July 5, 2009 | 8:00 a.m.

Madness over Familiarity

Joyce Shin
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 48
Ezekiel 2:1–7
Mark 6:1–13

Much madness is divinest sense
. . .
Much sense the starkest madness.
’Tis the majority
In this, as all, prevails.
Assent, and you are sane;
Demur, you’re straightway dangerous,
And handled with a chain.

Emily Dickinson

Jesus had been very busy, preaching good news all over Galilee, teaching through parables, and demonstrating God’s good news not just in word but also in deed. So remarkable were Jesus’ deeds that his fame soon spread and crowds grew. The Gospel of Mark talks about the amazement of the crowds. After Jesus cast out an unclean spirit from a man, the people, Marks tells us, “were all amazed.” After Jesus enabled a man who had been paralyzed to stand and walk again, Mark tells us, the people “were all amazed and glorified God, saying, ‘We have never seen anything like this!’” After Jesus brought back to life a little girl who had died, the people “were overcome with amazement.” Time after time, Mark ends his accounts of Jesus’ miracles with words about the crowds’ amazement.

This isn’t the only response Jesus received. In the passage you heard this morning, Jesus had returned to his hometown, and there he received a very different response. Teaching on the sabbath in the synagogue among people whom he knew and who had known him all his life, Jesus was received not with amazement, but with disbelief. That is why New Testament scholar Lamar Williamson calls this particular story an “un-miracle story.” In contrast to the many miracle stories preceding this story, this story ends with Mark’s statement about the crowd’s unbelief. Questions of initial astonishment, such as “Where did this man get all this? What is this wisdom that has been given to him? What deeds of power are being done by his hands!” were not allowed to take their full course, were not allowed to bloom into belief. Rather, belief was hindered by other immediate thoughts: “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?” Stumbling over their familiarity with Jesus, they couldn’t believe in him or in the good news of his words and deeds. So Mark tells us that instead the people of Jesus’ hometown took offense at Jesus and that this time Jesus was the one who “was amazed at their unbelief.”

In the face of their rejection and perhaps trying to make sense of it, Jesus paraphrased an old proverb, a proverb about the rejection that prophets face from their own people. “Prophets are not without honor,” Jesus said, “except in their hometown.”

The rejection of a prophet by his or her own people was a theme common in prophetic literature, and we find it reverberating in the passage we read from the Old Testament book of the prophet Ezekiel. In that passage, Ezekiel is being commissioned by God to be his prophet. God says to him,

Mortal, I am sending you to the people of Israel, to a nation of rebels who have rebelled against me. . . . And you, O mortal, do not be afraid of them, and do not be afraid of their words, though briers and thorns surround you and you live among scorpions; do not be afraid of their words, and do not be dismayed at their looks, for they are a rebellious house. You shall speak my words to them, whether they hear or refuse to hear.

Ezekiel was called by God to be a prophet to his own people—Israelites who, like Ezekiel, had been exiled to Babylon, an unfamiliar land. Although he shared the same language, concepts, traditions, and history with the people to whom he spoke, he would be received by them as though they were briers and thorns, scorpions, and rebels. They would look at him as though he were crazy. And, in fact, he may have appeared a bit crazy to them. Ezekiel is known to have been one of the more eccentric of the Old Testament prophets. He is reported to have performed eccentric acts, to have experienced levitation and telepathy, and to have had outbursts of uncontrolled and intemperate language—so much so that his actions gave rise to speculation about his mental and physical condition. Biblical scholars have long raised questions about whether Ezekiel may have suffered a wide range of psychosomatic disorders.

If you and I had met Ezekiel, we might have labeled him crazy—not just because of the levitation or telepathy that he may have experienced, but because, as history has shown us repeatedly, the public often protests against prophets, calling them crazy, mad.

In his lifetime, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. prophetically spoke out not only against racial discrimination against black Americans, but also against what he considered to be our nation’s wrong policies in Vietnam. As reported by his colleague Vincent Harding, after King gave a speech at Riverside Church in New York City in which he vociferously opposed the war in Vietnam, many fellow black Americans said to him, “Martin King, you’re crazy, because that’s not Christian stuff, that’s not civil rights stuff, and besides Lyndon Johnson is going to have your behind if you keep doing that” (Vincent Harding, “Martin Luther King Jr.: Dangerous Prophet,” in Cloud of Witnesses, edited by Jim Wallis and Joyce Hollyday, p. 85). In 1963 the assistant director of the FBI said, “We must mark King now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this nation” (Cloud of Witnesses, p. 82).

Labeling as crazy, marking as mad, slips easily into identifying as “dangerous.” This is, I think, what the great nineteenth-century American poet Emily Dickinson so astutely articulated in her poem “Much Madness Is Divinest Sense”:

Much madness is divinest sense
. . .
Much sense the starkest madness.
’Tis the majority
In this, as all, prevails.
Assent, and you are sane;
Demur, you’re straightway dangerous,
And handled with a chain.

Turning back to the Gospel of Mark, it is clear that Jesus’ identity is being questioned by every group he encounters. Everyone, whether stranger, friend, family, or foe, wants to know who it is that Jesus says he is and from where his authority comes. While strangers are amazed by Jesus and foes consider him dangerous, people from his hometown wonder if he is crazy. In chapter 3, hearing of Jesus’ return home and what their fellow villagers are saying about him—“He has gone out of his mind”—Jesus’ family tries to restrain him. Then in the passage I read earlier from chapter 6, it is clear that the people from his hometown cannot believe that the wisdom with which Jesus teaches and the power by which he demonstrates the gospel are divine.

It must have been strange for those who had known Jesus since he was a young boy to see him become something of a celebrity, to hear from neighboring villages that he was attracting crowds of people everywhere he went, to behold his audacity as he taught with authority. We don’t know much of anything about Jesus’ boyhood or teenage years. Most of the stories about Jesus as a young boy were written so long after Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were written that the church fathers decided not to include them in the biblical canon as we have it. So we do not know if Jesus was in some ways a regular kid who did regular kid things. If he had been, it would be understandable that those who had known Jesus during his childhood and teenage years and had known the family from which he came would have the hardest time overcoming their familiarity of him in order to accept the divinity of his words and deeds. The familiar, when relied upon too much, has a way of blocking out possibilities of a new reality.

You know, when you’re the youngest in a family, it is quite difficult to maintain an aura of mystery. Everyone else in the family has known you all your life. Older siblings remember about you the good, the bad, and the mundane; so it is nearly impossible to surprise anyone. That is why I am delighted to tell you this story. At the time of my ordination into the ministry of Word and Sacrament, I had returned to my hometown of Richmond, Kentucky, so that I could be ordained at the church in which I had grown up, before the congregation that had known me since I was in preschool, and in the presence of my parents and older sister. My older sister had flown in from Arizona, making a special trip for this occasion. The ordination service was lovely. As the ritual requires, hands were laid on me. Prayers were spoken on my behalf, and at the reception many people offered me words of support and affirmation. Then when the service and reception ended, my sister and I got in the car to leave the church parking lot. That is when my big sis, who has known and cared for me all my life, looked at me and, as unexpected as it was to herself as to me, burst into laughter. I joined her. Together we laughed until tears streamed down our faces: she at the irony of having a little sister who had never given her a single day of peace become a pastor, and I at the delight of finally surprising my big sister.

I am sure that you too can recall episodes in your lives when over-familiarity functioned ironically as a stumbling block, causing you or someone else to trip where everyone thought the ground was firm and flat. Such episodes don’t always lead to laughter. They often lead to anger, and in the case of the prophets and the prophetic tradition of our faith, familiarity often leads to rejection. Prophets, as Jesus said, are rejected by their own hometown, by their own kin, by their own household.

And this isn’t all. The people are rejected by the prophet. When, out of a sense of over-familiarity, his own people reject him, Jesus moves on. He leaves his hometown and moves on to other villages, and he commands his disciples to move on as well. In his commissioning of the twelve disciples, Jesus tells them how to respond when people refuse to receive their message: as a warning to them, the disciples are to shake off the dust that is on their feet just as they are to shake off such people. Then they are to move on.

From village to village, from city to city, Jesus and his disciples were on the go. What eventually became the church began as what New Testament scholars call the Jesus movement. There has never been a great movement in history without great prophets, and the church is certainly no exception. Whether through social critique or activism, prophets have always taken it upon themselves to call for reformation. “Reformed and always reforming”—that is the Reformation slogan that we use to describe ourselves. The church, if it is to live up to this understanding of itself, can’t afford to lose its prophetic edge. We must heed the warning of the prophets, so that as the family of Christ we ourselves don’t become overly familiar with Jesus and overly complacent with the church, so that we do not lose that divine sense of madness.