Over a century ago, the French Catholic poet Charles Péguy observed that “in the eyes of God all human order is a disorder”, all human peace a barely concealed chaos. As a convert who had struggled mightily with issues of faith and despair, he knew in his flesh of what he spoke. Today’s gospel passage from Mark is a textbook illustration of Péguy’s aphorism, enacted in shocking proportions in the life of the Lord Jesus. The scene challenges us to reflection about the historical opposition to Jesus in his day, as well as to reflection about ourselves and our attitudes. Only by first pondering this severe state of conflict which Mark holds out to our consideration as part of his “Good News” may we later be strengthened inwardly by the life-giving truths here communicated.
The gospel just proclaimed culminates in the teaching toward which Jesus is leading us as the upshot of all the conflict he himself has had to face. As he sits in the middle of those who are intently listening to his word, someone comes to tell him that his Mother and his brothers are waiting for him outside. To that Jesus responds cuttingly: ‘Who are my mother and my brothers?’ And looking around at those seated in the circle, he said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.’ It is toward this revelation that the whole passage is going. In this light, it would appear that the only question that ultimately matters in my life as a Christian disciple is the following: How can I most effectively respond to Jesus’ invitation that I, too, should enter into an intimate spiritual kinship with him by fulfilling the will of his Father?
What a beautiful teaching, we exclaim. What an enticing proposition! Who could be upset by it? From where, then, does all the loud cacophony and ugly conflict in this gospel scene come? It comes, I think, from the fact that the incarnate Word has come into our world not to put God’s stamp of approval on what he finds there, but to establish among us the Kingdom of God, a society reflecting the interior life of Our Lord’s native home, the Blessed Trinity. Trinitarian life, which is what Jesus wants to introduce into the world, is utterly simple: its order consists of nothing other than an incessant circulation of love which bestows life on everything it touches. Every society created by human beings, by glaring contrast, enforces its own so-called “order” proceeding from principles of greed, hunger for power and domination, and a passion to exalt the strong and exploit the weak. This enterprise is, by definition, a complex, corrupt and destructive social operation. In Jesus’ person the Kingdom itself approaches, and in him these two competing orders must unavoidably clash.
In the readings we witness dramatic situations of enmity, denunciation, and intense opposition. Satan insinuates himself into Eden in the form of a poisonous snake who seeks to destroy the natural trust existing between Adam and Eve and the God who had created them with such loving care. With the weapons of lies and seduction, Satan intends to subvert the divine order reigning in our first parents’ souls. He infuses them with the preposterous desire to become like God, feeding them the poison of a spurious freedom which pretends to be more divine and desirable than humble, life-giving obedience.
This strategy by the serpent results in Adam and Eve becoming submerged in fear and distrust as they now see God not as their generous Creator and Giver of life but as the massively threatening Other who is an enemy and must, as such, be hated. The plain evidence that Adam and Eve are sadly deluded, however, is their shame at their nakedness, which drives them to hide from God. Rebellion against God destroys the beatific harmony of creation and thus alienates us not only from God himself but also from our own persons, from each other and from nature. We now exist in a shattered world of rivalry, recrimination and mutual exploitation for sheer survival.
In the gospel, Jesus is the target of condemnation and violence, first of all by his own kin: They set out to grab a hold of him, Mark writes. Simultaneously, he is the victim of aggressive hostility from the religious authorities. The charges from either group are truly shocking when attached to the holy Name of Jesus. While his family members accuse him of being insane, the scribes declare him to be possessed. It appears that the same revolt against the divine order we have witnessed in Eden is now occurring with a vengeance in the streets of sleepy Capernaum, no longer now in a mythological mode but with a blunt historical harshness that already points to the Cross. No, the sufferings of Jesus’ Sacred Heart did not begin with the Passion.
How mind-boggling, this concerted opposition to Jesus, this conclusion that Jesus is both insane and possessed, a conclusion drawn according to impeccable human logic by both relatives and political enemies. On what evidence? On his universally acknowledged record of going about indiscriminately doing good, teaching God’s truth, and healing the sick and the demoniacs—all of which actions are judged dangerous because they disrupt the so-called “natural” order of things! Rebelliousness, the will-to-power, and above all fear of losing autonomy, must indeed be ruling the day in Judea for the human conscience to invert the categories of good and evil with such self-assured rage. God’s incarnate Wisdom is declared by men to be insane, and God’s incarnate Holiness is declared by men to be demonically possessed! Such is the attitude and behavior of the “seed” of the serpent down through the ages. And, certainly, calling Jesus by deceptive and wounding names that express the precise opposite of his true nature surely is an instance of the “blasphemy against the Holy Spirit that has no forgiveness”, according to Jesus himself.
Now, what could be the conscious motivations driving the minds of both Jesus’ relatives and the scribes? How can the order of God be so violently attacked on the basis of what appears to be very sensible human reasoning? The kind of public life Jesus has been leading is worrisome to many. By his radical teachings, and especially by his alleged violation of the Sabbath and the forgiving of sins, Jesus is wildly encroaching on the proper doctrinal and juridical territory of the religious authorities. Their rash judgment of what they do not understand is no doubt a measure of self-defense against a phenomenon that might force them to rethink their set ideas, question their own principles and motivations, or look in a radically new way at someone they believe they already know like an open book. And let us not forget that these scribes are hurling their accusations at Jesus in the name of God. In their conscience they are acting piously, their very piety blinding them to the sacrilege they are committing.
As for Jesus’ relatives: they declare him to be “out of his mind”! This outrageous judgment on the part of his family members most probably comes from the fact that they view his itinerant and celibate lifestyle, in the company of a small band of ragtag disciples, as being financially and socially disastrous for the whole family, especially in such a tight-knit, clannish society. To them Jesus is a scandalous maverick, behaving in a woefully irresponsible manner. He is the nonconforming relative who has deliberately deprived the family not only of one of its working members but also of the economic benefits and social prestige that would have accrued from an alliance with another family group, sealed by a respectable marriage. Imagine the enormous pressure the whole clan must be putting on Mary to bring her wayward offspring back in line! And yet, in her ever-mindful heart she must be hearing even now the echo of the twelve-year-old Jesus’ words to her and Joseph in the temple: Did you not know that I must be about my Father’s business? (Lk 2:49, DRA).
Yes, revolt against the divine Will can take extremely subtle and very reasonable-seeming forms. One of the greatest dangers to conventional human security comes from anything that threatens to overturn whatever status quo happens to dominate a particular society at a given moment in matters of religion, economics and sexuality. At every level of society, the life-giving divine order (based on the primacy of love alone), which Jesus is trying to establish on earth, clearly threatens the majority of people as a catastrophic human disorder.
At the height of his divine foolishness, Jesus states that in the new family he is creating in the community of believers that is the Church, the criterion of close kinship to him is no longer given by bonds of blood, but from doing the will of God. This means that no one in the Church is a member by right, or by somehow acquiring a place in it once and for all. Belonging to the community of God’s family is a privilege that comes solely by listening to the Word of God and by a fidelity to the Father’s will that must be renewed every day. This absolute spiritual criterion of membership means that we cannot judge infallibly who is “inside” and who is “outside” the Church as Body of Christ. To belong to the visible Church does not necessarily go hand in hand with genuineness of faith and the doing of God’s will. Only the Final Judgment will reveal what must remain opaque and hidden throughout earthly history.
In his commentary on today’s gospel St Augustine says that “Mary was more blessed in accepting faith in Christ than in conceiving the body of Christ... Even the fact of being [Jesus’ physical] mother would have been of no use to Mary if she had not carried Christ more thankfully in her heart than in the flesh” (On Holy Virginity, 2, 2-3). Jesus’ words about his Mother today in Mark, far from being in any way a putdown of Our Lady, are on the contrary a profound proclamation of both her spiritual and her maternal pre-eminence in the history of salvation and in the Church.
Jesus no more distances himself from his Mother than he does from his own sacred humanity, which he received from her, as necessary instrument of salvation. Indeed, Mary’s whole-hearted fiat to the Will of God (Lk 1:38)completely harmonized her whole being and existence with the Father’s salvific “order”—God’s plan to save the world by the blood of his and her Son (cf Eph 1:7,10).
Mary’s spiritual obedience to God’s Will and her physical conception of Jesus cannot be separated, since they are intimately united in her person as cause and effect. Mary is thus the archetype and first instance of the redeemed Christian. Indeed, her immaculate heart and soul would in due course be truly pierced, spiritually and psychologically, by the same spear of human rejection that tore open her Son’s Heart on Calvary, as she stood at the foot of the Cross gazing at the flood of water and blood flowing forth from Jesus’ open side (cf Lk 2:5; Jn 19:34). Her motherhood drank deeply of the cup of her Son’s suffering precisely because her whole being was surrendered so thoroughly to the Will of God. She could not surrender to God’s Will without the consequence of sharing in the Son’s Passion. In this way Mary is, for all time, the Woman par excellence, the New Eve who, as the Mother of the Redeemer, became the mother of all those living by grace.
Together with her Son, she crushed the head of the ancient serpent, as we see in Caravaggio’s marvelous Madonna dei Palafrenieri of 1606. It is a scene in which two wise and devoted women mentor the Savior of the world in his redeeming task, which both of them had had a major share in preparing. As St Anne watches from the right side, still wrapped in Old Testament chiaroscuro, Our Lady stand at the center behind a very young Jesus and holds him gently by his chest as they both lean forward elegantly. Mary fearlessly, and yet with a kind of immaculate delicacy, bears down her firm and naked left foot onto the head of a repulsive black snake, coiling grossly on the floor before them; and the naked infant Jesus obligingly places his tender left foot on top of his Mother’s adult foot, as together they press down on the hideously contorted head. Surely, by means of the child Jesus’ innocent nakedness, the artist is proclaiming him to be the New Adam who knows no guilt because he knows no revolt. And the careful but undaunted gaze of Jesus and Mary as they accomplish this gruesome task must reflect the harmonious grace that fills them conjointly and infuses fortitude in the face of the vanquished horror beneath them. No, there is never any enmity between Jesus and Mary. Everything between them is concerted effort as they, together, carry out the divine Will of redemption. Their shared enmity is only against the Seducer of humankind.
Jesus and Mary together, brothers and sisters, show us what it means to live already now in the Kingdom of God. They invite us to go with them beyond the chaos and disintegration of what St Paul today calls “our earthly dwelling”, that is, the clownish circus tent of every human pseudo-order. Our Lord and our blessed Lady together beckon us to follow them so as to come to dwell with them in “the building we have from God, a dwelling not made with hands, eternal in heaven”, where we have been promised “an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison”. And of this very glory we will now have a foretaste in this Eucharist.
