NOTES for Mar 3:7-12

In this reading we see three different attitudes toward Jesus, three different encounters with God. Confident in their virtue, the religious teachers of the people—the Pharisees—feel not merely irritation but hatred toward Jesus and plot to kill Him because He has broken religious rules, or more precisely, because He has placed the need of a living person above the letter of the law. It is incomprehensible: the teachers of God's law fail to recognize God!

The demons recognize God very well and, when they meet Him, fall before Him in fear; they would clearly prefer to be far away. Their attitude toward Jesus is fear.

A great multitude of exhausted, sick people crowd around Him, seeking to touch Him. To touch God means to believe; only through faith can one touch Christ and enter into a personal relationship with Him. And we see God's answer to people's faith: power goes out from Him and heals them all, as the parallel reading says in Luke 6:19.