In chapter 3 of Mark’s gospel, the identity of Jesus and the source of his power take centre stage. It seems that everyone had their own explanation, and even his own family thought Jesus was going too far and needed to be rescued or protected, perhaps from himself…
20 Then Jesus entered a house, and again a crowd gathered, so that he and his disciples were not even able to eat. 21 When his family heard about this, they went to take charge of him, for they said, “He is out of his mind.”
22 And the teachers of the law who came down from Jerusalem said, “He is possessed by Beelzebul! By the prince of demons he is driving out demons.”
Mark 3:20-22 NIV
Jesus knew how to push all the right buttons, healing on the Sabbath to prompt his opponents to plot to kill him. They even proclaimed he had a demon and was doing his miracles by the power of impure spirits.
This is, as Mark proves in this chapter, laughable, because the impure spirits who encounter Jesus respond by falling down before him, calling him the Son of God. There was no mistake among the spirit world who Jesus is. There never is. It is only humans who have a hard time identifying Jesus.
Remember that even Jesus own disciples mistook him for a ghost when he came to them walking on the water (Mark 6). In that same chapter, his neighbours and townspeople of Nazareth, where he was from, could not recognize that he was anything more than Joseph’s son. Their amazement and wonder at his teaching and actions did not reconcile with their knowledge of him up to that point. So they missed him.
His own family, we see in chapter 3, tried to stop him. Where his own mother had leveraged her knowledge of his power to help the couple married in Cana to not be embarrassed by running out of wine, she was now perhaps reading the play. This was not looking good for Jesus. He was looking for trouble. People were talking… too much.
Jesus knew, however, that he must create a stir to raise the questions of his identity, purpose, and authority. He would reveal himself to be Messiah, and all of this was setting the stage for the climax of his ministry when he would, as Messiah, die on the cross and rise again.
Amen.
Marc Kinna
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