When I was in the Philippines, there were two insults that I was told never to use, as they were very serious. One was boang, which means madman; the other was yawa, which means devil – the most serious insult in that culture.
Both of these are applied to Jesus in this gospel passage. Jesus the wisdom and the goodness of God! It goes to show, that we humans are capable of misjudging people pretty badly, indeed, getting our diagnosis of people completely back-to-front. The thing is, when we judge in a human way, Christ and Christianity seem crazy; when we judge according to a standard that is sinful, they can even seem evil.
Jesus’s relatives think he’s crazy because amid their apostolic busyness, he and his disciples don’t even have time to eat. I think we can sympathise with this concern to a point. It feels common-sensical. Food is an important part of human life, and we need to make sure we eat enough and healthily. But it is not the most important thing. Lots of people think their relationship with food is a virtuous one, because they’re not overweight, for example – but they actually make a huge deal out of food and give it much too much of their attention. People who spend excessive amounts of money on very sophisticated food, or again people who make a cult out of healthy eating. This is real craziness: thinking that the key to a flourishing life is what we eat.
Common sense is not an entirely bad guide. There are forms of religious craziness that do violence to human nature, and common sense can help us recognise those for what they are. But common sense is not enough to guide your life. It can’t guide you above a merely human life, when God’s call is to live a divine life. We have to listen to common sense, but listen more carefully to the Holy Spirit.
The Pharisees go even further though. They don’t just think Jesus is crazy, they think he is positively evil, that “Beelzebul is in him.” I am reminded of someone I know who does a lot of pro-life work. He tries to engage people in discussion on the morality of abortion. And quite often he has been told what he is doing is “diabolical.” If our moral standard goes awry, as our society’s has on this question, then we can totally misdiagnose. The Pharisees’ problem is that their moral judgment has become clouded by their vested interests, their influence and power. They are blinded, as Jesus often remarks about them in the gospel.
How can we judge aright? How can we move beyond a purely human way of judging? How can we move beyond the sinful standards that blind us? Look at the other characters in the gospel: the crowds that pressed round Jesus, that sat in a circle, transfixed by his teaching. We too have to return to the freshness of our first encounter with Christ, with his person and his teaching. We have to let the spark of his life arc from his heart to ours: the Holy Spirit. That spark of life will cause us to be reborn, to come to a totally new way of judging and thinking that has as its ultimate foundation the goodness that we have discovered in him.
I was talking to someone on the train yesterday who said that he used to be a Christian, but as he got older he decided to make his own mind up about what is true, about what is right and wrong, rather than following the teachings of another. But we can only think in that way if we have forgotten the original freshness of the encounter with Christ, if we have forgotten the electric shock of his words that streak so far ahead of everything that human wisdom can grasp. We turn to him to learn the truth about love, about right and wrong, because our own intuitions are so confused, prone to error, thwarted by our sinful inclinations, and because his in contrast are so radiant, white-hot with divine clarity, manifesting the deepest truth about love, goodness and the meaning of life.
Those sitting in a circle around him were those who had sensed that. Those who were listening and opening their hearts to obey him. They let Jesus teach them the deepest truth about right and wrong, about what love is, because they recognise that Jesus is love, that he is the one who perfectly fulfils the will of the Father who is love. They want to be electrified with the electricity that crackles in Jesus’ life and deeds and words. They want to do the same, they want to obey the Father, to be true to love in its deepest reality. When we are reborn in this way, we come closer to him than even his relatives, his brothers and sisters, because we are born to the same life that inhabits his heart.
–fr Philip-Thomas
Casting Fire 