Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was

Again he entered the synagogue, and a man was there who had a withered hand. They watched him to see whether he would cure him on the sabbath, so that they might accuse him. And he said to the man who had the withered hand, “Come forward.” Then he said to them, “Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the sabbath, to save life or to kill?” But they were silent. He looked around at them with anger; he was grieved at their hardness of heart and said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He stretched it out, and his hand was restored. The Pharisees went out and immediately conspired with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him.

No question: it is not only a person’s illness that is being healed here. This is more: the healing becomes a demonstration, provoked by Jesus’ opponents who are watching his every move, even lurking about in the hope that they can put the law on him. That very attitude forces Jesus to react quite clearly. He calls the crippled man forward. This healing is meant

to be a provocation. It is to show that the Torah is to be interpreted in light of what God really wants: in this case, to save life or give back life that has been lost or diminished, whatever the circumstances.

The healing becomes a symbolic act that says something fundamental about Jesus’ attitude toward the Torah. What really should happen privately and quietly, namely, the healing of a person, becomes in the face of the hardening of his opponents a public, provocative sign that extends far beyond the pure act of healing.

New Family

Mark 3:20-35 brings us a step further. We could title this part of the text “The Founding of a New Family.”⁶ The three-part story first presents us with the kind of enmity Jesus encounters when he begins to gather Israel for the reign of God. The resistance comes from two quarters: Jesus’ own relatives, who simply call him “crazy” (3:21), and the Jerusalem authorities, who have sent scribes to Galilee to observe Jesus. They, in turn, demonize Jesus by saying he is possessed by an evil spirit and does his miracles with the aid of the supreme evil spirit (3:22). Jesus warns the scribes with a saying about sin against the Holy Spirit, but he dismisses his relatives, who have come to put him under house arrest, with the curt question, “Who are my mother and my brothers?” (3:33).

But the narrative intends more than simply to illustrate the resistance to Jesus. It only gets to its real point when Jesus constitutes a “new family,” the family of those who do the will of God: “And looking at those who sat around him, he said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother’” (3:34-35).

In Israel, “doing the will of God” in and of itself meant following the Torah. But that cannot be what is intended in this situation, because Jesus’ family and relatives certainly kept the Torah. The common formula has acquired a new meaning. Here “doing the will of God” can only mean learning from Jesus what the living will of God is for “today,” the today that has broken upon Israel with Jesus’ appearing, and then responding obediently to this “today.” Whoever does that becomes Jesus’ brother, sister, and mother, and so belongs to Jesus’ new family.

As important as it is to rightly understand what “the will of God” has to mean in this passage, it is equally important to take the form of the saying seriously. Jesus is formulating his words here not merely in high rhetorical style, but even in juridical terms.⁷

Looking at the people seated around him, he speaks a declaratory formula analogous to one that was used at marriages in Israel (and also in divorces):⁸ “This is my mother, and these are my brothers!” The whole scene—like the healing of the man with the withered hand—is a kind of demonstration or illustration. We could also say that it is a definitive statement of intent. And yet such terminology is not adequate to what is happening here. Jesus wants to do more than merely declare or illustrate, just as the symbolic actions of the Old Testament prophets were more than illustrations or demonstrative declarations of intent. There is something creative in a symbolic action; it establishes a new reality. In our case it even has a formal-juridical dimension: Jesus releases himself from his physical relations and establishes a “new family.”

So what is related in Mark 3:20-35 is not a mere incident, and what he says about those who now follow the will of God is not simply rhetoric. Anyone who knows what clan and family mean in the Middle East can only see in Jesus’ distancing himself from his own family an event that cuts deeply into social relationships, something that is anything but innocuous.

The Installation of the Twelve