Me? Insane?

Me? Insane? October 9, 2015

By John Frye

Screen Shot 2015-01-07 at 3.35.58 PM“You don’t know what you’re talking about,”I was told. Like me, you probably have been disparaged in several ways in your ministry. I have been accused of being a liar, of not teaching the Word of God, of getting the facts all wrong (usually from someone with a pending divorce), and of being a willing dupe of others. In some ways these accusations come with the territory of being a pastor. Yet, thankfully, I have never been accused of being insane or being possessed by Satan. At least to my face. Jesus, however, was thought to be insane…by his family! Jesus was described by the religious ruling class as “possessed by Beelzebub, the prince of demons,”i.e., controlled by Satan. Let’s reflect a moment on Mark 3:20-35.

No doubt Jesus was a man of zeal. He lived and served with a tremendous sense of urgency. When Jesus cleansed the Temple, Psalm 69:9 was used to interpret his actions: “Zeal for your house will consume me”(John 2:17). In Mark 3, Jesus is so energized to preach the in-breaking of the kingdom of God, that he neglects eating. His brothers and mother, Mary, (if we correlate Mark 3:21 with 3:31, 32) seek to seize (arrest) Jesus for his extreme behavior, saying, “He is out of his mind”(3:21). This is an explosive claim. Manuscript editions and interpretations of this text try their best to liberate Jesus’family, especially Mary, the holy mother of God, from being implicated in this event. Some blame only Jesus’unbelieving brothers (see John 7:5). Yet, Mary was there. How much she was involved with the insanity claim we may never know.

Would anyone ever confuse our zeal for the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ with insanity?  We seek to come across as so rational, so even-keeled, so “with it.”Some evangelical systems of apologetics seek to bill-board the fact of how rational and intelligent we Christians really are. “We don’t wear tin-foil hats, people!”Perhaps kingdom zeal as demonstrated by Jesus doesn’t sit well with us. Moderation. We like moderation. Do all things in moderation. That’s almost an 11th commandment in West Michigan where I live. “Well, John, don’t you know Jesus was a unique individual; a man for his times. We need not get so worked up about the Gospel of the kingdom as he did. In our culture, less is more. Don’t you get it?”Yes, I get it. Maybe “the imitation of Christ”does have limitations. Yet what scares me is this: what if moderation is another evidence of religious control…like the kind the Jerusalem “teachers of the law”tried to force on Jesus by calling him demon-possessed: the episode sandwiched in between the “family”skirmish (Mark 3:22-30).

Jesus was accused by his family of being deluded. Jesus was accused by the Jerusalem scribes as being demon-possessed. Both accusations were aimed at preventing Jesus from doing his work (see Lane, Mark NICNT, 137). Yet, Jesus didn’t stop. He got even more “crazy.”He claimed he was stronger than and against Satan. Jesus even had the personal audacity to redefine the family. Family: so valuable and guarded a concept in 1st century Judaism. Family: so esteemed and guarded a concept in USAmerican evangelicalism. Family was your core identity. “We are of our father Abraham!”Jesus said, in essence, that everything you believe about the family is forever changed: “Whoever does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother.”What?! The man is, indeed, insane. He is Satan-controlled. You don’t dare touch the family!

Have you observed that in Paul’s letters, he usually addresses the family of God as a community before he addresses husbands, wives, parents, and children? The idea is that the new, larger community called the church, God’s family, has priority over the smaller unity called the family. We have reversed this in contemporary evangelicalism. (By the way, do some study on the 1st century “family.”You’ll learn that it is very far removed from the USAmerican Cleavers, the Brady Bunch, even the Modern Family.)

We are all zealous about something. Zeal need not be boisterous as cleansing the Temple. Maybe it’s usually more quiet and steady like Mother Teresa and the Missionaries of Charity.


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