Mark 3:20-35
Sometimes
people just don’t understand you. It is not that they don’t speak the same
language. That would be easy to absorb. But sometimes they don’t get you. They don’t understand what
motivates you, what really matters to you, the things you would die for. We
expect outsiders to not get us, but family is supposed to be in our corner. It
is one thing to be accused by outsiders of being nuts, and another thing when
those closest to us do the same.
Jesus
family thinks He is nuts. The religious leaders think He is demon possessed,
the religious equivalent of nuts. And yet the people are crowding to be in His
presence. Perfect strangers accept Jesus.
Sometimes
family are not as supportive as you want and need them to be. Sometime you have
to continue without family. This can be really hard to do, especially if family
has been supportive in the past. Going ahead with that support can be scary.
We
expect the establishment to get in the way. This is especially true when God is
really on the move. Jesus is obviously doing things unheard of in His day. The teaching
backup up by the miracles threatened their way of thinking about God and
themselves. They thought they had this thing all worked out in their heads. And
then Jesus shows up and flips the whole thing over. Everything they have come
to believe is now in question. No wonder they attack Jesus.
Jesus
in His powerful way tells a story to drive home His message. He uses the story,
the parable, to defend His actions and force the religious leaders to
reevaluate their deeply held beliefs and their hasty conclusion about Him.
I
want you to know that sometimes people oppose you because sometimes you are
nuts, or at least your ideas are! Sometime what we are doing is so off base
that they are trying to protect you from yourself. I know I have had some
pretty nutty ideas over these many years. I am so glad I had some people in my
life who were willing to tell me my idea were nuts. They saved me so much pain
and sorrow.
Sometimes
we oppose other people because with think their ideas are nuts. What they are
trying to do seems so foreign to the way that things have been done in the past
that our brain can’t wrap our minds around the change. And we like stability,
so we oppose the change. We might need to take a few steps back and reevaluate
the situation. Our knee jerk reactions might not lead us to the most productive
outcome. Sometimes slow is good.