Mark 3:20-35

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.”

I
The Gospel from Mark today overflows any possible message with this picture of Jesus who is so confrontational—speaking of binding a strong man; speaking of an unforgivable sin; refusing his family to create something new. It overflows any message with questions.

I wonder if we might just imagine Mary.

II
“Is it true you tried to stop our Lord?”

There was no end to the questions pious people came to ask her,
hushed, awestruck.
Nobody was ever brave or coarse enough to ask Mary that.
And now the truth was hard to remember—if
she really had meant to stop him.
It was like trying to remember
how you felt around a stranger before you loved them.

“We didn’t understand,” she says.

“Jesus left to go find John at the Jordan and be baptized,
and I thought he would come back to Nazareth and his work and to us,
like everyone else had.
But then it was so long, and we didn’t know where he was.

“People from by the sea came and said he himself was going along
healing what couldn’t be healed. That he was casting out demons,
and saying that the Day of God had come. He had chosen the twelve.
We had no idea what was happening to him.
We heard about the crowds.
Jerusalem people were coming to measure him, all pressing in.
He was in Capernaum. So we went to him ourselves, to bring him home.

“Our kin decided he’d lost his mind.
I just wanted to look in his face.

“All the way we walked, I wondered what I would say to him.
We had a relative there who took us to the house where he was.
But we couldn’t get through the people to him.
The men from the Temple had given verdict
of a demon in him because he frightened them.
Except for the fear, they looked dead all the way through.
But we were all afraid. Even the silent, sick ones waiting for him;
the constable with the flitting eyes and the hand on his sword;
the woman with the pallid baby who kept mouthing “see us, Sir.”

“The boys were telling the people who we were,
shouting into the house.
I stood in the street outside the place,
listening to the crowd inhale and exhale,
imagining his voice in the middle of them, making that happen
and I thought: let him go far enough,
and whatever this wind, this spirit, is will just take him.
He was already letting go, already facing away from me.
And he refused to come out.

“He had other mothers and brothers
who listened to him, and he’d stay with them.
That was his answer that came back to us. You know that.
It didn’t hurt me when he said it;
there was always more of him than I could hold.

“He was my child.
The Christ was the boy who would go down
sometimes with me to wash
and would look back from the water, so perfect,
and somehow full of something
I prayed to see erupt into blossom,
and also feared more than anything
because it would mean his life.
God knows I loved him.

“Is that what you wondered at?” she says.
“That I was part of what had to be broken for him to be the Christ for us?”

“Did you leave people behind to follow him?
I’ll tell you the goodness of this:
He was talking about us that day.
You and I have become that family; he made us sister and brother to him now.
Grace and peace be with you.”

“Grace and peace be with you, Mary,
mother of the anointed one,
blessed among women.


Notes

I’m indebted to Matt Skinner’s recent commentary which gets to the heart of the conflict and the emotion in this passage: https://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=3675