Jesus too has experienced the sting of social stigma attached to mental illness. He too understands the shame of neighbors who had known him for years now calling him crazy. He too has felt the betrayal of his faith community turning on him and pronouncing him possessed by evil. He too knows the frustration of his family attempting to stop him. Those who have lived this gospel story are not alone; God has been there too.
And Jesus shows that this space of expulsion is not the end. Being pushed into this space does not sentence a person to hopelessness because this space does not tell the truth about Jesus or about any other human being. Family, community, faith, vocation, and the rest of his story are not foreclosed but still to come. As he ventures toward his future, he sets a banquet table for all who have been stigmatized, deemed crazy, shamed, excluded, and expelled to join him. “I will be your family,” he says, “and you can be mine.”
Mary too has witnessed her community turn its back on her child. She too has heard crushing insults hurled at her son. She too has felt some combination of anger, fear, grief, and possibly shame rising up from neighbors and community leaders propagating false stories about her child as disturbed and dangerous. She too has known what it’s like to parent a child whom others have written off and rallied against. Those who have lived this gospel story are not alone; God’s mother has been there too.
And Mary exposes this space of social danger for what it is as she tries to stop her son. Why else would a parent who raised such a visionary, courageous, compassionate child seek to interrupt his mission if not to do what she could to keep him safe? Perhaps what the narrator casts as Mary’s misunderstanding is actually Mary’s tenacious strategizing to ensure her son has a future amid mounting hostility. “I refuse to let them do this to you,” I imagine her saying, “because you, my son, deserve better than this.”
And then there are the scribes and the people in Jesus’s hometown who play the part of antagonists in this scene. They draw the wrong conclusions, utter wounding words, and precipitate a community-wide conflict. Their actions do damage to others, and the harms they produce must be acknowledged. Yet perhaps what they say and do stems from the wider social and political setting in which they are immersed.
All the people in this scene too know what it’s like to live under the weight of imperial domination. They too understand the subjugation that comes with the watchful gaze of a ruthless empire upon their backs. They too have felt political pressures to comply and possibly to assimilate constraining the ways of life that have made them who they are. The people of Jesus’s hometown too have faced the struggle to survive oppression. And while the scribes occupy the complex position of simultaneous social power and disempowerment that lower-status residents in this town do not experience, the scribes too have faced the struggle of discerning how to preserve the traditions of their people and be faithful in the present on politically fraught terrain where much could be lost. Those who have lived this gospel story are not the first to find themselves in this predicament; God’s people before them have been there too.
And the derogatory reactions of some members of this community as well as the scribes point to stakes both theological and political in what Jesus was doing. With one of their own going around threatening to disturb the peace, possibly even to challenge imperial order with his talk of a divine kingdom and his inexplicable power and authority, perhaps people in Jesus’s hometown sought refuge in casting him as the disturbed one and themselves by extension as uninvolved in his disruption project. Perhaps the scribes’ appearance and airtime in what could have just remained a local conflict indicate the force and reach of the waves Jesus was making to have drawn Jerusalem’s attention. Perhaps going so far as to demonize Jesus was for the scribes as much about keeping their people under Rome’s radar as it was about maintaining their positions or trying to make theological sense of Jesus’s actions. Perhaps the scribes believed that if they could persuade the people who know Jesus best that he is not worth listening to, not to be trusted, then they could bring this resistance movement to a halt and avoid imperial scrutiny and retaliation. “This is a risk we cannot afford to take,” I imagine them saying. “We are too vulnerable, and we see no happy ending for any of us on the path he is choosing.”
In this scripture, I hear multiple stories with scars. I don’t see any of the characters walking away unaffected. The interactions that have taken place and the wounds inflicted are the kind that can tear the fabric of a community and take time to mend. And the story ends unresolved. The scene closes with Jesus’s family standing at a distance, the people who called him crazy somewhere off-stage, the scribes who demonized him silent, and Jesus turning toward the group of people who hear him.
Yet in these interwoven stories and their palpable conflict, this scripture speaks into the fibers of our humanity. It offers readers no neat-and-tidy moral takeaway. Instead, it connects us with the stuff that resides in our bones and flows in our veins: loves, fears, angers, longings, relationships, powers, constraints, and burdens that are indelible parts of our lives and life together. It illuminates struggle: to be faithful, to navigate relationships, to take courage, to make sense of the incomprehensible, to survive amid oppression, to sustain community, and to seek God where God actually shows up.
And I choose to believe that the open-endedness of this passage signals that all the stories it tells are not done yet. Each member and the community as a whole exit the scene with ellipses and question marks before them, not periods. Where they go from here they have a chance to figure out.
And the same can be said of us who read and recognize threads of ourselves, our families, our neighbors, our communities, our faith in these stories. What might become of our stories we too have a chance to question, imagine, and work out with one another and with God.
What story do you hear surfacing in Jesus? Mary? His siblings? His neighbors? The scribes?
What feelings and motivations do you perceive between the lines?
How might God be showing up in these stories?
How do these stories speak to your social context and community and to where you might go from here?
Notes
A piece about Mark 3:20-35, one of the Revised Common Lectionary readings for Sunday, June 6, 2021
Some works informing my comments here are:
Donald H. Juel, The Gospel of Mark (Abingdon, 1999).
Love L. Sechrest, ” ‘Humbled among the Nations’: Matthew 15:21-28 in Antiracist Womanist Missiological Engagement,” in Can “White” People Be Saved?: Triangulating Race, Theology, and Mission, eds. Love L. Sechrest, Johnny Ramírez-Johnson, and Amos Yong (InterVarsity Academic, 2018), 276-299.
Ekkehard Stegemann and Wolfgang Stegemann, Jesus Movement: A Social History of Its First Century (Bloomsbury Academic, 1999).
Featured image of “Mental Health Matters” is by Marcel Strauss on the Unsplash website, www.unsplash.com.
