When his relatives heard of this they set out to seize him,
for they said, “He is out of his mind.”
The relatives of Jesus heard about the crowds and about the adverse effects his popularity was having on his life. Unable even to eat? He must Be in over his head, they thought, swept up in something that had become too big to manage. Had he come to believe in what must have been his own hype? After all, they were his relatives. They had known him, and thought they knew him. They continued to assume that he was normal. Others with less intimate connections to him might imagine him to be something more, but his relatives knew, or thought they knew, that he was no different from they.
If Jesus was misunderstood by people who thought they knew him before he began his mission it is likely that Christians will be misunderstood, first, upon their initial conversion, and then again and again as they deepen their commitment and take Jesus and his Gospel more and more seriously. The paradigm of normal, the only one the world apart from Jesus has with which to work, is not applicable to the followers of Jesus. A fundamental idea of the Gospel is that the world was not OK as Jesus found it. He came because it needed saving. And he extends that mission into our own day through us. But people who haven't accepted the idea that there is something fundamentally wrong with the world (though, who could miss it?) often take offense at the idea that it needs fixing. People have even more reason to be offended by us than by Jesus himself, because we are clearly flawed, imperfect in all of the same ways the world is imperfect. How could we possibly claim to help? If anything, it is probably even harder for anyone to imagine that this claim could be valid in spite of the flaws of its advocates.
Knowing that we will be misunderstood and even opposed as followers of Jesus is ought not cause us to give up in advance. Rather, we should set to work with realistic expectations, so that we are not surprised or deterred when we encounter such results. People may try to stop us, even thinking they are acting for our benefit. But we must persist. We must be willing to be seen as fools for Christ if and when the situation demands.
We may well lose friends, not necessarily through any hostility on their part, but simply because they no longer understand us or our priorities. They may not regard us with hostility. And yet our different goals may cause us to drift apart. But part of the promise of the Gospel is friendship in a new and deeper form, first with Jesus, and then through him with his other friends. Such friendship is even sweeter than that between David and Jonathan.
“I grieve for you, Jonathan my brother!
most dear have you been to me;
more precious have I held love for you than love for women.
Thus is the promise of Jesus fulfilled that "everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands, for my name’s sake, will receive a hundredfold" (see Matthew 19:29). We recognize that when we do leave family or friends we are responding to the love that Jesus himself first showed us. Knowing this we can be reassured that nothing truly important is ever lost when we take Jesus at his word.
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