Step 3, Item 5 - What About Mary?

Doubting Doubt

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The Process

Step 3 – He is Beside Himself (cont.)

 

5.  What About Mary?

   What about Mary?

  Essentially, there are two propositions I have made so far to establish securely a motivation for Jesus’ family to come to get Jesus:  (1) they were concerned to remove Jesus from a hazardous situation, and (2) that this motivation lends credence to the theory that, in spite of what they declared publicly, namely, that Jesus was out of His mind, Jesus’ family did not genuinely believe that.  Instead, they fabricated that claim as the excuse for their actions in an effort to achieve a favorable outcome for their mission and to dissuade the scribes from taking any harsh actions or from making troublesome reports to the Sanhedrin.

  I made these propositions in a way that attempted to minimize speculation as much as possible by indicating evidence, such as, the lack of sufficient grounds for any competing motivational claims, the probability that the family came following an alert notification from a messenger, as well as the notable mention of the presence of the scribes who represented a dangerous element to Jesus.

  By themselves, these propositions still do not confirm that Jesus’ family did not think that Jesus was out of His mind.  After all, it is possible that Jesus’ family arrived to remove Jesus from danger and, at the same time, they suspected that Jesus was out of His mind.

  Fortunately we can further reinforce the propositions and not just by one method but by several methods.

  The challenge made by Pastor X was “What about Mary?”  He listed several pieces of information we are given about Mary:  she gave birth to Jesus through the supernatural power of the Holy Spirit, she had spoken to angels, she had experienced the worship of Jesus by shepherds and wise men and she raised a truly perfect and sinless Son.

  To that list we can add a few more facts:  she had the testimony of Elizabeth (Luke 1:41-45, of which I would also say that this is a respectable testimony since Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit (verse 41).  And Mary was not only a witness of shepherds, wise men and angels, she was nearly deliriously joyful with her praises which we see in her song, a song that is also known as the Magnificat.

  Yes, it truly does seem perplexing to suppose that Mary could have all of that evidence and not know the identity of Jesus.  Yet that’s what the church teaches and that is what seemingly all of us, including Pastor X, are ready to accept without question.  Why?

  In fact, Pastor X not only is perfectly willing to accept such a perplexing notion, he states

  “… the evidence is there that at least to some degree she did not understand fully …”

 

  Actually he provided no evidence.  But I, on the other hand, have already provided a great deal of evidence so far, that to base what he calls “the common view” on the sentence in Mark 3:21, that they said “He is out of his mind,” stands a high probability of being a misreading of that sentence.  Furthermore, I still have much more evidence to submit.

  Some of what I will now present will apply equally to the rest of the family as well as to Mary, and some will be unique to Mary.

  The first which applied equally to the whole family including Mary were the two propositions I described above and do not need repeating.  Next, we at least should try and find out what the family might or might not have known about Jesus.  Let’s read Luke 1:30-35 –

  ³⁰ But the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary; you have found favor with God.  ³¹ You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus.  ³² He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High.  The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, ³³ and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end.

 

  ³⁴ “How will this be,” Mary asked the angel, “since I am a virgin?”

 

  ³⁵ The angel answered, “The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.  So the holy one to be born will be called the Son of God. (NIV)

 

  With this in mind, please permit me to set my starting point for what is to follow.  I said that I had been told that “the evidence is there that Mary did not fully understand,” and then I said that no evidence was furnished for this claim, at least no evidence beyond the sentence given in Mark 3:21.  In lieu of any other evidence, I will try to furnish some evidence myself, not for the sake of creating a straw man, but for the sake of being prepared for whatever foreseeable objection I might encounter.

  Now, recalling the passage from Luke, above, we can compare it to what was known by the Jewish people as a whole.  The Jews had known for centuries that there was to be a Messiah.  The Messiah is the anointed one.  The name Jesus means “Savior.”

  Now let’s go back to our selection in Mark 3, some 30 years or so later.  We can expect that Jesus’ brothers (and sister(s)) had heard Mary tell of the experience she had of which we read in Luke 1.  Suppose I was to try to suggest that Mary and her family really did think that Jesus was crazy.  On what grounds can we imagine that they might have thought that?

  One possible explanation I have read is that He previously was making an honest living in a secular trade and He gave it up for the life of an itinerant preacher, thus, He must be crazy.  I don’t know if that makes Jesus crazy, but I think that explanation sounds a little crazy.

  If they thought Jesus was crazy, they had to have doubted His identity.  This is exactly the same claim that is universally made concerning John the Baptist in prison (Matt. 11:2-3; Luke 7:18-20), that he doubted Jesus’ identity.

  Jesus’ family couldn’t help but know that Jesus was the Savior because that was His very name.  So could it possibly be that they might have thought that the Savior was one person and the Messiah was someone else?  Or to put it another way, could it possibly be that the Savior, the Son of God, was neither God nor the Messiah?  To state it still another way, could it be that they did not believe that Jesus was God and in fact they believed that He was not God?

  So then, in other words, perhaps they had been dull, inattentive students in school and they never learned Isaiah 7:14:

  The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel. (NIV)

 

  The chances that the members of this Jewish family never learned this or didn’t remember it are low but I suppose it is a possibility.  I struggle to remember all of the state capitols.  They could have missed this little bit of information.

  Perhaps they just plain forgot everything they once knew.  It happens to the best of us sometimes … doesn’t it?

  Perhaps it is just one of the symptoms of the fallenness of man.  Our ability to be certain of things waxes and wanes.  I find this explanation to be compelling … nearly.  It tells me that sometimes we are unsure that Jesus is the Son of God – so we declare Him to be a lunatic?

  That I can tell, the church does not have a definitely stated position as to what was going on in the minds of this poor, pressured family at this time; not anywhere within Protestantism anyway.  So the best answer we are given is something like some of these I have mentioned.

  For whatever truth there might be in any of those answers, observe that every one of them are suppositions; maybe it could be this, that or the other thing.

  And I am told that I am the one making the outlandish claims?!  Something is not right.  Something doesn’t add up here.

  Now I will really focus in on Mary.  This is key because Pastor X used Mary’s behavior to explain John the Baptist’s behavior.  I have three ways to deal with this.

  As I have said before, what I find to be the most persuasive position to take is that Jesus’ family’s arrival was the result of having been alerted in some way about the things that were happening at that house right on that very day, and that probably it was the awareness of the presence of the scribes from Jerusalem that raised their sense of alarm.

  Earlier, we were assuming that they arrived there after making a long trip on foot from Nazareth.  Frankly, I don’t know that I would bet my life on that assumption.  The more I research this episode the more I am inclined to think that Jesus’ family were somewhere nearby at the time.  But at any rate, wherever it is that they were, somehow they were notified, because the events going on at that house that day precipitated their arrival.

  The phrase of interest from Mark 3:21 is, “… they said, He is out of his mind.”  The Matthew Henry comment that I provided suggested that it could be understood that they were concerned for Jesus’ physical condition because of the stress of the situation and Jesus’ need for nourishment.  Some other sources I have found suggest that the claim that Jesus was out of His mind was one that was urged upon His family by others, so His family was following up on that basis.

  I continue to maintain that neither of those explanations corresponds with all of the information that the Bible provides.  Here then is the first of my three approaches for reaching an accurate understanding of Mary’s behavior during this event.