Summary
Two Families in Mark 3
Picture the perfect family, and Jesus' household seems an obvious candidate. Mary and Joseph adoring the Christ child, brothers and sisters supporting the Lord's ministry, one sinless son to make things easier on everyone. Yet Mark 3 tells a different story, and it does so through one of the Gospel's signature literary devices: the so-called "ABA" structure, where Mark begins one scene, interrupts it with another, and then returns to resolve the first. The same technique frames the raising of Jairus' daughter around the woman with the hemorrhage, and it shapes the “Family” 1-23-22 text as well.
The "A" begins at Mark 3:20–21: when Jesus' family heard the crowds pressing around him, "they went out to restrain him, for people were saying, 'He has gone out of his mind.'" The Greek expression is blunt—Jesus has gone crazy, he is out of it. Mary herself believed her Son was the Messiah, but John 7:5 tells us plainly that "not even his brothers believed in him." Only after the resurrection do we find the whole household gathered in faith, devoted to prayer with the disciples Acts 1:14. At this moment in Mark, however, his own kin have come to take him home as a man unhinged.
Mark returns to the scene at Mark 3:31–32. The detail to notice is location: his mother and brothers and sisters are outside, while those listening to his word are inside. By standing outside, Jesus' relatives have unwittingly taken the same posture as the hostile authorities elsewhere in the Gospel. This is no portrait of perfection. Jesus loves and honors his family—he was obedient to Mary and Joseph Luke 2:51 and provided for his mother from the cross John 19:26–27—but the household into which he was born is not yet the family of faith.
So Jesus speaks of another family. Looking around at those seated near him, he says, "Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother" Mark 3:33–35. This is not a rejection of natural kinship but the announcement of a deeper one. Scripture takes up the theme everywhere: "In Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith" Galatians 3:26; "to all who did receive him… he gave the right to become children of God" John 1:12; "all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God" Romans 8:14; "see what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God" 1 John 3:1. Faith makes us children of the heavenly Father.
The mark of this family is doing the will of God—not as the price of belonging, but as its fruit. As Luther put it, faith is "a living, busy, active thing"; where faith exists, it cannot help but express itself. Paul says the same in Philippians 2:13: "It is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure." Those gathered around Jesus, hearing his word, are people in whom the Father is already at work.
And yet, are we the perfect family? Hardly. Like Jesus' brothers, we can misunderstand his mission, assuming he came chiefly to make our lives easier and concluding, when life is hard, that he must not be in control. Like them, we can decide God is "crazy" for not following the timetable we have mapped out for him. We can drift to the outside, preferring teachers who will echo our own thoughts back to us rather than sit on the inside and listen to what God actually says.
Even so, in God's eyes the verdict stands. He has "clothed me with the garments of salvation… covered me with the robe of righteousness" Isaiah 61:10. "For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God" 2 Corinthians 5:21. Found in Christ, we have "not a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ" Philippians 3:9. Jesus took our sin to the cross and clothed us in his perfect life. When the Father looks at his other family—the brothers and sisters and mothers gathered around his Son—he sees the perfection of Jesus. He sees the perfect family. And it is us.
Video citations
- “Family” 1-23-22 — You're open your Bibles, please, with me, to mark the third chapter for our study today, page 32, if you're using a copy of the Scriptures in the Pew. Mark the third chapter for our study this…