The Ultimate Start-Up

His Own Holy Desire

(Mark 3:13-21, Preaching: Pastor Stephen Magee, September 16, 2018)

[13] And he went up on the mountain and called to him those whom he desired, and they came to him. [14] And he appointed twelve (whom he also named apostles) so that they might be with him and he might send them out to preach [15] and have authority to cast out demons. [16] He appointed the twelve: Simon (to whom he gave the name Peter); [17] James the son of Zebedee and John the brother of James (to whom he gave the name Boanerges, that is, Sons of Thunder); [18] Andrew, and Philip, and Bartholomew, and Matthew, and Thomas, and James the son of Alphaeus, and Thaddaeus, and Simon the Zealot, [19] and Judas Iscariot, who betrayed him.

[20] Then he went home, and the crowd gathered again, so that they could not even eat. [21] And when his family heard it, they went out to seize him, for they were saying, “He is out of his mind.”

Jesus

As Jesus appoints the men who will be leaders in His church, we are left with no doubt that His will is supreme in the kingdom that He is establishing (Ephesians 1:10). He is the one who chooses them and calls them to Himself. We are told that these are the people “whom He desired” (literally those “He wanted”) and they came to Him.

He will have twelve apostles – men who would be sent out by Him on a mission that will ultimately change the entire world. They will be “with Him,” not to stay secure in their ease but to be sent out. Their ministry will be like His: they will be “sent out to preach” and they will also have “authority to cast out demons.” Everything that they have will be an extension of who their Master is. As He would later say, He would be the vine and those He would send out would be the branches (John 15:4-5, 20:21).

The Twelve

Most striking about these twelve men is that they were very unlikely candidates for the job. They did not have obvious qualities that recommended them for this historic role. Some of them we still know very little about. The unfathomable fact is that one in their number would be a betrayer.

All in all, the key requirement that set the twelve apart from their contemporaries was their chosenness. And what were they chosen for? Not a life of ease, but one of uncommon suffering in service of a Man who died on a cross and rose from the dead.

His Family

As we have considered before, the ministry of Jesus, one that the twelve will share with Him (Ephesians 2:20) together with other prophetic leaders in the first century church, attracted enormous attention. Normal life became nearly impossibly for this group of men. We are told that “they could not even eat” in peace because so many people wanted access to them, and especially to Jesus.

All this attention was very unnerving to His natural born family. When they heard about what was happening, they decided to stage some kind of intervention. “They went out to seize Him.” Why? They had come to the conclusion that their brother was “out of His mind.”

Who can doubt that it would have been challenging for sinful and envious men to grow up in the same family as Jesus of Nazareth? Let's look at the evidence. From the moment when Mary conceived the Christ, her life together with that of Joseph was thrown into disorder, almost resulting in the end of their relationship before it even began (Matthew 1:19). We may think of angel visitation as a great idea, but if we consider the evidence more carefully we must acknowledge that this way of being directed by God was exceptionally unsettling (Matthew 2:13-23). The messages coming from those with prophetic gifts were also troubling since they pointed to upheaval and emotional agony (Luke 2:34-35).

What about the relationships with the extended family that can be such a blessing in any family desiring a stable home life? When Jesus was 12 and traveled with the large group of family and friends up to Jerusalem, he stayed behind and did not tell anyone. His mother was beside herself, and His response to her “distress” would not have been all that reassuring (Luke 2:49).

What about His adult brothers when Jesus began His whirlwind public ministry? They did not believe in Him, and He points out the painful fact that they lived their lives with a different worldview than He had (John 7:1-9). This was no small matter because Jesus' way of speaking and living ended up putting Himself and anyone around Him in the middle of a gigantic controversy that might get violent at any time, and His brothers were right in the middle of it, and not by their choice (John 7:10-13 and the rest of John's gospel).

There is no indication that His brothers believed in Him until after His resurrection (1 Corinthians 15:7). Two of them would enter the ranks of New Testament writers, James and Jude. We learn of the new life that these men had from the opening words of their letters (James 1:1, Jude 1). All of this helps us to think more deliberately about this earlier assessment of their brother that we read in Mark 3:21, “They were saying, 'He is out of his mind.'”

What is God revealing to us here? Jesus was and is in charge. A real man in a world of danger, He was also truly the second person of the Godhead – How uncomfortable! God was with people. In the words of Isaiah 5:8-9, “My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” He has His own goals, His own way to achieve them, and His own will.

He does not need the best and the brightest to succeed. It is our privilege to be on His side. We are not doing Him a needed favor by believing in Him and serving Him.

Finally, the resurrection does not come to earth because we say so. The final verdict on Jesus and the gospel was never ultimately a matter of human opinion. He is the Sovereign Lord over heaven and earth.

Old Testament Reading—Psalm 75 – It is I

New Testament Reading—Hebrews 4 – Draw near the throne of grace