Out of His Mind

Homily for Saturday of the Second Week in Ordinary Time

When Jesus takes over people’s lives, they sometimes do seemingly crazy things.

St. Francis of Assisi stripped off his fine garments in the middle of town embarrassing his rich father who was appalled that his son became a mendicant friar.

St. Ignatius of Loyola abandoned the dissolute life as a soldier to fast and pray for days on end enroute to forming his “company” of Jesus.

Dorothy Day shocked her bohemian friends by converting to Catholicism and then took her faith so seriously that she co-founded the Catholic Worker movement.

Damien de Veuster and Marianne Cope volunteered to remain on the island of Molokai to care for the people who were forced to live in a leper colony.

But if giving up a privileged life to do something radical for Christ is crazy, we have to remember that some of Jesus’ relatives thought he was crazy, according to two short verses in today’s powerful Gospel from Mark. “They (his relatives) set out to seize him, for they said, ‘He is out of his mind.’”

Certainly, Jesus made radical demands that sounded crazy, such as telling his followers to put out their eyes or cut off their hands if they are instruments of sin. We don’t take these commands literally but how crazy do serious followers of Jesus have to be?

We rule out serious physical harm, finding it hard to believe that penances like flagellation were once mainstream. Yet radically selfless people like St. Maximilian Kolbe, who was murdered in place of another inmate in a Nazi concentration camp, are properly considered heroic, not insane.  

We really do not have to look far to find such heroes in the history of Christianity. As the Letter to the Hebrews so wonderfully points out, we are “surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses” as we run our own race to the arms of Jesus. Hopefully, we are willing to be at least a little crazy for Christ even if that just means stepping outside our convenience zones on behalf of others.