Apprenticing Under The Master August 7, 2005
Mark 3:7- 35 (20-35)
Jesus’ True Family
In between university and seminary I built houses (for three days until I got a better paying job at a steel mill) I was hired on as an unskilled labourer, but I felt like I was apprenticing for those three days. I knew some basic carpentry, but I learned a lot in those three days – my boss liked to yell when you weren’t doing something the right way, or his way. When we were nailing a floor or a roof down, I’d often work backwards so that I could see where I’d already nailed, and I’d be able to follow the line and be sure to hit the joist that I was hammering into. My boss would catch me and yell out, “a horse don’t work backward!” I think he was trying to keep me from falling off the house.
There are times when we are apprenticing under the master that he needs to correct the ways that we do things, correct the way that we think about things, or correct unhelpful habits. In this passage, Jesus corrects both his family, and the Pharisees in this passage
The movement around Jesus is building – more and more people are coming to him to be healed: so many that Jesus asks Peter to have a boat ready just incase he needs to escape the crowds as they press in on him to be healed. He has chosen his inner-circle of 12; they are a motley crew of fishermen, a tax collector, a freedom fighter, or terrorist…
Read verse 20-35
On reflecting on the things that Jesus says about himself – that he is the unique Son of God, on equal footing with God and able to forgive sins, C.S. Lewis wrote “A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said wouldn’t be a great moral teacher; he would either be a lunatic – on the level with a man who says he is a poached egg – or else he would be the devil of hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was and is the Son of God, or a madman or something worse… but don’t lets come up with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He hasn’t left that open to us. He didn’t intend to.”
In this passage Jesus is accused of both insanity and evil.
Word has got back to Jesus’ family of all that he is doing and saying. They are not sure of what to make of this.
It’s hard to know what is going through Mary’s heart and mind at this time – she experienced the miracles of his birth, she heard the prophesies of his greatness, she knew that he was different than all the other children, from John 2 we know that she knew of his miraculous abilities, but she and the family are not sure about his present behavior. If nothing else, he is putting himself in a very dangerous position.
They show up at the house were Jesus is, and there are so many people that they can’t even get access to him. Has that ever happened to you? You’ve got a really good friend or family member who you’re very close to and they get their 15 minutes of fame, and you can’t even get close enough to them to say hi? It can make you a little put out. Imagine Mary, a Jewish mother, not being able to get to her son!
And then someone in the crowd says, “I’m not sure that you’re going to be able to talk to him, he and his disciples are so busy, they haven’t even taken a break to eat today!”
“He’s not eating? He’s not eating! Oy ve! He’s lost his mind!”
While Jesus gives an argument to the Pharisees’ charge that he is possessed by a demon, he doesn’t argue with his family about his mental health.
There are not too many people who would say “Jesus was a nice guy, but he was delusional about this whole Son of God thing,” but there may be some.
The Psychology wards at the hospital usually have a few people who think that they are the Son of God at any given time.
But Jesus’ character does not match a delusional person.
The very fact that he spends so much time healing people points to a very sane person. The mentally ill people and delusional people that I have known have a very small universe – it begins and ends with themselves, the whole world, whether for good or for evil, revolves around them. Even high functioning delusional people: the kinds who start cults and such, have a universe that revolves around themselves. Jesus, on the other hand, has a very large universe. He is forever loving people, not looking for their love. He is forever giving attention away, not trying to receive attention. He says things like “I have come into the world to serve, not to be served;” and he backs those statements up with a life that is laid down for his friends – both in life and in death. Jesus does not hoard power, he gives it away, even the power to heal and cast out demons! Delusional people are usually trying to get attention, and service, and power, not give it away.
Jesus is the sanest person that ever lived. And, he is the divine Son of God.
From Apprentice to Family
Mary, and Jesus’ brothers, finally get a message to Jesus that they would like to have a word. They were going to have a family intervention.
Jesus knows what they are up to and doesn’t go to them, instead he says, “Who are my mother and my brothers?”
He looked at those seated in a circle around him and said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother.”
If you are worried about Mary and the family, don’t be. I’ll let you in on the end of their story. They came to believe that Jesus is the Son of God. You see Mary at the foot of the cross, and she is part of the group of disciples who are gathered in the upper room waiting for the Holy Spirit to come at Pentecost. Mary carried the Son of God in her womb, and then she carried the Holy Spirit from Pentecost onward! Can you imagine her out on the street praising God and speaking in tongues with the other disciples at Pentecost?!
James, Jesus’ brother, becomes a leader in the Church at Jerusalem. He is the one who writes the letter we call “James,” found in your Bible after the letter to the Hebrews. If there is any reason to believe that Jesus is the Son of God, it has to be that his brother, who he grew up with, came to believe as well! His natural family becomes part of his spiritual family!
Jesus’ Family
Jesus says that his family is made up of the people who do God’s will. This would tell us that in order to be Jesus’ brother or sister, we need to have an active faith.
There is a quote from Bill McKibben, in his Harper’s magazine essay, "The Christian Paradox on the back of your bulletin today. In the article he talks about how America is the most professing Christian of all nations in the world. 85% of Americans identify themselves as Christian. “Israel, by way of comparison, is 77 percent Jewish. It is true that a smaller number of Americans - about 75 percent - claim they actually pray to God on a daily basis, and only 33 percent say they manage to get to church every week. “Still, even if that 85 percent overstates actual practice, it clearly represents aspiration. In fact, there is nothing else that unites more than four fifths of America. Every other statistic one can cite about American behavior is essentially also a measure of the behavior of professed Christians. That’s what America is: a place saturated in Christian identity.”
He goes on from there to ask the question “But is it Christian? …Christ was pretty specific about what he had in mind for his followers. What if we chose some simple criterion - say, giving aid to the poorest people - as a reasonable proxy for Christian behavior? After all, in the days before his crucifixion, when Jesus summed up his message for his disciples, he said the way you could tell the righteous from the damned was by whether they’d fed the hungry, slaked the thirsty, clothed the naked, welcomed the stranger, and visited the prisoner. What would we find then?”
Using these criteria and other criteria that even the most conservative Christian would use, he says that America is Christian in name only.
This is not enough.
Jesus says again and again that identifying with him, following him, believing in him will be born out in action. We cannot be Christian in name only.
We in the west have defined believing as something that we do with our minds, so when we hear “believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you shall be saved.” We think that it means that is we give mental accent to Jesus divinity and the effectiveness of his death and resurrection to remove our sins. But believing is always born out in action
Matthew 7:24-27 "Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash."
When we sing this story as a song, we sing the moral as “So build your life on the Lord Jesus Christ…” which kind of spiritualizes a very practical teaching. Jesus is saying that we are the wise builder if we act on his teachings, not if we just believe them. He is calling us to act on our faith in him.
Speaking of building a house on a rock. Some of you know that I built a little cabin up at my family’s property on the way to Ottawa. What you might not know is that it is built on the edge of a small cliff with a good view of the lake. The north end of the cabin is on solid Canadian Shield rock, but the south end hangs over the cliff and rests on cedar posts. Now I am an amateur builder. My sister had a dream (while sleeping in the cabin!) that the whole thing rolled down the ridge. Now you might say that you trust me that I built it right and it won’t roll down the cliff, but if you say that and refuse to step into the cabin, you don’t really trust me. In the same way, if we say that we believe in Jesus, trust in him, and refuse to do what he says, do we really believe in him? If we believe we will do what he says – whether we completely understand it or not.
Belief in Jesus is not just a change of mind – it is a transforming relationship. We trust him to be right about the way that we are supposed to live. We can trust him because of his deep love for us and our world – he wants us to do the will of God because it is the best way for us to live!
This is how Eugene Peterson Translates what Jesus’ brother James says to us:
“Dear friends, do you think you’ll get anywhere in this if you learn all the right words but never do anything? Does merely talking about faith indicate that a person really has it? For instance, you come upon an old friend dressed in rags and half-starved and say, "Good morning, friend! Be clothed in Christ! Be filled with the Holy Spirit!" and walk off without providing so much as a coat or a cup of soup--where does that get you? Isn’t it obvious that God-talk without God-acts is outrageous nonsense?
I can already hear one of you agreeing by saying, "Sounds good. You take care of the faith department, I’ll handle the works department."
Not so fast. You can no more show me your works apart from your faith than I can show you my faith apart from my works. Faith and works, works and faith, fit together hand in glove.
Do I hear you professing to believe in the one and only God, but then observe you complacently sitting back as if you had done something wonderful? That’s just great. Demons do that, but what good does it do them? Use your heads! Do you suppose for a minute that you can cut faith and works in two and not end up with a corpse on your hands?” - James 2:14-20
Our belief in Jesus is born out in doing the things he teaches us to do!
So if we want to be Jesus’ true family, and do the will of God, do we all need to quit our jobs and join the Peace Corps? Some of you might, but most of us are called to serve God right where we are – we just need to have our actions fit our faith.
This is what John the Baptist says to his followers:
Luke 3:8-13
“Produce fruit in keeping with repentance. And do not begin to say to yourselves, ’We have Abraham as our father.’ For I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up children for Abraham. …
"What should we do then?" the crowd asked.
John answered, "The man with two tunics should share with him who has none, and the one who has food should do the same."
Tax collectors also came to be baptized. "Teacher," they asked, "what should we do?"
"Don’t collect any more than you are required to," he told them. 14Then some soldiers asked him, "And what should we do?"
He replied, "Don’t extort money and don’t accuse people falsely—be content with your pay."”
Just as these people did, we need to find out how we obey the will of God in the place that he has placed us. We need to obey the “do not” commands, like honest, moral living as well as the “do” commands such as caring for the less fortunate, living a prayerful life and acting in love.
C.S. Lewis said that if we just had Christ’s claims to divinity, we would have three choices: he is insane, he is evil, or he really is who he says he is. It is not Jesus claims that show him for who he is, but it is that he acts in agreement with his claims. His character and his actions prove his claims.
You might say that you are a Christian. Does you character and your actions prove it?
