and wasn't able to eat because He had so many people following Him. It may have been a simple problem, but it represented a big challenge. It showed that as news about Jesus spread, even the simplest things would become more difficult. It would be like being an unknown extra one day and then suddenly winning an Oscar. All of a sudden there was no privacy, demands were being made on Jesus, expectations were high. Why would you want your life to change like that? And that seemed to be the cause of His family's misgivings. We sometimes think of the passage as saying that Jesus' family thought that Jesus was out of His mind to believe Himself to be the Messiah; that they thought He had become some sort of religious nutcase. But this passage doesn't support that. They were concerned about the change in His life, and what the implications of that change might be. “Who would take this on?” seems to have been their question, and their answer was that anyone who would take this on has to be “out of His mind.” Choosing to follow Jesus by definition makes a difference in our lives – and therefore to those around us and closest to us.
The world doesn't understand the difference Jesus makes to those who truly follow Him. The world wants to get things. People want to get ahead. To follow Jesus is to follow the way of sacrifice – and that doesn't make sense to a lot of people in the modern world. Many people today will give – but they'll only give as long as they don't really miss what they're giving. Jesus set the example for His followers by giving everything. And the world doesn't understand. And sometimes the world even ridicules those who truly follow Jesus – because they don't understand. “You're out of your mind.” Possibly. By worldly standards. After all, the message of the cross is foolishness to the world around us.
The point of the passage seems to be that those who are by default the closest to us are usually the ones who don't know quite what to make of us, and that can be a tough road to walk. It was a tough road for Jesus as well, but it seemed to work out in the end. His mother was among those at the cross on the day He died, and it's believed that James was one of his brothers – and that he became a leader of the church in Jerusalem and the author of the New Testament letter named after him. But how hard is it to hold on to faith when those closest to you don't share what you believe. It's a real issue in today's world, in which there's a virtual buffet of religions to choose from – one of which is no religion at all. And how we show our faith to those closest to us is a big issue today. The lesson we learn from Jesus is a simple one: just live it. Just do what God calls you to do. Just love as God calls you to love. Just share what God calls you to share. We worry too much about results, and we forget to leave the results to God. We're just called to be the witnesses – to those both near and far.
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