Jesus came with his disciples into the house.
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.”
The relatives of Jesus felt the need to take matters into their own hands to protect the reputation of the family from being damaged by one who was reputed to be "out of his mind", which might even mean possessed (see John 10:20). The relatives left from Nazareth to seize Jesus at Capernaum in order to run damage control. It was a similar response to what Jesus would later experience when he himself came to Nazareth and preached in their synagogue.
"A prophet is not without honor, except in his hometown and among his relatives and in his own household" (see Mark 6:4).
The closer people were to Jesus before his ministry the less willing they seemed to understand him once it started. Family and friends, people who should have been the first to advocate for him, were actually among the first to reject him. Familiarity with Jesus ought to have made them aware of his moral integrity and his utter lack of pretense, of the way his heart was always close to the heart of God. Yet when Jesus began his ministry it was something his relatives could not understand on the basis of mere historical precedent. Rather than being open to the fact that something amazing was beginning through and around Jesus they could only see it through a purely human lens.
When his relatives heard of this they set out to seize him,
for they said, “He is out of his mind.”
To arrive at this opinion the relatives must have selectively ignored the stories of healing and deliverance and instead focused only on the opinions of those in the crowd that doubted and disbelieved, those who saw only disorder and disturbance because they weren't looking closely enough. Why would relatives of all people do this? Did they feel particularly threatened or betrayed by this new role which Jesus took seemed to have taken upon himself, as though he were now too good for them, or as though he were leaving them behind? Those thoughts may not have been conscious but perhaps they distorted their interpretation of the reports about Jesus.
Jesus's relatives can serve as a warning for us that our familiarity is never a guarantee of perseverance. Just as we feel comfortable with the way things have been in our relationship with Jesus he may begin doing something new around us or within our hearts. We remain free to accept or reject him. The temptation is to limit ourselves to see Jesus according to a human interpretation of our past experiences with him. We may feel slighted that we experienced (or so we believe) a relatively normal and mundane Jesus for so long and yet only now something new, miraculous, and unexpected is said to be beginning. The bigger the crowd that proclaims it before we experience it the harder it can be for us to hear it. When it impinges on practical matters it can be even harder. We are not fans of anything that makes it impossible for us even to eat. Yet we have been given these lessons in advance so that we can recognize the temptation to put limits on Jesus when it occurs and to instead take the side of those who surrounded him with eager expectation.
There is often a human way to view a situation that is not the Godly way. He said through his prophet that his thoughts were not our thoughts. Jesus himself accused Peter of thinking as "human beings do" (see Matthew 16:23), as though that was now below what was expected of him. All of this is an invitation to make sure we are putting the renewed mind we have by virtue of our baptism to use by the power of the Holy Spirit in us. For people surrounding David the death of Saul would have seemed like a victory but David realized that such a death could never be a victory. Saul was the Lord's anointed and it was sorrowful to see him come to such an end. It was even more sorrowful to see so close a friend as Jonathan fallen by the sword. It was a victory for David in human terms, and many of the people around him would have had him celebrate. But such a celebration would have inevitably entailed the hardening of David's heart which instead remained pliant and malleable.
“How can the warriors have fallen,
the weapons of war have perished!”
Yet we know that David had prophetic intimations of the resurrection. He was able to enter into a grief that did not become despair because, however sad this was, his trust in God was greater. He did not grieve in a merely human way, which is to say, without hope.
But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope (see First Thessalonians 4:13).
Christians who recognize that death is not the end may seem out of their minds to a world whose hope is only in this life. We ourselves must constantly reject the mindset that tells us that there is nothing more than this life. We can instead embrace the lavish hope we have been given.
Let us see your face, Lord, and we shall be saved.
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