Bible Commentaries

This is one of the few occasions on which it is said that Christ was angry. Particularly note the reason for His anger: "When He had looked round about on them with anger, being grieved at the hardening of their hearts." What a picture these next verses give us of the thronging of the crowds! Perhaps there is no other picture in the Gospels quite equal to it for life, and color, and movement.

The time had now arrived for setting apart His workers.

1. "He . . . calleth unto Him whom He Himself would."

2. "They went unto Him."

3. "He appointed twelve, that they might be with Him, and that He might send them forth." The chosen are "appointed" to two things, first, to be with Him; and, second, to be sent forth.

Here is chronicled the effect which the news of His ceaseless activity had on His kinsfolk at Nazareth. These brothers of the Lord never had had any great confidence in Him, and in all probability He spoke out of the depth of His own experience when He said, "A man's foes shall be they of his own household."

No more solemn and awful words ever fell from the lips of Jesus than those in which He referred to "eternal sin" (see R.V.). That sin is the sin against the Holy Spirit, the deliberate, willful, and final rejection of His ministry. His kinsfolk, the account of whose setting out to Him is contained in the earlier part of the chapter, here arrive. They were come, from whatever motive, to hinder Him in His work. It must have cost Him suffering to how that neither His mother nor His nearest relations understood that He was carrying out the will of God.