20 January 2024 Mark 3:20-21
The Bible is a little ambivalent about “family values.”
This is not to say that the Bible says families are unimportant – that is obviously not true. The Bible affirms again and again, in both Testaments, that families are the first and most influential evangelists of children. The Bible affirms again and again the importance of mothers and fathers, the deep significance of the marriage bond, and the obligation of parents to raise their children in the love and admonition of the Lord.
It is to say that sometimes families just don’t get it.
Jesus’ relatives thought he had lost his mind because there was a crowd outside at dinnertime, and Jesus seemed to care about them more than he cared about dinner with the family. They laid hands on him, and tried to drag him back inside – the verb Mark uses is the same one used when guards came to arrest Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane later on. Jesus’ relations just couldn’t understand how this crowd full of the riffraff of the neighborhood – sick people, contagious people, demon-possessed people – could be more important to him than his own family. “Get back inside! What are you, nuts?”
Sometimes families just don’t get it.
Jesus, of course objected to this, and tried to straighten his family out, but even he couldn’t get through to them. There is a reason why he said later on, “Prophets are not without honor, except in their hometown, and among their own kin, and in their own house” (Mark 6:4).
He was the Messiah, he was the Lord. But not at dinnertime. Some families just don’t get it.
Jesus’ family was right about one thing, though – someone was crazy. They thought it was Jesus, but of course it was them. What they couldn’t comprehend at that time was that Jesus’ life revolved around a different center, and it wasn’t His family. It was the will of God. He was as human as we are, but our lives cannot be as His was, as full of power as His was, as full of love as His was, with dominion over sickness, evil, sin and death as His was, until they are focused around the same center as His was – the will of God. We become the most perfect version of ourselves when our lives revolve around the will of God, and only the will of God, as His did.
We can become perfect. Who wouldn’t want that? It would be crazy not to.
His family eventually came around. With his half-brother James, it took a post-resurrection appearance (cf. I Corinthians 15:7), and after that he became one of the leaders of the earliest Church. They said he had knees like a camel because of the hours he spent in prayer. He even got a nickname – James the Just. And Mary, well, we call her now Mother of God and Queen of Heaven, and pray thousands of times, millions of times every day, “Hail Mary, full of Grace, the Lord is with thee.”
With her, indeed. At the center of her life, at the center for everyone who finally gets it.
Perfect.
Comments