When his relatives heard of this, they set out to seize him,
for they said, “He is out of his mind.”
Mark

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 of a soldier/dandy 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 then took her  faith so seriously that she co-founded  the Catholic Worker movement.

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 nuts, according to today’s short but 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 like 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 our 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.   

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.

Within my parish, there’s a woman who accompanied a death row inmate on his road to execution. That’s beyond most of us but another friend spends hours overseeing health care for our refugee family and many others who help at homeless shelters or just reach out to relatives and friends in need.   We can all incorporate at least one regular significant work of charity or justice into our lives.

We may even feel the radical Jesus hovering near us as we take a friend with dementia to coffee to give their caretaker a break. We can strive to be radically kind -- the craziness that Christ asks of all of us.