Saturday of the Second Week in Ordinary Time

Lectionary: 316

Again the crowd gathered, making it impossible for them even to eat. When his relatives heard of this they set out to seize him, for they said, “He is out of his mind.” 

Just about everyone agrees that Jesus was a very unusual fellow. His worst enemies might compare him to the Buddha or Muhammad, but the rest of us find him simply incomparable. There was no one like him before, nor anyone since. 

The Gospel of Saint Mark begins with this singularity and then discovers the fear and hostility that uniqueness bred around him. The world comprised of Jews and Gentiles agrees he does not belong to us and cannot remain with us. 

In today's very brief gospel we hear about the opposition of Jesus's family. Aware of the commotion he is generating and that it might recoil on themselves, they decide -- to be on the safe side -- to arrest him and bring back to Capernaum to be confined. They justify this project on his state of mind. He is, to be exact, "out of his mind." 

Beyond their interest in preserving their standing in the community, they believe they have both the right and the duty to take charge of Jesus. They'll argue he must be protected from hostile others; and he should be protected from himself. 

When they arrive -- as we'll hear on Tuesday -- they are dismissed. Jesus will not submit to them; he will not even respond to them. Instead he disowns them in favor of his disciples: 

“Here are my mother and my brothers.

For whoever does the will of God

is my brother and sister and mother.”

The new family of Jesus are those who, like him, are willing to abandon father and mother, land and property, in their following of him.

“Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever does not take up his cross and follow after me is not worthy of me. Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.

The principle is simple. How it applies to each of us is not. We first saw God's radical demand when Abram was called to leave his father's house and "go to the place I will show you." Not long afterward, the same man would be told to sacrifice, "your son, your only son, whom you love."  

We saw the inevitable and necessary apotheosis of this demand when 

"God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life."

God could not and would not make a demand upon us that he would not make upon himself. And besides, there is no other way we can be saved.

Everyone experiences that demand in different ways. It is there. We know it is there. It might not appear daily but we are apt to feel its weight at many different points in our life. Young people might face it as they choose a job, career, or profession; and as they enter marriage with its demands for fidelity, perseverance, and willingness to beget children. Older people will feel it as they practice their vows, eschewing every thought of distractedness, infidelity, or divorce. We must even guard thoughts that might lead in those directions. These conceptions of the mind, even those beloved like Isaac, have no place among us. 

Every Christian must experience that terrifying solitude in God's presence even as they enter and remain in the companionship of the Church. Each one will pray with the Lord occasionally, "Why have you abandoned me?" And each will know the Resurrection of Faith, Hope, and Love in the Spirit of Jesus.