Pentecost 2

Pentecost 2 (Mark 3:20-35) “Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.”

The will of God is steadfast holy unconditional love.

The will of God is that simple. The will of God is that difficult.
Since the will of God is love the reality of Divine Will emerges in relationships. The One God Himself is a relationship of three distinct and co-eternal persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

In this passage we hear from three sets of individuals. We see how they react to the Will of God revealed and made flesh in Jesus Christ.

The first group of individuals is the crowd. They press hard on Jesus. They insist he be present to them at all times and in all ways to meet their needs and their demands. They react to Jesus in the context of a bargain. They offer their submission to him in exchange for his submission to them.\

The second group is the extended family of Jesus. This includes his mother and his brethren: nephews, nieces, cousins, and according to tradition the adult children of Joseph by Joseph’s first wife. According to tradition, Joseph was a widower with young children when his family contracted with Mary’s family for them to marry.

It is important to remember and to ponder that in Biblical times and in most times until very recently, the basic unit of society was the extended family. Jesus’ family hears how the crowds press on Jesus and make incessant demands on Jesus such that he cannot eat or sleep. Mary and the extended family come to offer Jesus a way out. The way out is an escape from the crowds. The way out is to withdraw from the responsibility of being the Messiah.

The third group is a section of the religious leadership. They are the scribes. They hold the scriptures and interpret the scriptures. They react to Jesus with fear that produces aggression. They view the scene with the crowd as a threat to their position and power. They accuse Jesus of being in league with Satan.

The crowds react with a bargain of submission to get what they want. The family reacts with the promise of withdrawal back into the safety of obscurity. The religious leadership reacts from fear with aggression.

What are they reacting to? Why are they engaged in such melodrama?
The answer is very simple: Jesus healed people.

Jesus healed everyone who came to him. He healed men and women. He healed adults and children. He healed Jews and Gentiles. He healed rich and poor, slave and free, notorious sinners and the well-respected righteous. He healed everyone who came to him and his success rate was 100%

At a time when only the very rich who lived in the big cities of the Roman Empire could afford healthcare, Jesus healed everyone. And, everyone who experienced the healing, saw the healing or heard of the healing came to the same conclusion. He’s got the power.

The crowds wanted Jesus to use the power to meet their needs and fulfill their demands. The family wanted Jesus to give up the power and come home. The religious authorities feared the power and wanted to kill him so they falsely accused him of being a Satanist.

Jesus did not heal by power, or knowledge. Jesus healed by love.

This may seem strange for us to hear. In our culture love is associated with self-indulgent sentiment. Even in Jesus’ day people paid lip service the insights of Moses and the Prophets who taught about the reality of steadfast holy unconditional love.

Pagan philosophers had accurately described four basic levels of love. Most people then, as now, were stuck in the first level: infatuation.

The love Jesus brought into the world is the very nature of the infinite and eternal God. That love is the essence of the One God who is three persons. Jesus just doesn’t speak of Divine Love or demonstrate Divine love, He is that love. Jesus is the co-eternal Beloved of the Eternal Love of God made flesh in a particular person at a particular time and place in human history.

Jesus offers us the invitation to respond to that love. He came and he continues to come with his arms wide open and the single word: “Come”

Jesus does not seek our submission to Law. He does not ask us to withdraw from this sinful and broken world. He absolutely does not authorize aggression through fear and anger to impose an inflexible and uncompromising religious or secular ideology on people. Jesus is the co-eternal Beloved who invites us to surrender to the joyful embrace of Eternal love.

In that embrace we experience reunification with God. In that embrace we recognize that God has been seeking for us all of our lives. In that embrace we discover that God finds us in Jesus. God finds us by love, through love and for love.

That love is personal. That love expresses himself in three primary relationships: the relationship with God through worship, the relationship with other people through compassion, kindness and civility, and the relationship with our true identity in Christ as the beloved of the co-eternal Beloved.

The crowds, the family, and the religious leaders missed the message. They saw only power. In that vision of power they reacted from the place of fear that produced submission, withdrawal and aggression.

Jesus himself is the message. Jesus himself is the Divine Will and the Divine word made flesh. The message is the relationship. So it is that Jesus invites all people into a new life and a new way of living by entering into a new relationship.
The Will of God is for all of us and each of us to be the forever friend, brother and sister of the living Lord of Love, Jesus Christ.