Notes on the Remainder of Mark 3

In Mark 3:7-35 we have four short sections that highlight the whirlwind of activity and confusion that has come to surround Jesus. At first glance, the vignettes seem to have little to do with one another: crowds swarm Jesus, a list of the twelve disciples, an encounter with the scribes, and Jesus’ enigmatic comment about his family relations. But looking deeper, a thread emerges that holds the four individual passages together to form a single unit and leads nicely into the teaching section that follows.


Verses 7-12 set the tone, a chaotic, threatening, circus-like atmosphere. Great crowds of people surround Jesus, some coming almost 100 miles to see him in Galilee. (Imagine walking from Columbia to Spartanburg for the chance of meeting a man.) Mark mentions that people come from Galilee, a region containing the northernmost reaches of Israel; he specifically mentions Judea (the Southern Kingdom) and Jerusalem, home of the Temple; and he names Idumea, a region containing the southernmost reaches of Israel. Galilee, Judea and Idumea are key locations that essentially mark out the borders of the land of Canaan promised to Abraham, occupied by Joshua’s generation and secured by David. Geographically, Mark shows us that people are coming from the farthest reaches of the Davidic Kingdom to see Jesus. They are even leaving Jerusalem, the Holy City on a Hill, the Temple Mount, to see him. Finally, we should note that Mark mentions Tyre and Sidon, two cities outside the boundaries of Israel. Mark is giving us a clue about Jesus’ broader mission. The true King has arrived on the scene, and his true Kingdom is too big for the old borders to contain it.

However, we also see something of the relationship between Jesus and the crowd. When they heard all that he was doing they came to him and pressed in on him, following him even as he withdrew with his disciples, pursuing him so closely that Jesus feared that he would be crushed by them. No doubt there are those in the crowd who come to Jesus in faith, but Mark’s language gives the sense that most of those who come do so while making demands of Jesus or to simply see the spectacle of his works.


Contrast 3:7-12 with verses 13-21. Finally Jesus is able to retreat from the crowds. Instead of being followed and pressed in upon, Jesus chooses “those whom he desired.” He takes hold of them and separates them from the crowd (the same way God takes hold of us and separates us from the crowds when he calls into a life of worship. Thus, our Sunday morning service begins with the call to worship.) He renames them (a kind of transformation), naming them “apostles”, apostelous in the Greek, derived from the verb aposteleo, meaning “I send.” In renaming them, Jesus transforms them into sent ones and consecrates them for a special task, “that they might be with him and he might send them out to preach and have authority to cast out demons.”

(Likewise, through the process of conviction, confession, repentance, forgiveness and cleansing [1 John 1:9] we are transformed for the purpose of being with God. In our service we follow confession / assurance with ascension in the Lord’s presence, that is the bringing of an offering and talking with him in prayer. We are then further transformed through the preaching of the Word and consecrated by it with the task of going out and incorporating it into our day-to-day lives, sent ones from God that we may bear witness to his goodness, mercy and redemption.)

After this brief retreat with his friends, Jesus returns to his family, who promptly questions his sanity.


In verses 22-30 the scribes’ accusation sounds remarkably similar to that of Jesus’ family, if not in the particular charge, at least in the general sense that both parties betray that they know exactly nothing about who Jesus really is. On the one hand it’s amazing that either should be so off. Had Joseph and Mary never spoken about those incredible events that surrounded Jesus’ birth? Shouldn’t his family, upon seeing his miracles and power, say with wonder, “It’s true!” And the scribes – they were teachers of the Law, people who were trained and accepted as authorities in what the Scriptures say. But they had obscured what the Scriptures say. Hidden it and distorted it with self-made religion and tradition. Those Scriptures that they prided themselves in knowing so well were pointing them to Jesus; and now, when they come face-to-face with him, instead of hailing him as the Messiah from God, they accuse him of colluding with Satan. They weren’t simply confused. They weren’t just off the mark, misinformed, or mistaken. They looked God in the face and told him that he belongs in Hell.

More precisely, they saw the work of the Holy Spirit and called it the work of Satan. It wasn’t only that they blasphemed, made a rash statement out of sinful anger and malice. It was that, with that 180° perversion of the truth - a truth that they had tasted a hundred times over in their studies – they declared their final, unequivocal, irreversible rejection of Christ. As scribes they had tasted the goodness of the word of God, they had drunk the rain and they had born only thorns and thistles (Heb 6:4-8).

Jesus points out the foolishness of their assertion and then pronounces judgment on them.


Now we get to verses 31-35, the end of the thread that runs through these passages and binds them to the teaching section that opens chapter 4. If we were going to toss out the divisions and section headings that come in our study Bibles and replace them with our own, we might title Mark 3:7-30 “The Different Relationships People Have to Jesus.” Mark has masterfully given us the feel of what Jesus’ life was like at this point in his ministry: crowded, harried, somewhat chaotic and threatening. To paint the picture, Mark uses events that center around people and their relations to Jesus. He then anchors the unit with an incident involving Jesus’ actual relations, begging the question, “What is it that marks a person as one who is in a right relationship with Jesus?”

“Whoever does the will of God,” that person is in Jesus’ family.

And then Jesus began to teach.