A plot for His assassination was secretly on foot. And at this juncture
the incident of my text, which we owe to Mark alone of the Evangelists,
occurs. Christ’s friends, apparently the members of His own family--sad
to say, as would appear from the context, including His mother--came with
a kindly design to rescue their misguided kinsman from danger, and
laying hands upon Him, to carry Him off to some safe restraint in
Nazareth, where He might indulge His delusions without doing any harm to
Himself. They wish to excuse His eccentricities on the ground that He
is not quite responsible--scarcely Himself; and so to blunt the point of
the more hostile explanation of the Pharisees that He is in league with
Beelzebub.
Conceive of that! The
Incarnate Wisdom shielded by friends from the accusation that He is a
demoniac by the apology that He is a lunatic! . . . There is nothing that commonplace men hate like anything fresh and
original.
-- Alexander Maclaren (1826-1910), Exposition on Mark 3:21
