Phrases from today’s three scripture passages resonate deeply during this season of colds, coughs, flus, sore throats, and the like.
A woman in bed with a fever…Jesus enters her room, takes her by the hand, lifts her up, and she is immediately well.
Hearing that there is a healer in town, throngs of the ill are brought to where he is, and Jesus, the General Practitioner, cures many who are sick with various diseases.
The psalm reminds us that as early as the ancient songs of Israel were first sung, the Divine is portrayed as one who heals. “God heals the brokenhearted; God binds up their wounds…” From this ancient songbook we read of God who lifts up those who are depressed, and provides delicious food and refreshing drink so that all can be healthy.
The prophet Isaiah, writing some 500 years before Jesus lived, assures the people: God will give power to the weak; God strengthens the powerless; and in one of scripture’s most encouraging passages, we hear Isaiah promise that, “those who wait for God will renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.”
Last Sunday, about this time, as you were worshiping here, I was completing another half marathon. This one was along the beautiful shoreline of the Pacific Ocean in Huntington Beach. As I crossed the finish line, one announcer happened to enthusiastically yell into the microphone, “We are taking the church to the streets today!” I smiled, for it was just about straight up noon…the church hour in America.
Earlier in the morning, I had experienced some of that Divine healing energy about which our morning scriptures speak. Within the first 3 or 4 miles, as the paths for the full marathon and half marathon ran parallel on opposite sides of Pacific Coast Highway, I was blessed to see the front runners of the marathon. One young black man, long strides, full smile, arms like wings helping him all but fly on the course…he was out front, running, as scripture says, but not at all weary. Behind him, dozens of runners, heads held high, countenances glowing, robustly mounting up like eagles on the wing.
I am grateful that I was able to join these athletes in embodying scripture last Sunday…taking the church to the streets…for there I was, just as scripture promises, walking and not fainting! Thanks to the aid provided every mile—cold, fresh drinking water; electrolyte-filled energy drink; at one station, orange slices; at another Clif bars—without peanuts, thank you! God’s healing energy was present—providing and encouraging—all along that 13.1 mile route.
Perhaps you, too, have sensed God’s healing in this past week, as you have faced the flu season or the cancer season or the grief season or the depression season or the loss of job season or any of a number of other potentially-debilitating paths that we all walk in this life. Perhaps there have been moments for you, too, of being lifted like an eagle on the wing; of running and not becoming too weary to continue; of walking and, surprisingly, not fainting. Perhaps God has reached to touch you and lift you as you lay in your sick bed. Perhaps, thanks to God, your broken heart is mending and your wounds now have stitches and clean bandages. Perhaps you are among the world’s fortunate to have eaten delicious food and drank refreshing water to revitalize your body and soul this past week. If any of this has been true for you, as it has for me, then you and I gratefully join the ranks of the first century crowds who flocked around Jesus, and who, without paying a cent, were given a new shot at life. Free health care: that’s one reason for the quick popularity of Christ’s ministry—in the first century and in ours.
Mark’s gospel story—which we are reading for most of this year—portrays a fast-moving Christ, who, in the first chapter alone, appears on the scene for baptism, goes into the wilderness for strengthening and cross-training, gathers around him a few strong disciples, and immediately begins a controversial ministry of healing people for free. One author by the name of Ted Smith writing about this gospel narrative notes with humor that “Mark begins like an alarm clock, persistently declaring the time and demanding some response.” I’ve often said that Mark reads like it was written by someone who was double-parked. It takes off, without the beautiful infancy narratives, no manger, no shepherds, no elderly prophets singing praise to God in the temple as they hold the promised One, a baby, in their arms.
Instead of easing into the story of Christ, as do the other gospels, Mark quickly sets the scene for what will soon become a very controversial kind of ministry. The backdrops for the Jesus story in Mark’s first chapter are quick, compact accounts that you’ll miss if you blink—a 5-verse account of John the Baptist preaching, 3 short verses of Jesus being baptized and then only 2 verses describing his being driven into the wilderness. This first chapter continues with an abbreviated calling of the disciples, and moves immediately into the stories of healing and teaching—stories that form the beginning—in fact, the heart—of Jesus’ public ministry.
In the passage we read today from the end of that first chapter, Jesus seems to be vacillating between his two very real gifts of healing and teaching. The passage begins as Jesus enters the sickroom of the mother-in-law of one of his new disciples, Simon, who later will be known as Peter. Simon’s mother-in-law—let’s call her Freda—has a fever, and we can surmise that it has been severe enough to keep her in bed for some time. Who of us cannot relate to that?! Freda is ill. Presumably, Jesus and the disciples show up hungry on her doorstep, having just left the synagogue next door where Jesus created quite a stir by teaching and healing indiscriminately. Freda hears them out on the step, and moans as she turns over in her bed. Someone lets them in, or perhaps Simon himself enters first…it is, after all, his home, too. Like many families today, Simon’s household is not made up of two spouses and their children. His mother-in-law is not only living with him but is apparently in charge of hospitality, a role that, in their day, carries its own particular honor. There are many reasons Freda may have moved in, including dependency on Simon because she had no other male to provide for her, or perhaps because Simon needed her help in running the household while he fished.
At any rate, we can imagine Jesus following Simon into the home, sniffing illness in the air, and with the authority of a doctor striding to the forward cabin at 35,000’ in the air, Jesus confidently and quickly finds his patient Freda. No conversation is recorded between them. No words of comfort spoken by Jesus. No lead-in at all, other than that he is told what he already knows as a healer to be true…Freda is ill. The author of Mark writes, “Jesus came and took her by the hand and lifted her up. Then the fever left her, and she began to serve them.”
A moment earlier, Freda was unable to assume her role as chief cook and chair of the hospitality committee. Her fever prevented her from taking her place in the community. In raising Freda up, Jesus restored her to her rightful place in her home and her role within her community, and she proceeded directly to fulfilling it.
We know from the next verses, that word spread quickly about this healer, this Jesus. For by nightfall, the entire community of Capernaum where Freda and her family lived, was gathered at their front door. They brought all who had fevers, who were depressed, the mentally ill, those who had lost jobs or friendships or dreams, and as it is written, “the whole city was gathered around the door.” Of course it was! For in this, friends, the first century is no different than ours. They were all in need of healing…and so are we.
I am touched by the image of an entire city gathered at the doorway of a home where a healer is in residence. Here we see vulnerable humanity at its finest. Here we see hope, more than in any political campaign or inaugural prayer or speech. Here, one by one, the people assemble, crawling, running if they can, pushing forward in the crowd so as to see and possibly be made whole. A touching scene, this is.
You see, in this passage, as in the rest of the gospel of Mark, Jesus is sweeping through Galilee and taking it by storm. The time is now, Jesus announces. The time for healing has come. As one commentary writer notes, this isn’t the kind of time we keep track of in our calendars and journals: time that is counted in hours, days, weeks, months and years. Jesus is living in an altogether other kind of time. In contrast to chronos time, time we keep with watches and clocks and calendars, Jesus time is known by the Greek word, kairos. Fred Craddock, noted Disciples of Christ preacher describes kairos time as, “a special time, an opportune time, a time in which a constellation of factors creates an unusually significant moment.” It’s the kind of time we long for, especially as communities; and the people of Israel had been waiting for just such a moment, when the heel of the oppressor d’jour would be removed from their throats. And now a healer who healed for free was in town. How could they not gather on the porch of that Capernaum home when their own promised wholeness was so close at hand? It was a moment. It was their moment…finally here.
In a very real and ultimately self-destructive way, Jesus was at the center of that moment. By healing publicly, without cost, anyone who was ill, Jesus was spitting in the face of a first-century health care system that sought to make the rich richer on the weakened backs and the sick souls of the poorest in the Galilean communities. The health care system—if it can even be called that—was one in which an ill person was required to bring a certain amount of sacrifice or payment to the priests in the temple. Since it was believed that all illness was a direct result of sin, illness of whatever form was considered a spiritual or religious matter. According to the system in place, when the proper amount was paid, the priest said the appropriate prayers, and the sick person was sent home to heal. If the person died, well, obviously their death was a sign that they still had some sin in their lives, and their death was therefore their own fault. If they lived, they did so quite a bit poorer than before. Either way, the priests came out on top and the poor who became ill were usually without much hope.
Into this manipulative system sweeps Jesus the healer. Yes, for those who were ill and who experienced the touch of Jesus, their so-called “moment” was certainly one of becoming whole again. We read repeatedly in Mark’s gospel of the joy of those whose sight is restored, fever diminished, or legs energized to walk and run again. Yet, in a broader panoramic way, Jesus the healer confidently strides in with much more than his medical bag under his arm. Here, he begins to confront a system that, from the top down, is one of oppression and injustice. Here he begins to risk his own livelihood by publicly declaiming the integrity of this broken system. Here he starts walking his own sort of marathon—this one that will end, not at a finish line with a colorful medal, but at the cross, with the agents of the system looking on in derision. Yet, here Jesus offers his gifts of healing free of charge, free to anyone in need, knowing full well that to do so will win him no honors.
No wonder that, when this day of intense healing is over, Jesus retires for a bit of rest, and then awakens early before dawn to go out alone to pray. From the beginning of time through the ministries of great saints and evident here in the life of Jesus, mindful contemplation makes possible life-giving ministry and action. Jesus goes “off duty” so he can return to duty, rested and open to the needs of those who seek his care and guidance. This interplay of action and contemplation and contemplation and action is essential for each of us. Stopping to reflect on our lives, to simply “be still” with no need to change our world, of trusting God enough to listen for God’s voice in silence and then respond with graceful action…this is what Jesus models for us in the early morning hours of his day.
There is a sense that, for Jesus as for us, this time alone, however, is not completely peaceful. It reads for Jesus as a time of wrestling and questions, a break in the relentless pace and pressing needs of the crowds, yes, but also a time of wondering about the next step, and perhaps even anguish over the suffering of humanity that engulfs him.
When Jesus is found in that deserted, quiet place by the searching disciples, his response is spiritually “self-differentiated”—as one commentary author notes. Jesus does not compromise his prayer time but lives according to the vision that has emerged in his conversations with God. He recognizes that they must not linger in a familiar place, despite its attractiveness, but must preach and teach in other towns, “for that,” says Jesus to the disciples, “is what I came out to do.” In stillness, we, like Jesus, experience God’s voice amid all the other voices of life calling us back to our own center. Such stillness can strengthen both our sense of self as well as our sense of mission…as free as was the health care Jesus offered in the first century, so does the health-giving option of stillness provide us freely with strength, with vision, with hope, and with an assurance of God’s presence with us, even as we go out to take on the injustices of our century. In waiting for God in the silence, Jesus claimed God’s infinite energy and God’s vision for his life. So also can we. In our own waiting for God, we can emerge running without weariness, and walking without growing faint.
Dianne Bergant’s reflection on this passage is most elegant in its simplicity: “Jesus realizes,” she writes, “that the crowds are coming because they want miracles…[they are there for the show.] He, on the other hand, wants crowds to come to hear the gospel he will preach… The demons seem to know who he is and what he is about, while his followers and the crowds he attracts misunderstand him and his mission. Everything in this episode,” she writes, “is complicated.”
To be sure, the Jesus we encounter this morning is at the center of a complicated moment. Then as now, he will push his disciples, taking us in new and unexpected directions, moving us on in ministry to do what he calls us to do, even if it’s not the most popular thing.
Preaching and healing. Healing and preaching. “This,” Mike Graves writes, “represents the ministry of Jesus in a nutshell, and it represents still the ministry of those [of us] who follow him.”
As we embark on this new year of ministry together with God and with one another, what we can carry from this passage of scripture is nothing short of the miracle of free health care. It is Balance. Balance: of time reckoned by calendars and time bathed in Spirit. Balance: of quiet, solitary contemplation and robust invigorating action. Balance: of healing for self and healing of others. Balance: of preaching and healing, of words and actions. Balance that is well within the power of each of us to accomplish, and like the wholeness Jesus proposed in the first century, it is health care that doesn’t us cost a cent.
