NOTES for Mar 3:31-35

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.

The Gospel often speaks of the reward that those who follow the Lord will receive. Different people picture this reward in different ways. For some it is a “blessing” in the form of wealth, prosperity, comfort, or health in this life; for others it is deliverance from torment after death; for still others it is success in the spiritual life. But few of us would dare to think of the reward Christ speaks about in today’s reading: whoever does the will of God will become His brother, sister, and mother—that is, the dearest thing a person can have—His family. Not merely hired workers in His Kingdom, not merely His flock, not merely a community gathered around the Teacher, but family in the most direct sense: they will have the kind of relationship with Christ that exists between loving brothers, or between a brother and sister, or between a mother and son. Yes, perhaps this is too exalted for our imagination. People could never have conceived such a “reward for good behavior” as becoming relatives of God. Only He Himself could reveal this to those able to receive it.

One of the greatest saints of our time, Therese of Lisieux, began writing her autobiographical notes, "Story of a Soul," by opening the Gospel at random and finding her eyes falling on the very words with which our passage begins: "Then He went up on the mountain and called to Himself those whom He Himself wanted." In her thought, the whole mystery of the calling to holiness is contained in them: "He does not call those who are worthy of it, but those whom He Himself wants."

The whole passage is about the "called" and the "summoned," about the Lord's relationships with those closest to Him. Why does He choose the circle of His closest disciples? Do we have grounds to agree with Therese's words, or are we inwardly convinced that among all the listeners those chosen by Jesus were the worthiest?

In verses 28-29 there is a warning, and one of the sternest in the Gospel. Let us note: it is not Jesus who condemns the scribes. Speaking in parables, He gives them the opportunity to look and test for themselves what from what has been said applies to them. Is not this respect of His for the human conscience the key to what it means to "blaspheme the Holy Spirit"? Every other blasphemy is external: a person may "not know what he is doing." But when he blasphemes the Holy Spirit, he knows, and he does it in spite of what his own conscience is crying out. Is this not why the condemnation proves eternal, because nothing remains in a person that could raise him up?

In the last verses of the third chapter one at first sees a bitter testimony to Jesus' rejection of family ties because His relatives did not understand Him, until one realizes: the Lord does not move away from His relatives, otherwise what value would there be for the disciples in being called His "brother, and sister, and mother"? He shares with those who do the will of God His most personal, most tender, and most caring love.

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.