Sermon for the Second Sunday after Pentecost, June 7th, 2015
Text: Mark 3:20-35 (MSG)
20-21 Jesus came home and, as usual, a crowd gathered—so many making demands on him that there wasn’t even time to eat. His friends heard what was going on and went to rescue him, by force if necessary. They suspected he was getting carried away with himself.
22-27 The religion scholars from Jerusalem came down spreading rumors that he was working black magic, using devil tricks to impress them with spiritual power. Jesus confronted their slander with a story: “Does it make sense to send a devil to catch a devil, to use Satan to get rid of Satan? A constantly squabbling family disintegrates. If Satan were fighting Satan, there soon wouldn’t be any Satan left. Do you think it’s possible in broad daylight to enter the house of an awake, able-bodied man, and walk off with his possessions unless you tie him up first? Tie him up, though, and you can clean him out.
28-30 “Listen to this carefully. I’m warning you. There’s nothing done or said that can’t be forgiven. But if you persist in your slanders against God’s Holy Spirit, you are repudiating the very One who forgives, sawing off the branch on which you’re sitting, severing by your own perversity all connection with the One who forgives.” He gave this warning because they were accusing him of being in league with Evil.
Jesus’ Mother and Brothers
31-32 Just then his mother and brothers showed up. Standing outside, they relayed a message that they wanted a word with him. He was surrounded by the crowd when he was given the message, “Your mother and brothers and sisters are outside looking for you.”
33-35 Jesus responded, “Who do you think are my mother and brothers?” Looking around, taking in everyone seated around him, he said, “Right here, right in front of you—my mother and my brothers. Obedience is thicker than blood. The person who obeys God’s will is my brother and sister and mother.”
In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity. Amen.
In his poem “The Death of the Hired Man,” Robert Frost writes: “Home is the place where when you have to go there they have to take you in.”
Even if they don’t want to. Even if you don’t want them to!
What is it about families? We love our families, but if it can be said that “home is where the heart is,” we might also say that on occasion “home is where the heartburn is”!
Consider poor Mary, Jesus’ mother. This passage from Mark hints that the relationship between Jesus and his mother was perhaps a bit strained. On the one hand, this might seem odd, considering that Mary knew from the start that this child of hers was going to be a very different person than your “normal” child; yet maybe even Mary couldn’t have guessed at how different her offspring was going to be!
And Jesus certainly caused her more than a little anxiety in his growing-up years! I’m thinking in particular of the time he simply wandered away from his family so that he could be in the Temple debating with the elders and scribes – and Mary and Joseph had to turn around and rush back to Jerusalem to find him. And when they do find him after several tense hours, what does he say? “You should have known I’d be here in my Father’s house!” (The response of Joseph and Mary was – perhaps fortunately – never recorded …)
That’s just the most dramatic example. There had to have been many, many others. And as his fame spread, his family must have felt increasingly like they were living in a fishbowl – any time Jesus did something dramatic, which he did all the time, they must have heard about it. Mary goes to the market to buy some fish for dinner, and somebody comes up to her and says, “Hi, Mary! Say, I just heard that your boy Jesus cast out some demons the other day – is that true?” Or somebody shows up at the family carpenter shop (where all the brothers except Jesus put in a long, hard day’s work) and says to one of them, “Hello, James! I just heard that your brother Jesus is up in Capernaum causing quite a stir with his teaching in the synagogue up there – what’s up with that?” And Jesus moved around so much that it was probably only by reports from others and hearsay that they could get an idea where he was. Then there’s the fact that some of his followers were quite possibly members of one or another of the radical anti-Roman groups of the day, which also served to put Jesus – and all of them, too – right onto the Roman “watch list.” And if all of that weren’t enough, there were those who believed that Jesus was downright evil. So we can understand why his family became increasingly concerned about him. They thought he had gone totally off the rails!
It would have been easy to come to that conclusion. First off, he had given up the family business to become a wandering preacher. Here we need to note that in that part of the world, wood is pretty scarce; so the work of carpentry was not something that was given to just anybody. It was a highly-skilled trade, and those who plied that trade were solidly in what we might today call the middle class. So for Jesus to do what he did would be like the local banker’s son throwing away his Harvard education to go sit on a mountaintop in Nepal communing with the local guru. It just wasn’t done, and reflected very poorly on the family.
Secondly, Jesus was on an unavoidable collision course with the orthodox leaders of the day. He didn’t just rock the boat; he capsized it! These were the people you just didn’t mess with, but Jesus seemed to go out of his way to confront them, embarrass them, call them bad names like “hypocrite,” and to just generally get in their collective face.
And then there was that bunch of groupies of his I already mentioned – unlettered fishermen, a former tax collector – a tax collector!!! – and at least one subversive. Put it all together, and the conclusion is inescapable: He must be nuts!
No doubt one of the most frequent topics of conversation around his family’s dinner-table was: “What are we going to do about Jesus?”
We don’t usually think of Jesus in these terms. We think of Jesus the way John describes him, as the majestic, all-powerful, all-knowing, all-wise God who condescended to take on human form, the Word who was with God before all time, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, the One who was sent from God to redeem the world – and he is all of those things.
But Jesus was also a human being, a man who had earthly parents, brothers – some scholars will tell you that Thomas who was called “the Twin” (and later “Doubting Thomas”) was in fact Jesus’ twin – and sisters, cousins (like John the Baptist, for example), and so on. He was not some alien who just dropped down on to planet Earth to deliver his message and who otherwise had no connection to the people here. Mark, alone of the Gospel writers, tells us about this Jesus in his no-nonsense unvarnished way. And to me, reading about Jesus the human being makes Jesus the Son of God all the more compelling, because we see in this Jesus the stark contrast, and the sometimes agonizing conflicts, between being true to God, being true to our calling, on the one hand, and part of the human race, on the other. That is the Jesus who brings me here every week. That is the Jesus I worship. That is the Jesus I would follow to the ends of the Earth. Because that is the Jesus who knows what life is like for Bill Colby-Newton [and … and …]. He’s the Jesus who knows… knows me, knows you. He’s the Jesus who knows that we are not perfect, and sometimes far less than perfect, but who forgives us, anyway. He’s the Jesus who understands because he’s been there, too. Without this Jesus, the man who was God and the God who was a man, there would be no point of contact between us and God. Worse yet, there would be no point in life at all.
You’ve probably all seen those wall plaques with pictures and a caption underneath. I have one that shows a baseball player sliding into home plate with his arms stretched out in front of him. The caption reads: “Risk. Sometimes the greatest risk is not taking one.”
Jesus made people think he was crazy because that’s what he did. He gave up any notion of security; he threw away the possibility of safety; and he – perhaps worst of all – showed with his words and actions that he was totally indifferent to the verdict of society.
The New Testament scholar William Barclay recounts what John Bunyan wrote regarding his imprisonment:
“When John Bunyan was in prison, he was quite frankly afraid. ‘My imprisonment,’ he thought, ‘might end on the gallows for aught that I could tell.’ He did not like the thought of being hanged. Then came the day when he was ashamed of being afraid. ‘Methought I was ashamed to die with a pale face and tottering knees for such a cause as this.’ So finally he came to a conclusion as he thought of himself climbing up the ladder to the gallows: ‘Wherefore, thought I, I am for going on and venturing my eternal state with Christ whether I have comfort here or no; if God doth not come in, thought I, I will leap off the ladder even blindfold into eternity, sink or swim, come heaven, come hell; Lord Jesus, if thou wilt catch me, do: if not, I will venture for thy name.’ That is precisely what Jesus was willing to do. I will venture for thy name.”
That’s the essence of the life Jesus lived. He gave up safety and security for the sake of the Good News.
So how are we to follow his example in our day? None of us are likely to face the gallows for the sake of our faith, and none of us are likely to ever be considered crazy because we’re followers of Jesus.
Even so, there are opportunities all around us every day to follow our Call – throwing a pocketful of change into the little box for the Ronald McDonald House for kids with cancer, or giving somebody directions even if you’re busy, making a blood donation to the Red Cross, sending a check to St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital … these, and many other gestures like them, are very important ways to show that you, too, follow that rebel Jesus; they may seem so small as to be insignificant, but they are as real and as consequential as what that unnamed Chinese man did who stopped a tank on Tianmen Square all those years ago simply by standing still in front of it and refusing to move.
Another way is before you now: Standing up and being counted as members of the Body of Christ by partaking of Holy Communion. Come, my Sisters and my Brothers – let us be strengthened by the Body and the Blood of our Savior!
In the Name of God, the Holy and Undivided Trinity. Amen.