CMP Review 2024-10-20

The Old Testament closes with words that open the message of the New: “And he will turn the hearts of the fathers to the children.” It is a message that changed the course of my life, when I realized that when God gave me children, He also gave me a mission.

It is a message of love, reconciliation, and unity. What relationship can be more fruitful, more blessed, more promising, than that between parents and children?

It is this message that makes the pain of Mark 3:21 so acute: “And when his family heard it, they went out to seize [Jesus], for they were saying, ‘He is out of his mind.’” According to James R. Edwards, “the Greek wording is even more explicit: ‘they went to seize him, believing that Jesus had gone berserk.’”

It is a shocking statement, so starting that it does not even appear in the parallel passages in Matthew (12:22) and Luke (11:14). Edwards reminds us that it “is a calculated reminder that those closest to Jesus may indeed oppose him, and that proximity to Jesus—even blood relationship or being called by Jesus—is no substitute for allegiance to Jesus in faith and following.”

In Zechariah 13, the blessed prophet prophesies: “And one will say to him, ‘What are these wounds between your arms?’ Then he will answer, ‘Those with which I was wounded in the house of my friends.’”

Read or hear Charlotte Mason’s poem about the wounds that hurt the most, wounds at the hands of our friends. Find it here.

@artmiddlekauff