“You’re mad, bonkers, completely off your head. But I’ll tell you a secret. All the best people are,” said Lewis Carroll in his famous story, Alice in Wonderland.
A couple of weeks ago, I took a day trip to Ocean City, NJ. Once there, I looked for some new and different things to do and discovered that the town has a “historical museum” of the shore’s history. Being a lover of history, I walked several miles to the museum to take it all in. The entrance to the museum was free but one was asked to sign in. Upon coming up to sign the visitor booklet, I asked incredulously if indeed the entry was free. The man behind the glass counter said gruffly, “That depends on what state you’re from.” Taken by surprise, I replied, “I’m from Pennsylvania.” He snorted in disgust, glared at me as though I was a strange kind of beast, and said, “Humph, that’s a blue state.” I gave no response as to my political affiliation but quietly entered and looked around the little museum, feeling like I’d just gone through the looking glass and entered into a foreign kind of territory. Had every venue now been divided into “red” and “blue zones”? This categorization certainly gave the concept of a “blue zone” a whole different meaning! The surprisingly accusatory encounter stunned me. On vacation, the last thing I was thinking about was politics! For this man, it was nearly the only thing that mattered. It was not only the insistence of one point of view but the act of lumping everyone in the entire state of Pennsylvania into one assumed political category that took me aback, and I realized, how easy it is for us as human beings to draw lines in the sand, keeping some people out and accepting others in, our allegiance and adherence set to our own set of rules, assumptions, or even whims. Even more so, how easy it was to deem some people acceptable and others upside down crazy simply due to their thoughts or affiliations. When and how did we as “socially interdependent animals” become so blatantly un-relational? I thought. Surely there must be more to us as human beings than which political party we might subscribe to. Or have we all gone mad?
Perhaps we have. Certainly, the chaotic soup of our current culture might seem to indicate that something strange is going on. As in the day of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, otherwise known as Lewis Carroll, we see “hatters” everywhere. No matter which perspective you take as your view, the “hatters” of our world seem to be for us the ones who threaten the status quo, build power structures, and defend restrictive systems. Yet, this very “status quo” (along with its structures and systems) will change or be redefined, depending on whom you speak with. Through the looking glass indeed!
This is not the first time our world has been divided. Throughout history, people have divided themselves again and again according to identity or preference. As we talked about last week in our discussion of Schadenfreude, it’s much easier to exclude than to include, much easier to fear than to love. Loving is hard. That’s what makes it all the more valuable when we receive it.
But it’s one thing to be unloving and another to “demonize” those who disagree with our own point of view. We seldom demonize those close to us. It can be hard for us to hate those we are in a relationship with. However, those we are not in a relationship with –well, it’s fairly easy to move them in our minds from people like us, to people like “them.” The “others.” From there, it’s even easier to move people from “them” or “other” to “anti-human,” “thing,” “bad apple,” “hatter,” or even “demon.” Here’s the bottom line though. Once you “demonize” someone, you remove their humanity.
Hear that.
Once you demonize someone, you remove their humanity… in your eyes, in the eyes of others –and even in the eyes of those you seek to hurt with that categorization.
You know the old saying about sticks and stones. It’s not entirely true. Words do hurt. They hurt a lot. They can be damaging to you, to those around you, and to those who are the object of your hurt.
And “object” is the key word here. Because when you demonize someone with your words, actions, or implications, you objectify them. And no one (no one here I promise you) wants to be treated as an object. We all want to be treated with the minimal respect due to a child of God.
In our scripture for today….Jesus is master of “crazy love”! For those in authority and power around him, he’s become their chief “mad hatter.” They’ve been tracking him for a while. The more he heals and associates with those the powers that be deem the “dregs” of society, the more stigmatized he becomes. His crowd of followers is growing, so much so that they follow him home and entrench him wherever he goes. The Pharisees and other authorities begin to fear what this will mean politically. Will he bolster an uprising? Will he feed them antagonistic messages about the power of Rome? The power of the Temple authorities? Their authority? Will the people revolt? How threatening is he?
The Pharisees’ fear is growing. At this point, they will go to any lengths to try to turn people away from following this cray-cray prophet who calls himself the Son of God.
So, they up the proverbial ante. They try to get to Jesus through his own family. Perhaps they can shame his family into silencing their wayward “son.”
They nearly succeed.
This is a truly sad moment in our scripture story, and we need to see this to understand how Jesus must have felt at the moment his own family questioned the veracity of his ministry:
“When his family hear it, they went out to restrain him, for people were saying, ‘He has gone out of his mind.’”
The rumor mill had started. The scribes from Jerusalem began “whispering down the alley” that Jesus had gone mad, that he was “Beelzebul” himself! And the gossip spread quickly, as all “good” gossip goes. When word reached Jesus’ mother and brothers that he had gone off the “deep end,” embarrassed and dishonored, they tried to “restrain” him. The word in Greek is “krateo.” They felt a need to regain authority over him and take custody of him due to his “mad” and “off the cuff” activities. They tried to “bring him home.”
How humiliating and disheartening that must have been to Jesus to have his own beloved family question his ministry and his identity, after all he had done for them. And yet, they did.
Jesus’ response is one we will never forget: “Who are my mother and my brothers?” He looked at those surrounding him. “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.” With that, Jesus redefined the meaning of family. That rift would persist until the moment of his crucifixion.
We demonize what we do not know or understand. Shifts of power. Non-conformism. Affiliations. The unknown. We fear difference. We fear healing. We fear power. We fear love. Why does Jesus challenge us so much?
Perhaps because he asks us to love without condition. We find it terribly uncomfortable to live let alone love without conditions.
But Jesus’ idea of an “alternative community” is about loving against the grain! About overriding divisions, debates, politics, classes, money, illnesses, conditions, assumptions, dictums, and dogmas, and instead embracing the world’s people as family –all worthy of God’s love and grace.
Jesus would go on and continue to heal, bless, and love the outcasts, the rejects, and the rankled for the entirety of his ministry. He would go against the grain in every way and form to create a world that put God first and each other second. Where the only “politic” was love and the only family was God’s. For him, anyone who did the “will of God” was eligible for his ragtag to riches kingdom.
“Mad as a hatter?” They thought so. But then, as Lewis Carroll said in the voice of little Alice, “All the best people are.”
Will you be one of them? “Proud to be mad for Jesus!”