happening, his relatives came to take charge of him. “He is
out of his mind,” they said.
Reflection:
Today, we have the shortest gospel reading of the entire year,
but one that speaks volumes about who we are! We all long
to be special and extraordinary but cannot risk our securities
and step beyond ourselves; and for the same reason, we
simply cannot bear someone else doing so! Thus, we love
to normalize everything and everyone around us, so as to feel
good about ourselves. In other words, we hate outliers and cut
them to size. A line from the movie Three Idiots captures this
dynamic: “When our friends fail, we feel bad; when they succeed,
we feel worse.” Jesus himself reminded his people that “no
prophet is honoured among his own people.” No wonder
the relatives of Jesus could not bear his growing uniqueness
and popularity and, hence, had to label him “out of mind.” How
do we treat the outliers in our families, religious communities,
our little worlds?
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