You Can't Depend on Anybody These Days - Item 3 of 3

Doubting Doubt

(Table of Contents - Click This Link)

The Process

Step 3 – He is Beside Himself (cont.) 

What About Mary?

  * You Can't Depend on Anybody These Days

    What do we know about people?  Well, one thing that we know about people is that we can be highly unpredictable.  As a general rule we all live our lives fairly similarly and consistently.  But there are those occasions when someone will say or do something that we never would have expected in a million years.  It catches us by surprise.  It shocks us.  It perplexes us.  And it grabs our attention and we ask, “Why?”  We want an answer.

  So then, we read in the Bible about John the Baptist, the very herald for Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God, as Jesus is described in Mark 1:1.  And we learn that John had been thrown into prison.  The first thing about this situation that grabs our attention is that we recognize that surely it must have been very distressing for John.  The second thing that grabs our attention is that we read that John sends disciples to inquire of Jesus and determine His identity.  We are surprised.  John doesn’t know?!

  Yet we put the two pieces of data together.  We know ourselves well enough that we can imagine that if we were in such a strait we might doubt too.  I must confess, there have been times in the past that I said to myself, “This Jesus is just too great and wonderful for words!  Am I imagining things or what?  Can this Christianity stuff be for real?”

  Yes, I remember very well that I used to have such thoughts.  I really don’t anymore.  Just the same, my amazement that Christ could save even a wretch like me had nothing to do with doubting Jesus’ identity.  There is a big difference between being staggered by the wonderment of salvation and connecting John’s prison predicament with the sending of the two messengers and arriving at the manufactured conclusion that “therefore he doubted.”

  At any rate, it certainly appears on the surface as though he doubted, and though we are surprised, it makes sense to us.  With no difficulty at all we force the conclusion to explain what appears to be John’s remarkable inconsistency.

  “What about Mary?” is the question we’re dealing with now.  What astounding inconsistency we seem to be faced with when we read “they said, ‘He is out of His mind.’”  But we know ourselves well enough to know that we, ourselves, are capable of practically inexplicable unpredictability and inconsistency.  Surely Mary would be the last person on earth who would doubt, yet it seems that that is what we are being told in Mark 3:21.  It baffles us.  We require an explanation.  So without blinking an eye, without even a second thought, we say, “It could happen!”  It is the “I’m only human” explanation.

  People can be amazingly unpredictable and inconsistent.  Peoples’ inconsistency makes the news every day.

  But there is one category of people who are so dependable and reliable in certain respects and so highly consistent in regards to certain traits that when we speak of them we regularly describe them with expressions such as “They always do such and such,” or “They always are like this or that.”

  What is this category of people?

  Mothers.

  Mothers have always evoked such expressions from us, no matter where or when.  In every country and culture on earth you will hear us speaking about our mothers with such terms.  They are so highly consistent regarding their motherly traits that their reliability in these ways is just a given fact.

  To suggest that Mary could have lapsed into such a distinct lack of confidence in Jesus, her Son, that she would go all the way as to charge Him with mental collapse, is to suggest a trait that is so contrary to one of the most consistent traits known to man, and is to suggest a characteristic that is so abnormally inconsistent to one that we all know so well, that you might as well suggest that water can turn and run uphill.

  “Yes, I know that,” someone will say to me.  “That is why it is so confusing when I read that she did that.  But I believe the Bible and that’s what the Bible says.”

  My dear reader, would you suppose that the Bible would have you to believe a lie?  Before you draw such an unlikely conclusion, don’t you think you might try to look at things a different way first?

  Apart from very rare exceptions, motherhood consists of qualities that are very highly consistent.  Dear, dear reader … think about it:

  It is your mother who was there loving you before you even knew you were you.  Your mother lifted you in her arms and bathed you and dressed you and fed you.  Your mother bought you things and played with you; she encouraged you on your first day in school and cried for you when you had to go.  She rooted for you when you were growing and achieving and learning.  No unkind word about you from anyone would she permit.  You could get yourself in the worst of troubles and she would be there faithfully for you even when no one else would.  And when even the smallest thing went well for you there was no one who was happier for you in all the world.

  That was your own mother.  Is it really the first thing you would believe without the slightest question that Mary would possess these traits all that much less, to such an extent that it hardly even resembled motherhood, the motherhood that all people the world over have known so well throughout all the centuries?

  Please – ask me to believe that a daisy can’t bring a smile or that a baby can’t melt a heart before you ask me to believe such a thing.  What you are asking is too hard for me; it is too much.  There must be another explanation.

  “I’m sorry,” the other person would say to me.  “Monty, I know it’s hard.  But I didn’t write the book.  That’s what it says.”

  “Are you sure you’ve read it correctly?” I would ask.  “Are you really certain?”

  And the other person answers, “That’s what the whole church teaches.  We all know it.  You say Mary didn’t think Jesus was crazy.  We say she did.  Stalemate.”

 

  “Not really …”