Episode 72: Mark 17–My Mother and Brothers. Fictive Kinship in the Bible.

Teaching this is always emotional for me. We’re going to talk about the family of God today, the “fictive” kinship group that joins together every believer from the very beginning (whether we like it or not). Ironically, what brings on this discussion is the episode of rejection by Yeshua’s/Jesus’s own family who are convinced that he is “existemi” or psychologically deranged. What is membership in the family of God based upon and why was this so controversial?

Transcript below:
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Mark 17—My Mother and Brothers—Fictive Kinship in the Body of Messiah.  Ep 72  8/14

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.”

 ²² And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem were saying, “He is possessed by Beelzebul,” and “by the prince of demons he casts out the demons.” ²³ And he called them to him and said to them in parables, “How can Satan cast out Satan? ²⁴ If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. ²⁵ And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand. ²⁶ And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but is coming to an end. ²⁷ But no one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his goods, unless he first binds the strong man. Then indeed he may plunder his house. ²⁸ “Truly, I say to you, all sins will be forgiven the children of man, and whatever blasphemies they utter, ²⁹ but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin”—³⁰ for they were saying, “He has an unclean spirit.”

³¹ And his mother and his brothers came, and standing outside they sent to him and called him. ³² And a crowd was sitting around him, and they said to him, “Your mother and your brothers are outside, seeking you.”  ³³ And he answered them, “Who are my mother and my brothers?” ³⁴ And looking about at those who sat around him, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! ³⁵ For whoever does the will of God, he is my brother and sister and mother.”

Same verses as last week, of course, but last week we only covered the inside out this Markan sandwich, which is what scholars call Mark’s habit of sticking one story inside another related story. Whereas last week we covered the inside, the meat of His being rejected and accused by the Jerusalem envoys, this week we will cover the bread—which is very similar in that we see His family doing roughly the same exact thing to Him.

This teaching is going to be somewhat of a smorgasbord of kinship vs fictive kinship, honor and shame, insiders vs outsiders. All that jazz. Of course, I’ve written books about the first and second of those topics, but I don’t think I’ve ever actually taught about the insiders and outsiders in the Gospel of Mark, and elsewhere, so that part should be fun. And I am also going to tie it to the Cross at the very end. Which means, if you recall, that I will undoubtedly start crying because I have never been able to talk about the Passion of our Savior without breaking down. So, if you don’t like women crying, best you turn the channel right now. It just is what it is. If, on the other hand, you hate me and love to hear me crying or know other people who would love to hear me crying—call them and let them know.

Hi, I am Tyler Dawn Rosenquist and welcome to Character in Context, where I teach the historical and ancient sociological context of Scripture with an eye to developing the character of the Messiah. If you prefer written material, I have five years’ worth of blog at theancientbridge.com as well as my six books available on amazon—including a four-volume curriculum series dedicated to teaching Scriptural context in a way that even kids can understand it, called Context for Kids—and I have two video channels on YouTube with free Bible teachings for both adults and kids. You can find the link for those on my website. Past broadcasts of this program can be found at characterincontext.podbean.com and transcripts can be had for most broadcasts at theancientbridge.com

All Scripture this week comes courtesy of the ESV, the English Standard Version but you can follow along with whatever Bible you want. A list of my resources can be found attached to the transcript for Part two of this series at theancientbridge.com.

²⁰ Then he went home, and the crowd gathered again, so that they could not even eat. 

Yeshua has been away, preaching, and He returns home. Where is home? The house of Peter’s mother in law, the home base they were using originally in Capernaum or perhaps He has by this time rented another home. We have two important words in use here. Last week we had the oikos/oikia paring of home and house and this week we are going to add the word crowd, ochlos. We see the crowds referenced a lot but I don’t often mention them. This week I will mention them because it’s important to know the audience that all of this is being played out for.

Throughout all the Gospels, you have named characters, unnamed characters, named groups, and the crowd. The crowd serves as an important backdrop—how are they responding and what are they doing in reaction to Yeshua’s preaching, His deeds, and His bold claims. So far, we have seen them amazed and astonished—that’s their prime attitude toward Yeshua. They hunt Him down when He retreats to solitude. They press in and demand healings, deliverance, and miracles no matter where He is or what He is doing, and if you don’t feel that is a problem, imagine needing to go outside to go to the bathroom. Greco-Roman cities had public latrines and so I do assume that Capernaum would have them as well. There were certainly public toilets atop the Temple Mount. But they were, yeah, public. Do you think they would leave Him alone there when they wouldn’t allow Him to even eat in the house where He was staying? The crowd is demanding, always wanting to touch Him. Sometimes He had to retreat to the shoreline and get into a boat so they could keep their distance. This picture isn’t that much different than the paparazzi crowding in around someone famous hoping to get a money shot. I also imagine that this crowd could be very noisy, making it difficult to teach and preach. As I have stated on many occasions, their needs were desperate but they come across more like beasts than people. And I am not speaking in order to make them seem inhuman. Each one of the crowd was a Jewish man, woman, or child who was living under terrible oppression and probably poverty, and with a level of need and sickness we can’t imagine. They were, as Yeshua says elsewhere, like sheep without a shepherd.  Imagine if Superbowl fans were permitted to all go down on the field after their team won the game. Imagine them mobbing the MVP, just hoping to touch him or to be able to see him up close. And now imagine the MVP could heal their kid of cancer. So, I don’t judge these people. My heart aches for them even as their behavior frustrates me because they have largely been missing the message up to this point. Will this change? Let’s keep reading to find out.

²¹ And when his family heard it, they went out to seize him, for they were saying, “He is out of his mind.”

When His family heard what? That he had created such a spectacle in Capernaum? That He was causing such a fuss that the house He was in found itself constantly mobbed? That He was allowing this to happen to the point where there might be riots and Herodian intervention? Whatever it was that they heard, they had to be very fearful right now for the safety of the family honor. Indeed, honor was so important in those times that they had to be thinking he was crazy in order to risk the reputation of their entire family for generations to come.

Let’s do a crash course on honor and shame here, so we can see the dilemma of Yeshua’s family and try to see this from their side. Remember, they have no narrator. They don’t know the end of the story and we can’t treat them as though they do. First, I want you to know that Mary will not be in charge of this rescue mission. Yeshua’s brothers will be in charge. We learn their identity in Matthew 13:55-6 and later in Mark 6 on his ill-fated preaching mission to His hometown of Nazareth:

 Is not this the carpenter’s son? Is not his mother called Mary? And are not his brothers James and Joseph and Simon and Judas? And are not all his sisters with us? Where then did this man get all these things?”

So, in Hebrew, His brothers would be named Ya’akov (translated as Jacob into English in the OT). Yosef, Shimon, and Yehudah (Judah, which here has been Hellenized to make it masculine as names ending with an “a” sound were feminine in Greco-Roman culture). And He has sisters but they are no doubt married off by the time Yeshua is thirty and all his brothers likely are grown and gainfully employed with families of their own. I know that the Catholics like to make Mary out the be a perpetual virgin, but that would have been incredibly shameful for her and proof to her neighbors that she was indeed an adulteress. However, having five sons and at least two daughters would put her in the Biblically sweet spot of the number seven and would be seen as symbolic of having God’s favor. Although sex really only became shameful a few hundred years ago, it was not so in Bible times. It was the way to produce children. Period. A fertile woman was a proud woman who was honoring her husband and her entire family. No blushing required. It was only the barren woman who was subjected to shame.

But it was the job of these sons, heck, traditionally it was the #1 job of Yeshua Himself to protect and promote the family honor. And we might think, “Well, He’s certainly popular!” Yes, He was popular, but with all the wrong people—people like them! Not people who were wealthy and powerful and who had high honor themselves. Honor, in ancient times and in 2/3 of the world today, had nothing to do with an internalized moral code. It was all about renown. Fame. A reputation for being excellent. Status. That sort of thing. You could be a low-down dirty skunk and still have high status and be respected. We live differently now in part because Yeshua changed the way we perceive what makes a man excellent. We look at his integrity and understand that a beggar can have more integrity than a King. They saw a beggar and their understanding was that the beggar was an unworthy, shameful lout who was obviously cursed by God. And so was his family! I hope you can understand how important the Beatitudes were in combatting these attitudes, and why the Torah tells us to support the vulnerable—the people who society was shaming.

But what Yeshua’s brothers knew was that what Yeshua was doing was extremely dangerous. He was walking on a knife’s edge. The only thing was–if He fell then they all would get cut to shreds. They would be irrevocably shamed and ruined for generations to come. Potentially no one would do business with them, leading to their starvation and ruin and especially as Joseph, their father, had just been a lowly artisan (a very low social class of laborer, not like today) and so that’s what they were as well. Yeshua is thirty and so His brothers are easily all in their twenties and married with families already of their own. As first-born, it would have been considered Yeshua’s job to care for His mother Miriam (if Joseph were alive, He would be leading this expedition as patriarch) and yet He wasn’t doing it. Leaving that task to His brothers was already very embarrassing for the family. What does Matthew 19:29 say about this?

And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands, for my name’s sake, will receive a hundredfold and will inherit eternal life.

This isn’t just talking about financial ruin, but personal shame. To leave the family to fend for themselves was to shame oneself terribly—and them as well. People wouldn’t look kindly on it. These disciples gave up jobs yes, but also their honor status within the community (as mediocre as that generally would be at least it was something—every social strata had its own rankings). So, we see the brothers coming to lay hands on Him and probably knock some sense into Him. “Take care of our mother like an honorable son! No more of this foolishness, you’re just an artisan laborer’s son, after all! Stop attracting the attention of our betters!” Yes, they would absolutely see better educated people, wealthier people, powerful people as inherently superior. That’s how these honor/shame societies work. Check out my curriculum book Context for Kids, Vol 1: Honor and Shame in the Bible, if you want to learn more. Most of the people who read it are actually adults, from what I hear. Let’s quickly review last week’s section before moving on. I am not going to teach it again but I want you to see the accusation from the Scribes and how Yeshua handles that before looking at how He handles the drama with His family.

²² And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem were saying, “He is possessed by Beelzebul,” and “by the prince of demons he casts out the demons.” ²³ And he called them to him and said to them in parables, “How can Satan cast out Satan? ²⁴ If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. ²⁵ And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand. ²⁶ And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but is coming to an end. ²⁷ But no one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his goods, unless he first binds the strong man. Then indeed he may plunder his house. ²⁸ “Truly, I say to you, all sins will be forgiven the children of man, and whatever blasphemies they utter, ²⁹ but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin”—³⁰ for they were saying, “He has an unclean spirit.”

As we covered last week, this was done in the presence of the crowds, the ochlos. Honor challenges, where public accusations were made and countered for the sole purpose of making yourself look good by making the other guy look bad (like High School, and the internet) had to be performed in front of an audience. The audience would decide who came out on top and certainly up to this point Yeshua has been coming out on top, as we can see by the “amazed and astonished” following He has gathered around Him. Everyone who has challenged Him has lost face, lost public standing, and He has gained it. It really seems as though His family should be riding high, but as we saw in Matthew 19 and will see in Mark 6 (presumably this has yet to happen), Nazareth is not accepting of His newfound fame. But, as we also saw last week, if they had followed Him and if Nazareth had been declared a seduced city, they would have all been in danger of being put to the sword and all their possessions put under the ban (destroyed). Nazareth had more to lose than anyone in following after this messianic claimant. But perhaps, as Chapter six is a long way away, all His family has heard at this point are rumors and they are rightfully alarmed. Up to this point, Yeshua had been acting like a normal guy—with few exceptions. If it had been otherwise, then Mark six would not present such a shocked reaction in the synagogue and there certainly would have been earlier inquiries. Apart from the claims of later heretical Gnostic Gospels, we see no evidence that Yeshua was working miracles, delivering, or healing anyone before the beginning of His public ministry.

³¹ And his mother and his brothers came, and standing outside they sent to him and called him. 

So, His mother and at least two of His brothers came. Although James (Jacob) and Judas (Jude) later become heavy hitters in the first-century church, we never hear anything about His other two brothers. But they were standing outside. And unlike the four men with the paralytic, they could have entered if they had wanted to. This crowd looked at Yeshua as having more honor than themselves and would have extended that honor to His family. They would have cleared a path and treated them with just as much deference as Yeshua. But they stood outside and called for Him to come outside too. And this is going to be a major theme in Yeshua’s teachings beginning next week when we start in with the parables. Inside, people are flocking to Him. He can’t even eat because people want to be near Him, to touch Him, to eat with Him, to be healed by Him. All but (1) the Scribes who call Him demon-possessed and (2) His family who say he is existemi, psychologically deranged. To be existemi, although not as alarming to us as being demon-possessed, was actually just as serious in some ways. Although mental illness was often regarded by pagans as a sign of being touched by the gods, among the Jews it was not. It was a curse—they obviously would have no understanding of chemical imbalances in the brain and only recently, over the past five hundred years, even begun to see that the brain was actually responsible for thinking (the Greeks finally figured that out—but on a funny note, the Egyptian view of the brain was typical of the ancient world, they thought it was skull wadding and so threw it out during the mummification process because they didn’t think it was needed in the afterlife. They instead saved the heart, which they believed was responsible for rational thought.)

But for the Jews, if a person was stricken in this way, it would reflect badly on the family. Actually, I ought to mention that this was true in some ultra-orthodox Jewish communities as well, at least as recently as fifty years ago. A great book—Holy Woman: The Road to Greatness of Rebbetzin Chaya Sarah Kramer—talks about this in the early kibbutz decades after World War II. Jewish families would take their brain-damaged and mentally ill children and give them to Chaya Sarah so that their other children could still get married. They would literally pretend like this other child did not exist because no one wanted to marry into a family with “issues.” Times have changed drastically in the last century, for sure, and thank God the stigma of mental illness has greatly decreased. It is no longer as mysterious as it was or considered a curse from God within a growing number of cultures. So, that’s an honor/shame culture right there in modern-day Israel. The family was stigmatized if there was a mental issue and the other children couldn’t find husbands and wives. How tragic! It’s a glimpse into what Yeshua’s family was worried about.

I want you to remember that the family remains outside, of their own free will.

³² And a crowd was sitting around him, and they said to him, “Your mother and your brothers are outside, seeking you.”  

The ochlos is doing something different than normal—they are sitting around Him. Although they are preventing Him from eating, at least this isn’t an unruly and desperate crowd trying to touch Him. This is a positive thing. Something has suddenly changed. These normal, everyday, probably mostly faithful Jews had just watched this miracle worker defeat, in verbal battle, envoys who were probably sent by the Supreme Court of Jerusalem, the Sanhedrin. You really need to understand this. Envoys from Jerusalem were listened to, respected, and obeyed. There were penalties for refusal and if you want to learn about them then you can read a good commentary on Mishnah Tractate Sanhedrin. But because they were socially required to see the envoys as their superiors and worthy of the utmost respect (even though they were only legal retainers of the upper class and not upper class themselves), all that respect, and their attention and their ears are now transferred over to Yeshua. Now, they will listen and so the narrative changes in the coming chapters to Yeshua teaching, and to us being able to read about His teachings. Understanding honor and shame sociology is so important or we miss what is going on and just inject our modern ideas into the text, which rarely works out well. It sometimes leads us to the opposite of the truth!

So, the crowd informs Him of the situation outside. They undoubtedly expected Him to go to His family. That’s what they would have done. The closest relationships in the ancient Near Eastern world were (1) the relationship between mother and son, because the men always remained embedded in their father’s family and so the firstborn especially would be with his mother for the duration of his life, (2) brother/sister—as there is no competition there or rivalries, but it was still lesser than the relationship between a man and his mother because, at some point, the sister would leave and become embedded in her husband’s family, and below those in importance would be the relationship between brothers, between husband and wife, and between father and son. It had a lot to do with who you spent the most time with and under what conditions. Until coming of age, children rarely had any relations with their father—and then obviously the focus was on training up the son in the family business. Education was carried out by the mother and would vary depending on gender. Boys learned early on to be fiercely protective of the women in the family because it was very easy to shame a family simply by disgracing one of the women. Note that I talk about all of this in-depth in Context for Adults: Sexuality, Social Identity and Kinship Relations in the Bible. Teaching sociology is my favorite thing but I can’t do it in any depth in fifty minutes and a lot of the stuff we struggle with in the Torah can more easily be explained once we understand these mindsets. Fathers/husbands were home at mealtime and bedtime and that’s about it. Otherwise, they were either working or hanging out with other men. Girls would barely even know their fathers by the time they were married off to another family. This is the family reality of Biblical days and the frame of reference from which we must read all family interactions. This isn’t Little House on the Prairie.

Now Yeshua is about to do something utterly shocking:

³³ And he answered them, “Who are my mother and my brothers?” 

He didn’t get up and go. He didn’t even exercise the prerogative of the firstborn in telling them to come inside to Him. In fact, he’s not acting even remotely logically here, by social standards, where nothing on this earth was more important or sacred than one’s kinship group. Just the question alone sounded nuts, and they couldn’t even begin to imagine where He was going with this—into the unthinkable, as it turned out.

³⁴ And looking about at those who sat around him, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! 

Yeshua just blasted through one of the unassailable social norms of the ancient world. He has brought into question the importance of blood and kinship ties.  There were voluntary groups in the ancient world and there were kinship groups. No one would place a voluntary association as being on a higher plane of existence and significance than the kinship community that you were either born or adopted into (birth/adoption were considered equivalent and irrevocable). The Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Essenes, and the Herodians are all examples of voluntary associations. Although loyalty played a part in them, it was always a very distant second to your actual kinship clan. Although, as we can see from all the infighting, these voluntary factions had become a huge problem. In the Hebrew Scriptures, we see people organized by father’s house (clan), tribe (one of the 13), and nation (Jews or foreigners). But, due to Greco-Roman influences, factions had popped up in the three hundred years before the birth of Yeshua. Now, being a Pharisee took precedence over Nation. I like to think of it in terms of the book Animal Farm, “All Animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” The factions were like that—as factions always are. “All Jews are better than the pagan nations around us, but some of us are more Jewish than other Jews. And some Jews are only marginally better than heathens.” That last bit I included because that’s what the Qumran sect was often expressing in quite a few documents found among the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Let’s repeat the verse again and explore it some more:

³⁴ And looking about at those who sat around him, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! ³⁵ For whoever does the will of God, he is my brother and sister and mother.”

Make no mistake—instead of slamming factions as He did when speaking to the Scribes in the teaching last week when He was talking about divided Kingdoms and houses and the ruin it had brought to the Jewish people—now He is announcing the creation of a brand new faction, a new kinship group based on who is and is not accepting of Him and allying themselves with Him. I don’t want you to think He is disowning His family as this is not happening at all, but they are moving toward disowning Him and are thus providing Him with an opportunity to set up His own, alternative “fictive” kinship group based on choice and not upon genetics. But what is a fictive kinship group? It’s actually just what it sounds like—fictive is a word related to the much better-known fiction, which means an imaginary invention. We know all about fiction and non-fiction books. Fiction would be CS Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe whereas his memoirs and apologetic works would be non-fiction. Fictive is similar, and in this case, fictive kinship means kinship based on something other than actual literal family ties. It’s a real family, but it is also fictional. Your church or synagogue “family” is an example of fictive kinship. You are bound together by choice and not because you were born into it. For example, in my own life, I have two brothers and no sisters but in the fictive family that Yeshua created, based upon allegiance to Him as Messiah and Savior, I have billions and maybe trillions over the course of the last two thousand years. I may not know them, or even like them, but we are family because Yeshua says so.

But more than all of this—what did this declaration mean to the ochlos, the crowd? It meant that the honor they had given Him over the Jerusalem envoys—He was now sharing with everyone who would choose to be in this fictive kinship group. In modern terms, He was owning them and not rejecting them. And we have to view this in the same way—although we may be shamed by people in this world, in a very real and eternal sense we are actually honored when we endure and do not deny Yeshua, despite the terrible kinds of persecution that many non-Western believers live with on a daily basis. When our brothers and sisters in the Eastern world endure imprisonment and torture, lose their jobs and sometimes their families and sadly, even their lives—without compromising the witness of Yeshua and their love/loyalty toward Him, that all counts as honor within the fictive family of God. I mean, certainly we aren’t actually blood relatives of God and Yeshua left behind no progeny (thank goodness or they would have possibly been worshipped by converts accustomed to worshipping Caesar and his successors as gods). But we don’t need to be blood relatives, or even Jewish, to be members of the family of God because Yeshua opened up that avenue of relationship through Himself. In fact, He states that He is “The way, the truth and the life and no man comes to the Father except through…” Him. And it’s because of this new kinship group determined not through genetics but through allegiance. Salvation is about allegiance—that’s why it is not of works. You can’t just follow all the rules while thumbing your nose at actually allying yourself with God through His Messiah. They might make you a nicer person (or not, it’s amazing how evil some folks can be while claiming to be “Torah Observant” (which no one actually is), and hopefully they would if someone is sincere about loving God and neighbor, but without allegiance, they are worth very little. They cannot save on their own.

I said I was going to talk about the Cross and tie it back into all this, because I haven’t yet talked about family based on who is doing the will of the Father.

A fictive kinship group describes the phenomenon where people claim family status with non-blood kin based upon some other agreed upon criteria (the best example might be the kinship between men who were part of the same platoon for the duration of a war). In this case, Yeshua (Jesus) claims that all who do the will of God are part of Yeshua’s kinship group. So, what then is the will of the Father in Heaven? Sometimes we come up with easy, pat answers. I was wondering how to present the horrifying shame of the cross to younger people – because even Mel Gibson’s The Passion portrayed a dignified Messiah on the cross, in terrible pain and yet allowed to retain His dignity. We in the West like to focus on His suffering as though physical pain is the worst possible, and yet a teenager who cuts himself in order to avoid the pain within testifies to the fact that physical pain is not the worst manifestation of agony. Crucifixion wasn’t about physical pain, it was about stripping a man of his most precious commodity, his honor – subjecting him to utter and complete ruination, agony within and without, stripping Him of every shred of dignity and then allowing him to endure that shame as he died very slowly to the delight of the gathered crowds. There are things about crucifixion that no movie would ever dare portray. Our Savior was humiliated beyond our ability to comprehend, but we don’t like looking at a shamed Messiah. We like to see Him up there, wronged but still a picture of dignity. He had to bear our shame, and our humiliation – and our shame and humiliation, well-deserved, could not be dressed up in dignity. We don’t want to really see what our shame looked like. Really, it doesn’t look nearly as bad when the only pain being inflicted is portrayed as physical. People from honor/shame cultures understand this intrinsically, and are unwilling to dishonor Yeshua once they have tasted His salvation; they die before denying Him whereas in the West, we often don’t even want to face our family’s disapproval if we choose to celebrate Passover and Sukkot instead of Easter and Christmas.

John 19:25-27 but standing by the cross of Jesus were his mother and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to his mother, “Woman, behold, your son!” Then he said to the disciple, “Behold, your mother!” And from that hour the disciple took her to his own home.

Why the mention of this? I always wondered. Mary had several other sons – she had men to take care of her. Why give her to John? Yeshua, as firstborn, could only hand His mother over to a family member, and why was John always referred to as the “disciple Jesus loved?”

“For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.”

And I understood, there at the foot of the cross we learned the will of the Father – look upon the full shame of the cross and never, ever look away again. Never forget what our shame looked like. Never forget the sight of the Man who bore it for us. We can’t turn our heads away from the shame that He endured, our shame, the full measure of it. In crucifixion there was no dignity afforded the victim. He was not given the dignity of being clothed even in a loincloth, the flies and birds probably didn’t leave Him alone, flogging and crucifixion were designed to wear a man out so quickly that he wouldn’t even retain control over his own bowels and bladder. We want a dignified Savior because it hurts too badly to look at the true measure and seriousness of our shameful sins. Over and over again throughout the Scriptures, front to back, we are told of that shame, and the penalty of that shame. That shame had to be taken away by someone, and we can at least look at it, and once we do we had better never think we can turn away or deny it. We were freed yes, and we should rejoice, but we don’t dare forget it.

“Take up your cross and follow me.”

To be crucified was the greatest shame imaginable, and we are commanded to own that shame as having been our own, and to live in such a way as to never purposefully shame Him again.

Heb 6:4-6 For it is impossible, in the case of those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, and have shared in the Holy Spirit, and have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the age to come, and then have fallen away, to restore them again to repentance, since they are crucifying once again the Son of God to their own harm and holding him up to contempt.

We cannot accept His suffering for our shame and then reduce Him to shame again by denying Him. If we deny Yeshua, we are saying that He rightly died as a criminal for the crime of claiming to be the Son of God. We are guilty of convicting the one who was shamed for our sake – we cannot hold Him up to that shame and contempt again after that. Peter denied Yeshua before He went through that shame, but never afterward. Not one of them denied Him or ran away afterward.

Hebrews 9:27 tells us plainly that man is destined to die once – we cannot crucify our Master again.

People in honor/shame cultures understand this. They are willing to face death, even at the hands of their own families. Six times in I Corinthians, Paul talks about the foolishness of the cross, and of the foolishness of the wisdom of God – as perceived by the world. To follow a shamed criminal in the first-century world was a stumbling block for the Judeans (many of the Jerusalem elites) and foolishness to the Gentiles.

In the end, as He was about to die, Yeshua hung there in full sight of the mockers and scoffers who watched crucifixions for the entertaining public spectacle that they were – and He hung there in front of His mother, brother and sisters – naked, His genitalia swollen for the crowd to gawk at, His body distorted out of shape, covered in His own blood and feces. His mother Mary, John, Mary, wife of Cleopas and Mary Magdalene were the only ones there. In the end, they did not despise the shame of the cross, they looked at that shame with both eyes opened – they did the will of the Father in Heaven and never turned away. It is loyalty, and not genetics, that set them apart as His family – and in the end, that meant that Yeshua only had one brother to whom He could entrust His mother.

But the resurrection was coming and there would be, thank God, many more coming.