Mark 3
It must have been so hard to be Jesus. Think about what it must have been like. If Jesus were just the promised Messiah, without all the Son of God stuff, he would still have a hard road to travel. There were all kinds of people claiming they were the long awaited Messiah. Jesus was just one among many. He would have had to do something to make his voice distinct to rise above all the other lunatic voices making the same claim.
Reading the gospels, especially as we are here with Mark, there is no mention of other people claiming to be the Messiah. But because of historical records we know there were quite a few others. And some of them were fairly popular.
I wonder if some of the other Messiah wannabes had a group of religious leaders following them around like Jesus had. Were there some of the other candidates for Messiah more popular with the religious leaders.
It’s kind of like all the Republican candidates who have announced they are running for President. This week, amongst all the contenders, Donald Trump and that thing he has on his head, surged to second most popular in the field. All the news feeds were trying to figure out why his sudden popularity. So was I.
Maybe the same thing was going on with Jesus amongst all the other Messiah contenders. Jesus was one of the more popular Messiah claimants. But with popularity comes scrutiny. Imagine Jesus trying to get first his nation’s attention, and from there, the world’s attention. Jesus has a transforming message, a galvanizing mission. He is trying to change the world.
But all anyone in authority wants to do is argue with him, scrutinize him, and call into question everything he does. How frustrating. In this chapter we have stories about how those religious authorities begin plotting to kill Jesus because he healed a man’s withered arm. We will look at a story about how, in contrast to the religious leaders, the people and even some demons get who Jesus is. We will see how Jesus begins to adjust his training of the disciples. We will find out that Jesus’ own family, including his mother, Mary, think he is “out of his mind.” And how some of the religious teachers think Jesus is the devil himself.
As I quickly take us through these stories, I want you to imagine what Jesus is feeling, having to deal with all this misinformation and total lack of understanding of who he is. OK?
First, the healing of the man with the withered hand. This is one of those shady instances where something doesn’t quite smell right. Jesus is back in Capernaum. It is worship day—Sabbath services. The religious law experts are there. And there just happens to be a guy with a withered arm there. Hmmmm. And Mark’s story says the religious law guys “…were watching to see whether Jesus would heal him on the sabbath, so that they could bring a charge against him.”
Because the Pharisees wanted to “bring a charge against him (Jesus)“ it is not a stretch to think that the Pharisees brought the man with the withered (Greek = shriveled, growth stunted) arm. The Pharisees most likely enticed the man, and told him that Jesus would heal him. Which of us would turn down the possibility to have a long time birth defect, shriveled arm, be healed and finally have two good arms and hands? We wouldn’t know that we were just being used in a plot of the religious law guys. Doing the healing is exactly what they wanted Jesus to do in order to break the sabbath law. The Pharisees set Jesus up with the withered hand man.
Jesus sees through the flimsy plot. In the previous chapter we saw how Jesus read the Pharisee’s minds. Didn’t they learn a lesson from that. So Jesus tells them exactly why he is going to heal the man’s arm. Jesus’ reason for healing the man with the withered hand, on the Sabbath, was that evil never takes a day off. Evil doesn't care if there is a whole slough of Sabbath laws or not. Evil is going to just keep on pressing itself on people's lives. So, does that mean good has to take a holiday, just because of a bunch of man made rules? In Jesus’ estimation, it is always a good day to do good, and it doesn't matter if it is the Sabbath or not.
None of the Sabbath laws that Jesus had pushed in his face were in the Bible. There is just the general law in the 10 Commandmants about keeping the Sabbath holy. That's all that is in the Bible. All the Sabbath laws that were pushed at Jesus were in the Halakah (Mishnah) which were informative teachings, compiled by the Rabbi's, about the 10 Commandments.
In the Halakah or Mishnah the only kind of healing that could be done on the Sabbath was that which would save a person or animal's life. All else was prohibited. So Jesus could have waited until the next day when the Sabbath was over to heal the man. But Jesus went ahead and did it any way, flaunting the healing in the face of the Pharisees present, who set it all up in the first place.
Also, a huge percentage of the regular Jews in the Pews didn't follow any of the Sabbath laws either. So why weren't the Pharisees going after all them? Why this intensity of hate leveled at Jesus? Especially at the end of the story where they "right away started making plans to kill Jesus." For healing a man's hand!! Why?
Jesus was angry at their “stubbornness”,(“obstinate stupidity” REB) a word in Greek which means "covered with a callous". You only get a callous in a place where there is constant rubbing and pressure. To create a callused heart would be to constantly rub it up against some kind of pressure. So what is that in the Pharisees heart? What is that in our hearts that we keep rubbing up against causing an unnatural hardness towards God?
The next story has to do with the large crowds following Jesus. Maybe this is the answer to the question we raised in the previous story about why the Pharisees wanted to find some way to kill Jesus.
Huge crowds are pressing in upon Jesus to the point that he has to have a boat standing by for him to get in, just in case. Jesus is popular. "All these crowds came because they had heard what Jesus was doing" (vs. 8). These people's hearts were not callused. They were open, pliable, desiring, not fighting against anything, but embracing Jesus and what he was about. Certainly the Pharisees never had that kind of response to their teaching. No crowds were thronging to hear them, nor could any of them do what Jesus was doing.
If they were going to keep their foothold on the people's religiosity, they would have to get Jesus out of the way by either discrediting him in the people's eyes, or physically eliminating him.
The other contrast in this part of the story is that the demons recognize who Jesus really is ("You are the Son of God!"), but the religious guys, the Pharisees don't get that, don't see that. Mark is very intentional in putting these two stories side-by-side to make sure we get what is going on. Some get it (the ones who shouldn't but do) and some don't (the ones who should but don't).
At this point in Jesus' ministry there about 70 disciples--according to Matthew's gospel. Some of those Jesus chose personally, and some would have chosen Jesus because they were attracted by his teaching and miracles. Imagine having 70 people following you around wherever you went, just waiting for the show to start, hanging on every word, and some of those thinking you were going to throw the Romans out of the region. There were probably as many reasons people had for following Jesus as there were people following him.
Out of that 70, Jesus shifted his own ministry direction, and chose 12. Before, Jesus had that large group of disciples, tromping up the countryside behind him, going, listening, learning. But now that Jesus is back, his strategy of ministry is shifting. He picked out 12 from the 70. From here on out, most of his time will be concentrated on the 12, because they are the ones who will have to carry on his work when his life is ended.
I have known ministers who use this model for ministry as well. These Pastors spend their whole time training and equipping the Elders and Deacons to do all the ministry of the church. These kinds of Pastors don't do much with the people in the congregation, making sure the Elders and Deacons are trained to do that. How many of you would sign up to be an Elder or Deacon, knowing so much more would be expected of you?
Especially when you notice what Jesus was training the 12 to do: preach, and cast demons out of people. The preaching isn't all that bad. A number of you have tried it. Even though public speaking is the number one social fear, you who have tried it have done admirably well.
It is the demon stuff that would be scary to me. I'd rather sing the National Anthem at the NCAA championship basketball game, or the Super Bowl, than try my hand at an exorcism. I'd like to know how Jesus trained the 12 to do an exorcism. Like I said, learning to preach Jesus-style would be easy. You think up a few fun story-parables, throw them out there to people, and leave them scratching their heads wondering what it was all about. If an exorcism goes wrong, you could get seriously hurt.
Then there is the little side story, that will have another piece to it at the end of this chapter. Jesus' family shows up. They want to haul him out of there because they think Jesus is not just rowing the boat with one oar, but that he is pretending to row the boat with no oars. They think he's totally nuts. Looney. We don't know who from his family has come, at this point. We find out at the end of this chapter that his mother and his brothers are there.
So much for Mary "treasuring all these things in her heart" like she did during the birth story. Now she thinks Jesus is riding his camel right for the cliffs and she's trying to pull him off before he totally goes over the edge.
I felt that when I knew I was heading for the ministry. My father wanted none of it. His accountant mind couldn't make sense of someone getting one of the hardest Master's Degrees there is, and then getting paid a pittance for all that education. Plus he never really got the whole Jesus thing anyway.
And it's like the whole family relaxes when one of the kids goes into the ministry--"Ahhh, Steve's gone and done it; I don't have to be the one to become a priest, minister, chaplain. I won't have to be the one who sacrifices myself. Steve's done it for us; good for Steve.”
But there's a limit. I can be religious, but I can't be too religious, or then I'm no longer the sacrificial son, but the looney bin son who has let all that religion go to my head. No one in my family understood why I was going into the ministry. To some extent, I didn’t either. I didn’t have a choice. God got a hold of me when I was in 7th grade and said, “This is what I want you to do.” What do you say to that. And if you are a parent, what do you say to your seventh grade son who tells you God told him he was supposed to be a minister? I know what it is like for me and some of my fellow pastors. I can't imagine what it was like for the Savior of the world.
What is sad and a little tragic, in the long line of people who just don't get who Jesus is, at this early point in his ministry, you can put his family right up there with them.
Then comes this story that there were some Scribes also there, scrutinizing Jesus. As I said last week, the Scribes were like the seminary professors in the Jewish religious system. And these Scribes are telling people that Jesus is really the “prince of demons.” That Jesus is able to do everything he does because he is in charge of all the demons.
Jesus turns their logic against them: “Why would I be casting out demons if I was the prince of demons? Wouldn’t I want the demons to stay in people? If I was Satan, why would I work against myself?”
Like I said at the start, It must have been so hard to be Jesus. The religious leaders want to have him killed. His family thinks his biscuit isn’t quite done. And the religious teachers think he is the prince of darkness in the flesh. But the demons know exactly who he is: “You are the Son of God.” I wonder if Jesus was thinking, “This is going to be a lot harder than I expected.”
And the question we need to ask is, What group would we have been in? We are looking at Jesus from this side of the Cross and Resurrection and our own coming to faith in Christ. But what if we were on the other side of all that? Who would Jesus be to us then?
As I’ve said all along in this series, Mark is going to keep asking us to deal with that question: Who is Jesus, and what am I to think of him?
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