Saturday in the Second Week of Ordinary Time, January 21, 2023

Mark 3, 20-21

Jesus came with his disciples into the house. Again the crowd gathered, making it impossible for them even to eat. When his relatives heard of this they set out to seize him, for they said, “He is out of his mind.”

“Jesus came with his disciples into the house.”  After naming his Apostles, the Lord returned to .Capernaum, to Peter’s house.  Because St. Mark mentions that it was “impossible for them even to eat”, we can think of the selection of the Apostles occurring in the morning and the return to the house at midday, when the main meal of the day would have been eaten.  “Again the crowd gathered.”  The people wanted to hear Jesus.  The Church Father Origen believed that the Lord possessed a great personal charisma (we might say “a magnetic personality” today) that brought people to him in droves like this.

“When his relatives heard of this they set out to seize him.”  The verb tense tells us that a group of his kin got together and set out as a unit with the sole purpose of taking hold of him.  They were going to physically haul him back to Nazareth and keep him there.  Mark tells us they did this because they thought that, “He is out of his mind.”  The Greek text allows a wide range of interpretation for this phrase, including, “He amazes”.  We might consider this insulting behavior by family members who thoroughly misunderstood him, but, in fact, they were right.  He was indeed “out of his mind”.  The Lord, throughout his life, showed this: he chose to be born of a Virgin in an obscure place and laid to rest in a trough; he acted without explanations, as when he remained in the Temple for three days as a youth; he said incredible things like “He who eats my Body and drinks my Blood will live forever”; he deliberately chose for an Apostle a man whom he knew would betray him; he allowed himself to be arrested, humiliated, tortured, and brutally killed for people who would never show gratitude for his dying for their sins.  The Lord Jesus was out of his mind with love for us, and his love compelled him to act and speak in these ways.  If we read the Gospels objectively, we will scratch our heads more than once before we finish.  But perfect love does not act like anything in our experience.

You and I ought to “seize” this Lord, who is out of his mind in love for us, with the embrace of our hearts and souls, and ask for the grace to return his love, even if it looks insane to the world.