NOTES for Mar 3:20-27

Perhaps the most striking thing in the story by the evangelist Mark that we read today is that the Lord answers the outrageous statement of the scribes at all. A crowd gathers around Him. There are so many people that there is not even time to pause for a meal. One after another they come to the Lord Jesus with questions and pleas, and most of them need healing. It is hard even to imagine such a concentration of suffering in one place, and how terrible it must have looked from the outside... The possessed and the insane, the crippled and the ragged... One could easily become unclean there; one would not find profound theological insight into the law there; there was nothing respectable there. For an intellectual scribe, or even simply for a respected person with a position in society, it was somehow shameful even to approach this crowd. So even today people sometimes say about our Church that only old women and half-mad people go there...

The religion for which the scribes are zealous, by contrast, is very respectable. It does not concern itself with the fate of every outcast. Its goal is to raise man above the ugliness of a suffering world. Only the best, only the very best, are worthy to shine with virtue in the Kingdom of the expected Messiah. And this preacher from Nazareth... The natural conclusion for the scribes is that He associates with such people because He Himself is one of them. And even the obvious miracles, which cannot be disputed, He performs because He is possessed.

The incredible mercy of Christ is revealed in the fact that He receives and keeps receiving these crowds of suffering people, unattractive as all suffering is. He truly became one of us, though not in the sense the scribes think. He came to share this suffering and to bring His immaterial Light into this darkness. Yet even the scribes themselves, unaware of their own weakness and blindness, saying wild things offensive to any human being, are not strangers to Jesus. And in the midst of this crowd, He finds a way to address them too in their own language. It is the language of wisdom, the language of logic, the language of theology. Christ rejects only one thing: the mercilessness hidden behind the scribes' position.