They said, ‘He is out of his mind.’ In the course of Jesus’ public ministry, he heard all manner of accusations labeled against him. The accusations, coming from those who did not either understand or refused to accept Jesus as having come from God, were all related to the things that Jesus said or to the things that he did as he preached the good news. And whereas the majority of the accusations were out of contempt, the accusation about which we hear in today’s Gospel reading was out of concern. The family of Jesus, hearing of how the crowds pressing to seek Jesus’ attention had prevented him from eating, set off to where Jesus was in order to seize him and perhaps force him to eat. They reasoned that only someone who was out of his mind could ‘forego’ such a life-giving, human act.
The family of Jesus was right to be concerned about Jesus well-being. At any rate, without eating, he would not be able to continue ministering to the many people who always thronged about him. It was an understandable concern, and it showed that they cared about Jesus and his ministry.
Whereas we don’t know if ‘skipping’ meals (or rather being forced to skip meals) had become a pattern, the one thing that is very clear is the people’s thirst for the good news that Jesus was proclaiming. As would later be remarked, Jesus had found a people who were lost and dejected, a people who were longing for the good news of God coming to visit them. In Jesus’ words and actions, the people had come to realize that the promises which God had made to the people had finally come to be fulfilled. God had finally come to visite them. While Jesus would have loved not to skip or push back his meal times, he perhaps also realized that there were those in the crowds that had waited for the entirety of their lives a touch of God’s good news. And perhaps unbeknownst to his family, Jesus was aware that as long as he was doing God’s will, God was going to take care of him. After all, one does not live by bread alone but by every word that comes forth from the mouth of God (cf. Matthew 4:4).