“He Is Beside Himself”

Mk 3.21

The most pathetic life in the history of the world is the life of our Lord Jesus. Before He came, it was already foretold that He would be acquainted with grief, but no imagination had ever conceived the darkness of the reality. It began with one of the bitterest kinds of sorrow—the sorrow of an enforced silence. For thirty years He saw, but dared not act. The wrongs he came to redress were there. The hollowest religion ever known, a mere piece of acting, was being palmed off around Him on every side as the religion of the Living God. He saw the poor trodden upon, the sick unattended, the widow unavenged, His Father’s people scattered, His truth misrepresented and the whole earth filled with hypocrisy and violence. He saw this, grew up among it, knew how to cure it, yet He was dumb—He opened not His mouth.

How He held in his breaking spirit till the slow years dragged themselves out is impossible to comprehend. Then came the public life; the necessity to breathe its atmosphere, the temptation, the contradiction of sinners, the insults of the Pharisees, the attempts on His life, the dullness of His disciples, the Jew’s rejection of Him, the apparent failure of His cause, Gethsemane, and Calvary. Yet these were but the more marked shades in the darkness which blackened the whole path of the “Man of sorrows”.

It was not the way the world treated Him, it was not the Pharisees, it was not something which came from His enemies: it was something His friends did when He left the carpenter shop and went out into the wider life—His friends were watching Him. For some time back they had remarked a certain strangeness about His manner. He had always been strange among His brothers, but now this was growing on Him. He had said much stranger things of late, made many strange plans, gone away on curious errands to strange places. What did it mean? Where was it to end? Were they to be responsible for what He was doing? It was His mind that had become affected. He was beside Himself. In plain English, he was crazy.

What is craziness? It is eccentrically having a different center from other people. Here is a man, for instance, who devoted his life to collecting objects of antiquarian interest, old coins perhaps, or old editions of books. His centre is odd, his life revolves around an orbit of his own. Therefore, his friends say, “He is eccentric.”

Jesus put everything out of his life that had even a temptation in it to move to the world’s centre. He humbled Himself—there is no place in the world’s history vortex for humility. He became of no reputation. He emptied Himself—gravitation cannot act on emptiness.

So the prince of this world came, but found nothing in Him. He found nothing because the true centre of that life was not to be seen. It was with God. The unseen and the eternal moved Him. He did not seek His own happiness, but that of others. He went about doing good. His object in going about was not personal gain, but to do good. Now all this was very eccentric. It was living on new lines altogether. He did God’s will. He pleased not Himself. His centre was to one side of self. He was “beside Himself.”

From the world’s point of view, it was simply madness. He would not go with the multitude. And men were expecting Him to go with the multitude. What the multitude thought, said, and did were the right things to have thought on, said, and done; and if anyone thought, said, or did differently, his folly would be on his own head—he was beside himself, he was crazy.

Every man who lives like Christ produces the same reaction upon the world. This is an inevitable consequence. What men said of Him, if we are true to Him, they will say of you and me. “The servant is not above his master, if they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you.” A Christians must be different from other people. Time has not changed the essential difference between the spirit of the world and the spirit of Christ. Light must conflict with darkness, truth with error. There is no sanctioned place in the world as yet, for a person with God as his goal and and self-denial as his principle. True religion is not milk-and-water experience. It is a sword. It is a burning, consuming heat, which must radiate upon everything around.

This is the New Testament Christian experience, which can seem as so much exaggerations: a new man, a new creature; a new heart, a new birth. His very life has been taken down and recrystallized round a new centre. He has been born again!

The words are hard, but not new. Has it not come down that long line of whom the world was not worthy? Its history is well known. It fell on the first Christians in a painful and very vulgar form. The little church had just begun to live. The disciples stood after the day of Pentecost contemplating that first triumph of Christ’s cause with unbounded joy. At last an impression had been made upon the world. The enterprise was going to succeed, and the whole earth would fill with God’s glory. They little calculated the impression they made on the world was the impression on their own ridiculousness. “What does this mean?” the people asked. It meant, the disciples would have said, that the Holy Ghost who was to come in His name was here, that God’s grace was stirring the hearts of men and moving them to repent. The people had a different answer: “These men,” was the coarse reply, “are full of new wine.”

Not crazy this time, just drunk.

Time passed and Paul tells us the charge was laid at his door. He had made that great speech in the hall of the Caesarean palace before Agrippa and Festus. He told them of the grace of God in his conversion, and closed with an eloquent confession of his Lord. What impression had he made on his audience? The impression of a mad-man. As he thus spake for himself, Festus said with a loud voice to Paul, “You are beside yourself; too much learning has made you go crazy.”

Christ’s religion did not trouble His friends at first. For thirty years, at all events, they were content to put up with it. But as it grew in intensity they lost patience. When He called the twelve disciples they gave him up. His work went on, the world said nothing for some time, but as his career became more and more aberrant, the feelings of His friends (so called) spread and gained universal ground. Even the most beautiful and tender words He uttered were quoted in evidence of His state. For John tells us that after that exquisite discourse in the tenth chapter about the Good Shepherd, there was division among the Jews for these sayings: and many of them said, “He has a devil and is crazy. Why do you listen to Him?” It seemed to them to be utter raving.

Have you ever notice—and there is nothing more touching in history—how Christ’s path narrowed? The first great active period was a year of triumph. The world received him for a time, Vast crowds followed. The Baptist’s audience left him and gathered around the new voice. Palestine rang with the name of Jesus. Noblemen, rulers, and rabbis all vied one with another in entertaining Him. But the excitement died down suddenly and soon. The next year was a year of oppression. The applause was over. The crowds thinned. On every hand He was obstructed. The Sadducees left Him. The Jews, the great mass of the people, gave Him up. His path was narrowing.

With the third period came the end. The path was very narrow now. There were but twelve left to Him when the last act of the drama opens. They are gathered on the stage together for the last time. But it must narrow still. One of the disciples, after receiving the supper, goes out. Eleven are left with Him; Peter soon follows. There are but ten.

One by one they all left the stage, till all forsook Him and fled, and He is left to die alone.

Well might He cry, as He hung there in this awful solitude as if even God had forgotten Him, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

But this is not peculiar to Jesus. It is typical of the life of every Christian—his path, too, must narrow. As he grows in grace, he grows in isolation from this world and its worshipers. He feels that God is detaching his life from all around it and drawing him to Himself for a more intimate fellowship. But as the communion is nearer, the chasm which separates him from his worldly fellow-man must widen. It is a sad reflection that, as in the case of Christ, the keenest suffering may come sometimes still from our own circle of friends.

We think of eccentricity as associated with frenzy, nervousness, excitement, and ungovernable enthusiasm. But the life of Jesus was a calm. It was a life of marvelous composure. The storms were all about it, tumult and tempest, tempest and tumult, waves breaking over Him all the time till the worn body was laid in the grave. But the inner life was as a sea of glass. It was a life of perfect composure. To come near it even now is to be calmed and soothed. Go to it at any moment, the great calm is there. The request to come at any moment was a standing invitation all through His life. Come unto me at my darkest hour, in my heaviest trial, on my busiest day, and I will give you rest. And when the very blood-hounds were gathering in the streets of Jerusalem to haunt Him down, did He not turn to the quaking group around Him and bequeath to them a lasting legacy: “My peace...”?

There was no frenzy about His life, no excitement. In patience and composure the most thrilling miracles were wrought. Men came unto Him and they found not restlessness, but rest. Composure is to be had for faith. We shall be worse than fanatics if we attempt to go along the lonely path without Christ, without His Spirit. We shall do harm, not good. We shall leave half-done work. We shall wear out before our time.

Do not say life is short. Christ’s life was short, yet He finished the work that was given Him to do. He was never in a hurry. And if God has given us anything to do for Him, He will give enough time to finish it with a repose like Christ’s.

To be beside one’s self for Christ’s sake is to be beside Christ, which is man’s chief end for time and eternity.

— Author unknown