Sermon for June 9, 2024

June 9, 2014

By Kristin Berkey-Abbott



Mark 3:20-35


I do some of my best writing when I’m away from my writing desk. So I made sure to read this week’s Gospel lesson before we left on our trip to go to Arkansas for the wedding of Carl’s sister. Often ideas come to me while driving, and we went 700 miles each way.

As we drove past Civil War battle sites, my thoughts circled around that phrase that Abraham Lincoln quoted in one of his speeches, in verse 25, a house divided that cannot stand. But frankly, this house we call our own, this nation has in fact been divided throughout its history more than it’s been singing a song in unison or pleasant harmony. It was not lost on me that we followed the Trail of Tears as we headed to Arkansas, and I thought about those Cherokee tribes who left a home so beautiful to head towards Oklahoma, a desolate land in comparison (I am biased, I know). I thought about them taking their trip without adequate supplies, with very few people willing to help, in part because the travelers were Native Americans, in part because it was a time of contagion when you didn’t open the door to just anyone.

If this was not a sermon, I might talk about that time and compare it to our current time, where we seem so deeply divided both as a nation and a world. But then I hear my Preaching professor saying, “Where is the Good News in this?”

And so, I went back to the end of the text, back to that little part about Mary and the brothers of Jesus coming to him and asking to see him. Rather than seeing them, he sends them away. Does it seem as harsh to them as it does to us? He rejects his family of origin and turns towards the new family he has adopted. I suspect many of us know people who for good reasons or bad have made this choice.

I think about Mary in this story. The Gospel of Mark gives us an incomplete picture—of Mary, and of most of the people we’ll come to know better in other Gospels. Mark is not the Gospel where we see Mary agree to be part of God’s cosmic plan, that story we hear so often in Advent. Mark is not the Gospel where we meet Elizabeth. Mark’s Gospel doesn’t have Mary the mother of Jesus at the crucifixion or the resurrection. Why is this Gospel so different?

There are many possibilities. Some Biblical scholars tell us that Mark is the first Gospel and that other Gospel writers both used Mark’s Gospel as a basis for their own and felt free to go in different directions. Keep in mind that we are reading a Gospel. It’s meant to bring us the Good News of God at work in the world. It’s not meant to be a biography of Jesus.

My New Testament professor would want me to remind you that the differences between Gospels are intentional. When the early Church fathers had to decide what would be included in the Bible, they wanted us to have these different pictures.

As we return to Mark, let’s consider the beginning of the text, where the family comes to restrain him. What is that about? Do they not understand the mission of Jesus? Do they, too, think he’s delusional? Are they worried about his safety in terms of the crowds or in terms of the authorities? Are they embarrassed?

Any one of these answers could be true. Clearly they are upset and concerned for him. As I reflected on this text in the context of a family reunion, I thought about all the ways our family members know us best. They’ve known us longest, so in some ways, they understand both the individual and the family dynamics in a way that no one else can. In an ideal world, family members want what’s best for us. And frankly, no one else can irritate us in quite the same way.

And despite this deep knowledge, in many ways family members don’t understand us at all, as members have their own life paths to travel, paths that can be very different, even if everyone stays in the same home town to witness the same behavior and see the same stories.

That’s part of being a family too. We may understand psychology, we may see family members taking their own path, but we still want to save them. Ask anyone who’s ever loved someone with an addiction problem, and you’ll hear stories. Or just listen to people at a family reunion or during a car trip. Families can break our hearts a million ways and one of the hardest is that we wish we could save our loved ones from worlds of pain, but we often can’t.

I picture Mary hearing news of her firstborn, the one for whom she had such high hopes, the one who was to fulfill a prophecy, according to some people she met early on. And here he is, healing people on the Sabbath and casting out demons, and acting like he wasn’t raised properly. I imagine her thinking, perhaps even praying, “Please, God, it’s been 30 some odd years, and my child is still acting like he hasn’t got any sense. Please, God, help me figure out how to keep him safe.”

In today’s Gospel, we see Jesus at the beginning of his ministry, but we see Mary in the middle of her spiritual journey. As I traveled back and forth across the country this past week, I thought about the middle of stories of all kinds, where we have guesses and hopes but where we’re not sure how it will all turn out. In our churches, we often hear about the beginning of great stories of faith: we hear about the angel Gabriel appearing to Mary, for example, and we have baptisms of all kinds, and the appearance of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost and the early years of Paul’s ministry. The church year goes from beginning to end, and some years we go from Christmas to Easter at a dizzying pace. As a church, we spend a whole season preparing for the beginning of the story of Jesus, and we spend a whole season celebrating the victory at the end of his ministry, which starts and ends so quickly that he barely has time to have any stories from the middle years.

This glimpse of Mary is a real gift to those of us in the middle of our stories, where we don’t quite know how it will all turn out and we’re deeply concerned—and that’s all of us, after all. I take comfort from this picture of Mary, which may seem like rejection (a mother rejecting her son, a son rejecting his mother), but it is not, not ultimately as the story continues. When we look at all the Gospels, we see a woman who says yes to God, but that yes does not spare her from doubt or confusion or pain. Still, by the end of the assembling of all the Gospels, she is there, at the cross, and there at the resurrection.

That is good news for those of us feeling like we’ve gone astray somehow or gotten stuck along the way. Jesus promises that God’s vision for our flourishing is much bigger than our own, much better than any our families or societies can offer or even fully understand. Jesus invites us to join him on the path, on the trail that may contain tears but will not end in tears.