Crazy Love
Scripture Reading: Mark 3:20-35
Love can make you do crazy things, like play the drums in a church service in a language you barely understand. Sandy and I weren’t active churchgoers when we met back in 1997. She was on a long hiatus from the Korean Presbyterian church of her youth, and I hadn’t attended Mass at a Catholic church since I left my parents’ home and moved to New York City.
Nevertheless, we had a traditional church wedding at the Church of the Transfiguration, also known as the Little Church Around the Corner, an Episcopal parish on 29th St. between Fifth and Madison Avenues, which was, true to its billing, right around the corner from our apartment. The Neo-Gothic building looked like it had been dropped from the English countryside into what’s now the hip neighborhood of NoMad but back then was simply an extension of Midtown.
Sandy and I attended Sunday worship a few times leading up to the wedding and a few more times after the wedding, but we weren’t exactly regulars. But after Sandy ended up in the emergency room twice in two years, with what turned out to be acute pancreatitis, she got religion, which meant that I got religion…eventually. That is a story for another sermon, but suffice it to say that her condition was so severe on her second trip to the ER in January 2001, that she legitimately thought she was dying.
The experience of being put on a gurney and shoved into the back of an ambulance was a wake-up call. Sandy began attending a Korean Presbyterian church on the edge of Koreatown, and in addition to the regular Sunday service, also faithfully attended the daily dawn prayer service as well. I, however, continued to spend my Sunday mornings going for runs along the Battery Park Esplanade (we had by this point moved to Lower Manhattan).
Sandy let me know that the church also had an English service, if I was interested. I wasn’t, but like Monty Hall, I was willing to play Let’s Make a Deal. “I will go to church with you,” I offered, “if you come running with me.” That sounded fair to her, and to make it official, we shook hands.
Now, do you want to guess the number of times that Sandy accompanied me on a run? I’ll give you a hint. It falls between 0 and 2.
One time! She went running with me one time! Meanwhile, I began attending the English service, then started playing drums with the praise band at the English service, and then agreed to play at the Korean service as well. I was in church all day on Sundays! When we moved to New Jersey and joined a Korean church there, I added youth-group teacher to my ever-deepening résumé with the Korean church.
To my non-churchgoing friends, which was most of them, this all seemed crazy. I have to say, before meeting Sandy, I never thought that playing drums in a Korean church would be on my life’s BINGO card. But like I said at the outset, love will make you do crazy things. And there is no love more crazy—more exuberant, more extravagant, and more unsettling for some—than the love of Jesus Christ for sinners.
That’s what we see in today’s passage from Mark. We see Jesus demonstrate a love that confounds the religious authorities and that causes his own family to become concerned for his sanity.
We see Jesus demonstrate a love that confounds the religious authorities and that causes his own family to become concerned for his sanity.
Today begins our journey through the Gospel of Mark, which we’ll be reading for much of the remainder of the year. If there’s an underrated Gospel, it’s Mark. For one, Mark is the shortest of the four Gospels, with just 16 chapters.
For another, Mark is the Hemingway of the Gospel authors. He writes with an economy of style and directness that surges forward with momentum. It’s as if Mark is less concerned with describing what happened and more so with what happened next.
And finally, Mark makes no mention of Jesus’ coming into the world, either as the Word of God descending from heaven, as in John, or as a child born in Bethlehem, as in Matthew and Luke. That’s right, there’s no birth narrative in Mark—no angels, no shepherds, no Mary and Joseph fleeing to Egypt to avoid Herod’s reign of terror. In fact, Jesus’ parents never appear in Mark’s Gospel. They are neither seen nor heard. Mary is mentioned just once and Joseph not at all.
As luck would have it, the one appearance of Jesus’ family in the entire Gospel occurs right here in this passage. After Jesus returns home from an eventful day in the synagogue and by the seaside where he has healed the sick and done battle with demons, his family are filled with pride and amazement and welcome him home enthusiastically with open arms and kisses on the cheek.
I’m just kidding. They go out to seize him because they think he’s lost his mind! Mark writes, “Then he went home, and the crowd came together again, so that they could not even eat. When his family heard it, they went out to restrain him, for people were saying, “He has gone out of his mind!”
You can imagine the whispers of those who knew Jesus back in the day. What ever happened to Jesus? He was such a good boy. Well mannered, thoughtful. Never caused any trouble. Now he’s attracting an undesirable element, bringing all these sick and possessed people into our peaceful village.
You see, Jesus has been busy. As an observant Jew, on the day of the Sabbath he visited his local synagogue where he encountered a man with a withered hand. Knowing that the Pharisees were watching him, Jesus asked the man to come forward and told him to stretch out his withered hand, which miraculously, he was able to do. This only enraged the Pharisees who were responsible for seeing to it that Jews observed the Law in all aspects of life, and the Law expressly forbade doing work on the Sabbath. And, yes, healing constituted work.
Leaving the synagogue, Jesus then headed for the shore, and a large crowd of people beset with all sorts of illnesses and ailments followed him. No doubt they hoped that they too might receive healing. Let’s note that this was not an orderly affair; it was a scene of chaos. Mark writes, “He told his disciples to have a boat ready for him because of the crowd, so that they would not crush him; for he had cured many, so that all who had diseases pressed upon him to touch him” (Mk. 3:9-10). Jesus has the disciples prepare a boat so that he can make a quick getaway!
But it didn’t work. As we pick up the story, the crowd has followed him home. They’re pressing in on him such that he and the disciples can’t even sit down and eat lunch. That’s when his family comes looking for him. They’re concerned for his safety, for his well being. And they’re probably wondering what the heck is going on. Who are all these people? Why are they following you?
Jesus’ family are not the only ones looking for him. Some scribes have come all the way from Jerusalem to this remote part of Galilee. They’ve heard reports of this controversial rabbi whose ministry breaks with tradition and even violates the Law of Moses. The people are following him in droves. This is getting serious, they’re thinking. Who knows what he might do next or how popular his movement might become?
Interestingly, the scribes don’t deny the miraculous deeds that Jesus performs. How could they? They’ve probably seen them with their own eyes. They don’t or can’t deny these wonders; they just attribute them to Satan. “He has Beelzebul, and by the ruler of the demons he casts out demons.” They’re telling the crowd, Listen! He only appears to be a man of God, but all these healings that he’s done, all these demons that he’s exorcised—it’s the work of the devil. (Unimportant but interesting footnote: “Beelzebul” translates as “Lord of the flies,” which you may remember from your high school English class.)
Any time the Jewish religious leaders appear and object to something that Jesus has said or done, we’re reminded of just how outrageous, offensive, and threatening they took Jesus to be. But these were not evil men. We tend to think of the scribes and Pharisees only in light of their antagonism toward Jesus, but they were committed to maintaining Jewish identity in the midst of Roman occupation. They wanted to ensure that Israel remained culturally and religiously Jewish and not adopt Roman ways.
After all, isn’t that what so much of the Old Testament warns about—Israel adopting the ways of the nations that surround them? We may think of the scribes as the men in black hats, i.e., easily identifiable bad guys, but they saw themselves as the good guys. They were the keepers of tradition and the defenders of orthodoxy. For them, seeing Jesus’ indiscriminate love for sinners felt like looking into the abyss.
They’re not unlike the friends of Job who were so convinced of their own rightness, so certain that they understood God’s ways, that they were incapable of conceiving that God might act in a manner that was unexpected, shocking, and even scandalous. And that is precisely what Jesus does. He doesn’t take a moral inventory of those who come to him. He doesn’t check to see if their name is on the guest list. He sees broken bodies in need of healing and he heals them. He meets broken people in search of restoration and he restores them. He sees people desperate for forgiveness and he forgives them.
The religious authorities see all this—they see the kingdom of God breaking into the world right before their very eyes—and they think, “That’s the work of the devil.” Not only do they not recognize the kingdom of God, not only do they reject it, they show contempt for it.
This is the only unforgivable sin of which Jesus speaks—blaspheming the Holy Spirit, i.e., being unable to tell the difference between the power of the Holy Spirit and the demonic. It’s unforgivable only because the person who commits it rejects forgiveness.
And so, what to the religious authorities appeared demonic, and what to Jesus’ own family was cause to fear for his sanity, was nothing less than God’s exuberant, extravagant, and—dare I say—crazy love. A love that forgives, heals, restores, and makes whole. A love that transforms sinners into sisters and brothers.