In the gospel of John, chapter 1, when John the baptizer sees Jesus walking by, he tells his disciples “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.” The next morning, Andrew (Peter’s brother) and John (son of Zebedee) are with him, and he says the same thing; and Andrew and John set off immediately to follow Jesus. When Jesus notices them, He asks them one of the deepest questions we will ever face, a question we must all sooner or later face: “What do you seek?”
By this point in the gospel of Mark, Jesus has demonstrated by word and deed what He meant when He proclaimed. “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand”: He has come to overturn the power of the kingdoms of this world. Therefore, He can heal humanity, body and soul: He can heal any sickness, even leprosy, and cast out demons, and change the hearts of those who are willing to receive His word. Sinners and tax-collectors follow Him as a result. But, true to the implication of the proclamation, those who prefer the status quo of the kingdom of the world – especially those who derive their power from it – reject Him.
It is clear to the people that He is a powerful prophet, like the prophets Elijah and Elisha… and these news, of course, spread far and wide…
The crowd by the sea
Mark 3:7-8 And Jesus withdrew with his disciples to the sea; and a great multitude from Galilee followed him, and from Judaea, and from Jerusalem, and from Idumaea and beyond the Jordan; and they of around Tyre and Sidon, a great multitude, having heard what things he did, came to him.
It is important to note that these are not just Israelites. Tyre and Sidon were predominantly Gentile. Idumea is what was in the Old Testament Edom. But they all respond. Why? Maybe they also remembered the stories of those ancient Israelite prophets. (Elijah saved from starvation a widow in Zarephath (a town at the border of Tyre and Sidon), and when her son died, he brought him back to life. Elisha healed the leprosy of the commander of the army of Syria.) Those memories and the eyewitness testimony of the people in the crowds that followed Jesus were enough to bring people from far away.
But, why? What were they seeking?
Surely, any that were sick or had sick relatives or friends, went there looking for healing. But as it would happen today, plenty of people would also be there out of curiosity, attending for the sake of the thrill; to see the “show”. And I bet there was a third group… people who, moved by the words of Jesus, went there looking for a different kind of healing.
Jesus receives them all.
Mark 3:9-12 And he spoke to his disciples, in order that a little ship should wait upon him on account of the crowd, that they might not press upon him. For he healed many, so that they beset him that they might touch him, as many as had plagues. And the unclean spirits, when they beheld him, fell down before him, and cried saying, *Thou* art the Son of God. And he rebuked them much, that they might not make him manifest.
The way Mark says it here, I get the impression that Jesus has no problem healing anyone and everyone in that crowd that comes up to Him. In other words, He had no problem meeting their “felt needs” up front. But at some point, before the crowd becomes a mob, He changes things and steps from the shore to the boat; and from the boat, He feeds them the Word of God.
Now, how do you think the three groups of people in that crowd are going to respond?
If you came there for the “show”, the “show” is over. But maybe you saw something that day that really touched you… and maybe, just maybe, you are thinking about sticking around to listen to what this undoubtedly powerful teacher has to say.
This is why Jesus will never turn away this group of people: If you are in this group, you know you came here by your free will. You came because you decided that there was something here potentially worth seeing, worth investigating, worth analyzing. You came with your mind fully engaged. And after you have seen all that he has done, your mind can remain fully engaged to ask more questions… maybe new questions that you never asked before: ‘Is this Jesus more than I suspected? If His deeds are this powerful, what about His words?’
If you did choose to stay there pondering those thoughts, I think Jesus would wave you to come to the front of the shore and welcome you to listen.
If you came there for the healing and got healed, would you stay? If I had been healed, or if my relative had been healed right there by Jesus, I hope I would stay, out of gratitude. But I don’t have to; do I? I got what I came for. I could turn around and go. Jesus is not going to stop me.
Yet if I am not inclined to stay out of gratitude, I hope I would acknowledge something else, something that everybody knows deep inside: namely, that I, that we, are not body alone… There is more to us than this physical body. And that is precisely what Jesus has been talking about all along when He talks about the Kingdom of Heaven. So, maybe, since He has the power to heal my earthly body, maybe that means He has the power to heal my spirit, my heart, my soul.
And I am uniquely qualified to receive that message: Because I have lived with sickness of the body, I know how fragile and fallible this life of mine is… so I am not too proud to admit that I could very well be sick in my soul.
And, finally, if you came here expressly to hear Him, then seeing Him step into that boat and pull away from the shore is precisely what you have been waiting for… maybe an hour, maybe two… but this is it, He is ready to teach, and you know it will be worth it. This is why I am here. I know this is what I need.
The question for each one of us today is this:
Why am I in this crowd? What am I seeking?
And it is a question that will be put to us, time and again.
The crowd at the house
So far, Jesus has been driving the assault of the Kingdom of Heaven on the kingdoms of this world, by Himself. The powers of this world and the powers of Hell have been caught by surprise. We saw in the verses above how, with just one look at Him, the demons fall down and worship Him in terror. Now the next phase of the assault begins.
Mark 3:13-19 And he goes up into the mountain, and calls whom he himself would, and they went to him. And he appointed twelve that they might be with him, and that he might send them to preach, and to have power [to heal diseases, and] to cast out demons. And he gave to Simon the surname of Peter; and James the [son] of Zebedee, and John the brother of James, and he gave them the surname of Boanerges, that is, Sons of thunder; and Andrew, and Philip, and Bartholomew, and Matthew, and Thomas, and James the [son] of Alphaeus, and Thaddaeus, and Simon the Cananaean, and Judas Iscariote, who also delivered him up. And they come to [the] house.
The appointing of the apostles now gives “structure” to Jesus’ ministry. It increases His reach and it also increases His audience, because each one of these apostles is an individual with whom people of similar background, similar temperament can identify. Not only are they officially part of the mission and privy to its plans (“to be with Him”), they are also empowered to carry out the mission themselves with the same miraculous powers that Jesus has been using. From now on they, with Jesus, will be the focus of the crowd.
The “house” that Mark refers to above is probably Jesus’ base of operations in Capernaum, most likely Peter’s house mentioned in 1:29 and possibly 2:3-4. If that is so, then it is a well-known place, where you would go to find Jesus when He wasn’t walking around the country (1:38).
So, it is no surprise than when Jesus leaves the mountain with his disciples and no one knows where they were going, that they would go to see if He was back in Capernaum. Sure enough, they find Him and again the news spread and a large crowd gathers.
And again, as in the previous crowd, there are people here with varying motives. The first group singled out here by Mark are Jesus’ relatives.
Mark 3:20-21 And again a crowd comes together, so that they cannot even eat bread. And his relatives having heard [of it] went out to lay hold on him, for they said, He is out of his mind.
This is an interesting dynamic. Being His relatives, they care about Him. (And as we will soon see, His mother Mary was among them). But in the gospel of John, we were told that His relatives didn’t believe in Him:
John 7:1-5 And after these things Jesus walked in Galilee, for he would not walk in Judaea, because the Jews sought to kill him. (As we saw in Mark 3:6.)
Now the tabernacles, the feast of the Jews, was near. His brethren therefore said to him, Remove hence and go into Judaea, that thy disciples also may see thy works which thou doest; for no one does anything in secret and himself seeks to be [known] in public. If thou doest these things, manifest thyself to the world: for neither did his brethren believe on him.
And so, here we have a fourth group in the crowd. They, of all people, knew Jesus’ character. They grew up with him. Yet, as we see in John, they were uncomfortable with his notoriety. They saw the people of Galilee, their neighbors, their friends, flocking to him, and they didn’t really know how to deal with that.
Maybe people kept going to them trying to get an “inside track” with Jesus. Maybe the people that were angry at Jesus for taking the limelight away from them, or for healing on the Sabbath, went to them and told them to do something about it.
What would you do, if you were in that situation? It might be hard for us to understand. I mean, if people kept coming and telling you that your brother or your cousin had healed them, had cast demons out, cleansed lepers, given sight to the blind, how would you react?
Would my first reaction be, ‘Wait a minute, I broke my arm last year; and I didn’t know he could have healed me. Why didn’t he ever tell me he could do these things? And what about our dad, Joseph, couldn’t he have kept him from dying?’
But maybe we can understand it by remembering that, up to when he was about 30 years old, he was just an ordinary man: a carpenter, minding his own business. We never gave it a second thought; he was just one more of our large extended family. We were too busy with our own lives to notice that he was indeed different: that he never cursed, that he was never unkind, that he never sinned.
Is it possible that we really did not notice?
Maybe we did and we thought, “Oh, he is just a “little goody goody two-shoes.” Maybe we noticed and thought, “Naah, he can’t be that good. He is just better than the rest of us at hiding his faults, his slip-ups. Yeah, that’s it. No one can be good all the time.” Both of those, very human responses, would have blinded us to the reality that was there all along, a reality that Mary hid in her heart and pondered all her life.
If that sort of makes sense to you then I have to add that we can’t be too hard on them… because most of us know what it is to live like that: jaded by cynicism… saying we hope for the best but really expecting the worst.
That is the problem with cynicism: It is the rejection of hope.
Cynicism sees the possible bad in everything… without realizing that it would be just as easy to see the possible good in everything. We don’t realize that any time we talk about the possible, the future, we have no way of knowing it for certain. It is all a guess, a conclusion that we reach by choice.
Whatever data we use to support our cynicism, to claim that is based on a reasonable extrapolation of the past, of things that have happened to us or the way some people have treated us before, is – on close examination – an incomplete data set. Because, if we are honest with ourselves, we can find, in that same past, good things that have happened to us and evidence of people that have been kind to others if not explicitly to us.
As a minimum, I must admit that the data I used to justify living as a cynic, cannot encompass all of human experience because I am just one person, living in a finite interval of the history of humanity. It would be the height of arrogance for me to assume that I have such a clear enough view of the past that I can use it to predict that only bad things come to me.
And if that is so, then cynicism is unfounded. It is just a choice, a choice I make to consciously avoid hoping for the best, in order to lessen the blow when (if) things go wrong.
But is that really the way I want to live my life?
In the end, if things do go wrong, did expecting that outcome benefit me in any way?
Or more importantly, did it benefit anybody else?
There is a fifth group that we can find in any crowd:
The naysayers.
Mark 3:22-27 And the scribes who had come down from Jerusalem said, He has Beelzebub, and, By the prince of the demons he casts out demons.
And having called them to [Him], He said to them in parables, How can Satan cast out Satan? And if a kingdom has become divided against itself, that kingdom cannot subsist. And if a house has become divided against itself, that house cannot subsist. And if Satan rise up against himself, and is divided, he cannot subsist, but has an end. But no one can, having entered into his house, plunder the goods of the strong [man] unless he first bind the strong [man], and then he will plunder his house.
Why are these people here?
They did not come hoping to get anything from Jesus, they came to discredit Him. But why?
If we are familiar with the story of the gospel, we might be tempted to answer immediately that they were jealous of Him, of the crowds He attracted; that they were afraid of losing their prestige and influence among the people… because Jesus met the people’s need for spiritual food without demanding anything in return: He expected no benefit, no honor… He just met them right where they lived, gave them everything they needed and got nothing for himself.
What kind of business is that? Who lives like that? Who can afford to live like that? Doesn’t he value his time, his wisdom? And he gives it all away… for free?
What self-respecting scribe would do that?
Jesus was rendering them obsolete.
All that may be true, but that line of thinking assumes that their motive was logical. By that I mean that all of us can understand the fear and animosity that would be triggered in our hearts if someone stepped in and challenged our livelihood. It would be a logical, human reaction to strike back; not righteous, but definitely “justifiable” to some degree.
But I do not think that is what is going on here. You see, there are people in every crowd who “get their kicks” from being naysayers. Even if their livelihood is not threatened, even if their life and work and goals in life have no overlap with what Jesus is offering and the life He is calling us to live, they will still raise their voice and try to ridicule Him and anyone who claims to believe in what He teaches. This is as true today as it was in Jesus’ day.
You may have seen this in social media, in YouTube videos, in Reddit, maybe even in person.
Many times, the persons making the snide condescending remarks about ignorant or gullible Christians claim that they are scientists or that their scientific knowledge gives them the certainty to make their declarations. They may even go as far as chiding Christians for not having studied the history of religions or “comparative religion” and thus being ignorant of the “fact” that all that they believe in is actually borrowed from other more ancient (pagan) sources.
The irony is that the very accusation they make against Christians, applies to them; but they are blind to see it. They have not bothered to check for themselves whether the Bible is reliable… (they just read the books that tell them it is not so) or, worse, they have not bothered to check for themselves if the “science facts” they cite have not already been challenged by other scientists as rigorous as the ones they quote.
And the question is, why? Why bother attacking something you ridicule, something you think is nonsense; something you have told yourself you would never believe?
And, no, don’t tell me it’s a selfless desire to set people free from destructive delusions. If they really wanted to help people, they would spend their time feeding the hungry or clothing the homeless or advocating for the oppressed… they would spend time planting seeds of love instead of seeds of discord, then they would have no time to go online and post anti-Christian propaganda.
So: Why do it?
Why did the scribes here come up with this outrageous accusation that all the good works Jesus did were being empowered by Satan himself? Like I said, I don’t think the answer has anything to do with logic or caring about the gullible people in that crowd. I think in this instance, and in many of the instances we witness today, that hostility comes directly from the kingdom of this world: from Satan himself. And the people of this world, acting as his loudspeakers, don’t even realize it. They don’t realize that their hostility makes no logical sense. All they know is that they feel “bigger”, they feel justified in themselves, more self-important, when they put believers down.
I think this is why Jesus’ first reply to the scribes is a logical argument. He tears down their statements with the rigor they should have used to construct them, hoping that they will notice the nonsense that they spoke and get shaken awake.
Why is their argument nonsense?
Because the moment they assigned Jesus’ works to the Devil, they applied to themselves the condemnation from Isaiah:
Isaiah 5:20-21 Woe unto them who call evil good, and good evil; who put darkness for light, and light for darkness; who put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter! Woe unto them that are wise in their own eyes, and intelligent in their own esteem!
They automatically proved themselves to be in the wrong because Jehovah’s covenant promise to His people have always included blessings of healing:
Deuteronomy 7:12-15 And it shall come to pass, if ye hearken to these ordinances, and keep and do them, that Jehovah thy God will keep with thee the covenant and the mercy which he swore unto thy fathers; and he will love thee, and bless thee, and multiply thee, and will bless the fruit of thy womb, and the fruit of thy ground, thy corn and thy new wine, and thine oil, the offspring of thy kine, and the increase of thy sheep, in the land which he swore unto thy fathers to give thee.
Thou shalt be blessed above all the peoples; there shall not be male or female barren with thee, or with thy cattle; and Jehovah will take away from thee all sickness, and none of the evil infirmities of Egypt, which thou knowest, will he put upon thee; but he will lay them upon all them that hate thee.
Moses said it and the coming of the Messiah would confirm it:
Isaiah 35:3-6 Strengthen the weak hands and confirm the tottering knees. Say to them that are of a timid heart, Be strong, fear not; behold your God: vengeance cometh, the recompense of God! He will come himself, and save you. Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf be unstopped; then shall the lame [man] leap as a hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing: for in the wilderness shall waters break out, and torrents in the desert.
And this is the knot they have tied themselves in: If the miracles of healing done by Jesus can really be confused with the work of the Devil, then Jehovah has proven himself to be a very poor God indeed, a god that cannot even protect His people from being deceived.
But the prophets say otherwise:
Jeremiah 1:12 And Jehovah said unto me, Thou hast well seen; for I am watchful over my word to perform it.
Isaiah 55:10-11 For as the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth, and maketh it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower, and bread to the eater: so shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall do that which I please, and it shall accomplish that for which I send it.
In fact, God challenges all the other gods to prove they are gods by them making their words come true:
Isaiah 41:23-24 declare the things that are to happen hereafter, that we may know that ye are gods; yea, do good, or do evil, that we may be astonished, and behold it together. Behold, ye are less than nothing, and your work is of nought; an abomination is he that chooseth you. …
So, the scribes have reduced themselves to self-contradiction…
…because if they have taught the people about those verses in Jeremiah and Isaiah and Deuteronomy, and told them they are True, then they have already declared it is impossible for Satan to disguise his work as God’s work. Their accusation against Jesus cannot stand, by the words of their own lips.
But it is worse than that… because if they stubbornly cling to that self-contradiction, then they are teaching the people that God is self-contradictory, they are making God and the Devil equivalent… and thus leading into apostasy anyone who listens and believes what they say.
That is a dangerous thing to do:
Matthew 18:6 (NIV) “If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.
It is therefore no surprise that this is how Jesus responds to those scribes:
Mark 3:28-30 Verily I say unto you, that all sins shall be forgiven to the sons of men, and all the injurious speeches [with] which they may speak injuriously; but whosoever shall speak injuriously against the Holy Spirit, to eternity has no forgiveness; but lies under the guilt of an everlasting sin; —because they said, He has an unclean spirit.
Who am I, in the crowd?
Whatever we are seeking, spells the answer to that question.
Maybe you came for the “show”. Ok… Welcome! Stick around and you will hear words of Hope.
Maybe you came for physical healing. That’s fantastic because Jesus pointed out several times that the trigger that releases His healing power is your Faith. Then, stick around, because He has so much more healing to give us: healing that goes beyond this physical world into eternal life. That is the Hope of glory.
Maybe you came to hear His words… Then sit down and listen…
Mark 3:31-35 And his brethren and his mother come, and standing without sent to him calling him. And a crowd sat around him. And they said to him, Behold, thy mother and thy brethren seek thee without. And he answered them, saying, Who is my mother or my brethren? And looking around in a circuit at those that were sitting around him, he says, Behold my mother and my brethren: for whosoever shall do the will of God, *he* is my brother, and sister, and mother.
Following Him, doing the will of the Father, is what brings that Hope from eternity into this present world, for our life and the life of all those He will let us touch.
But what if you find yourself in the fourth or the fifth group in the crowd? Living in cynicism, trusting no one, hoping for nothing… Or living consciously rejecting Jesus…
The question I would ask is: How has that been working out for you? Is your life full of Love?
It is kind of hard to Love without Hope.