For us, ridicule is often the most frightening thing. Or not only ridicule, but any expression of public opinion at all. It is very hard for us to overcome this. What gets in our way is not only vanity, not only pride; often what gets in our way is the absence of love. Sometimes we have no one for whose sake we are ready to endure humiliation, ridicule, or even simply looking less than respectable or familiar.

David, wearing only a linen ephod - that is, domestic clothing rather than the ceremonial clothing proper for a king - danced before the ark of the Covenant, before the place of God's presence. David was a king. But his King was God. And David loved his God, his King, loved Him so much that he feared nothing: not Goliath, not Saul who pursued him, and later not the most frightening thing of all - ridicule, disrespect.

And if we acknowledge God as our King, humble ourselves and worship Him, we will be freed from the fear of ridicule, from the fear of being humiliated, which itself humiliates us. For there is no fear in love, and everything we do out of love, in freedom, is right.

The human mind is resourceful; this has been known long and well. So has the fact that it is the greatest flatterer in the world: if a person very much wants to convince himself of something, prove something to himself, or justify something for himself, his mind is glad to try and please him. It will find the needed arguments and offer such interpretations of perfectly obvious facts that, if the person wants, they will allow him to see those facts as completely different from what they really are. This activity of the human mind turns out to be especially "useful" when certain facts simply refuse to fit within the framework of a scheme, concept, or theory devised by the same human mind.

Something like this happened when certain "scribes" (apparently learned rabbis or teachers of Torah from the Jerusalem academy) began to claim that Jesus supposedly cast out dark spirits by using the power of their own head, the ruler of the world of shadows and the kingdom of death, one of whose names was Beelzebul. The absurdity of such a claim was obvious, and Jesus immediately pointed it out to the scribes: if everything were as they claimed, that would be a tremendous stroke of good fortune, because it would mean that a split had occurred in the kingdom of darkness, so that fighting it would now be quite easy. It was obvious to everyone that nothing of the sort was to be expected.

The scribes simply proposed a theory that could explain what was happening without destroying their own concepts, above all their messianic concepts, and some others as well. This Man, they said, violates the Law given by God (in reality, the prescriptions invented by people and proposed as an interpretation of that very Law given by God); therefore He cannot be a man of God; therefore He cannot heal; and since He nevertheless heals, then... at this point the new theory came in handy: therefore, He heals by the wrong power, not by God's power. The logic is preserved, but it has no relation to reality.

Yet a person who wants to deceive himself tries not to notice this, and truly does not notice it, while the mind helps him remain in ignorance. A person's life is determined not by mind and not by logic, but by will, which compels a person to choose and decide. This includes choosing what he wants to see and what he does not want to see. And seeing what one wants or failing to notice what one does not want is not so hard; when needed, both mind and feelings will help with this. They cannot resist the will, which determines who and what a person will be before God and people.

Jesus' answer to His relatives' request to see Him may seem too harsh. Meanwhile, in other cases He turns this harshness into a principle: whoever does not hate father and mother, He says, cannot be My disciple. Of course, hatred here must be understood in the biblical sense, in a broader sense than the one to which we are accustomed. For us, hatred is inseparable from the desire to destroy what is hated, to make it disappear from the face of the earth. In the Bible hatred can be like that too, but not always. Often it implies only the desire to exclude something from one's own life, completely ending any interaction with the hated thing or, when people are involved, any fellowship with them.

Does this mean that Jesus wants to exclude His relatives from His own life and advises others to do the same? At first glance it may seem so. Of course, if we speak about Him Himself and, in some cases, about one of His disciples, such a choice can be considered the only possible one. Here it is simply a matter of the particular features of a ministry and a path that exclude any family or kinship ties whatever. Christian history and practice know such a path, although a calling to it is a rare enough phenomenon; this is not the rule, but exceptions to it.

Yet something else is also present here: the denial of the absoluteness and self-sufficient value of natural kinship ties and relationships. For fallen humanity, kinship, especially blood kinship, is one of the main psychophysical bonds on which a great deal rests. Physiology here forms a strong alloy with the lower psyche characteristic of fallen humanity, and this alloy joins relatives into a single whole. Sometimes they themselves are not glad of it, but they can do absolutely nothing about it, because the nature of fallen humanity is usually stronger than its spirit.

Such bonds are completely incompatible with the Kingdom and its life, as Jesus testifies with full decisiveness. They are incompatible not because such kinship is bad in itself, but because relationships of this kind and the bonds that generate them usually remain very little conscious for the people bound by them. This means that their spiritual component, if it is not equal to zero, tends toward zero. Relationships must become different; they must be determined not by blood but by spirit. Then they will become fit for the Kingdom. This, however, will already be another kinship, not reducible to nature alone, a kinship consciously built by those who want it and strive for it.