Sunday, February 12, 2012
Epiphany 6B
Jerusalem Baptist Church (Emmerton), Warsaw VA
Text: Mark 1:40-45
40 A leper* came to him begging him, and kneeling* he said to him, ‘If you choose, you can make me clean.’ 41Moved with pity,* Jesus* stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, ‘I do choose. Be made clean!’ 42Immediately the leprosy* left him, and he was made clean. 43After sternly warning him he sent him away at once, 44saying to him, ‘See that you say nothing to anyone; but go, show yourself to the priest, and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded, as a testimony to them.’ 45But he went out and began to proclaim it freely, and to spread the word, so that Jesus* could no longer go into a town openly, but stayed out in the country; and people came to him from every quarter.
Have you ever done something nice or kind for someone and later come to regret it? A simple act of mercy, a momentary act of friendship and kindness that turned out to be not so good? It would seem to be the case for what Jesus did in this morning’s passage. Maybe something backfired.
A stranger approaches you and asks for some money. You happen to have some handy, not too much, but enough, and you don’t NEED it, so you give it to him, and what ends up happening is that the person begins to show up every so often, asking for ‘help’ – gas money, money for a bill, money for some food, whatever seems to be the need of the day, and you get caught up in this repeating cycle where you are aware that what is happening, while in one way it’s a good thing, in another way it is not so good for the long-term health of your relationship, OR for the person you are ‘helping’.
At first, this doesn’t seem to be a bad thing that Jesus does. After all, this is kind of Jesus’ THING – to heal people, and in Mark to tell them NOT to tell …
It is a straightforward telling. There don’t seem to be many nuances to explore or unravel. There’s a simple step-by-step progression. The stage is set with the leper coming to Jesus, asking to be healed. Jesus responds – predictably – by healing him. Jesus warns the man to not tell anyone, but to go and show himself to the priest in order to be reinstated into society. Remember, that was the process to be followed. He did the same thing when he healed the ten lepers and only one of them came back to thank him. The local priest had the say on whether or not someone was allowed to remain with the ‘in’ crowd or whether they were to be banished. Imagine the power of a simple yes or no from that man.
If I were to ask you to stop and think for a minute and choose three or four words that would describe Jesus, I would imagine that ‘compassionate’ would probably be at or near the top of the list. In the first verse of the passage I read a few minutes ago, the writer says Jesus was moved with pity – another word for compassion – when the man asked to be healed. But there is a letter next to the word in my Bible that refers me to a brief note at the bottom of the page, and the note says: ‘Other ancient authorities read anger’.
It is worth noting the different wording because what it tells us is that a few – sometimes maybe even more than a few – of the earliest manuscripts that have been found of this passage have the alternate wording in them – manuscripts that are in some instances older than the ones that began to use the ‘accepted’ or current wording.
So it is worth stopping to consider the implications of the alternate version of the verse. What would be going on if the emotion was, in fact, anger, that moved Jesus? How does that change the meaning of the events that are then related in the passage?
We tend to think of anger as something nearly opposite of compassion, don’t we? Compassion is the word, it is the understood emotion, and it is the one that describes so much of Jesus’ character. It DOESN’T seem to make sense that Jesus’ response would even approach anger … but let’s entertain that thought for a moment.
In the movie ‘The Blind Side’ the true story is told of the Tuohys, a well-to-do white southern family who take in a seventeen year-old young black man and how their lives are changed by the experience.
In one scene, Leigh Anne Tuohy is having lunch with three of her friends in what seems to be a country club restaurant and they are joking with her about Michael, the young man. One of them makes a joke about “why don’t you go ahead and make it official and just adopt him?” Leigh Anne’s response is to say that, “He’s almost eighteen, it doesn’t make sense to go through the adoption process at this point.” She answers the joke in full seriousness, letting her friends know just how profoundly the experience has affected her.
Her friends are stunned into silence when they realize this. One of them speaks up and asks her if what she is doing is prompted by some sense of ‘white guilt’, another asks what her father says about it. As it turns out, Leigh Anne’s father was an outspoken racist, he was also dead five years at that point in their lives, something Leigh Anne points out to her friend, asking if she wondered what he was saying before or after rolling over in his grave. Leigh Anne also points out that what makes her comment even worse is that she attended the funeral. She goes on to respond with these words: “I don’t need y’all to approve my choices, but I DO ask that you respect them. You have no idea what this boy has been through, and if this is going to become some running diatribe, I can find an overpriced salad a LOT closer to home.”
Her friends are appropriately ashamed, and they apologize to her. One speaks up and says how much she admires what she is doing in welcoming Michael into her home, that she is changing his life. Leigh Anne’s response is “No, he’s changing mine.”
There is a degree of anger that can be prompted when compassion is engaged. It is anger that is directed at the conditions that make compassion necessary – it is anger at the idea that selflessly doing something good for someone could be questioned and even criticized as naïve or stupid – senselessly acting in a miniscule way in the face of an overwhelming onslaught of “that’s the way the world IS.” Or even that you are simply not SUPPOSED to interact with ‘certain people’, as the religious leadership was so eager to point out to Jesus.
In this case, I believe I can understand if the original word WAS anger – on Jesus’ part – because he knew that what he was about to do would change the hopes that he had of setting out to bring his message to the people of Galilee. It also explains a little more for me this ‘Messianic Secret’ thing that is so much more present in the Gospel according to Mark – where he performs some miraculous healing or does something that makes it patently obvious that he IS the Messiah, but after doing or saying that thing he tells the people most affected – and convinced – by it to not tell a SOUL about what they’ve seen and heard.
What was the outcome of Jesus’ healing of the leper? The leper goes out and tells EVERYONE he comes in contact with about what has happened to him, and names Jesus, points to him and calls him the Messiah, says he’s the one – in short, he does everything BUT what Jesus told him to do – which was to BE QUIET about being healed. You’ve got to admit, it WAS kind of hard to keep something like that to yourself.
And what was the outcome of THAT – of his not being able to obey Jesus’ stern warning to not tell anyone? “Jesus could not go into a town openly, but stayed out in the country; and the people came to him from every quarter.”
So Jesus wasn’t able to keep going into the towns, to preach in their synagogues, to proclaim the message of the good news, like he had been up until he met this man.
But you know what is interesting? We’re not even out of the first chapter of the Gospel yet. If there was a derailment in the original plan, it still worked out. The Gospel was still proclaimed, people kept being healed, kept coming to and following Jesus, and the message has continued even to this day to be proclaimed.
Jesus realized really quickly that his ministry was going to consist of interruptions – needy people always clamoring for his attention, crying from the roadside, grasping at his garment hem, lowering a sickbed through the roof, trying to get the healing he can offer them. You can't blame them. These are people in need. But I imagine that living with constant, overwhelming requests for help would be exhausting for anyone, and Jesus had so much to do and so little time. I imagine that if Jesus were angry for a moment, it may have been, in part, at the realization that there would never be just a sermon, just a dinner with friends, just a moment to pray. He was going to have to live with continual interruption.
We live with continual interruptions too, don't we? There is always something coming up, something clamoring for our attention. As those interruptions arise, we struggle to balance them: a stranger whose car needs a jumpstart when we're already late for a committee meeting or a daughter's soccer game. A child who enters our home, filling our hearts with joy even as our lives change forever. A friend weeping in the pews on Sunday because her husband or father or mother or daughter was just diagnosed with cancer. This story of Jesus interrupted on his preaching mission teaches us something about how to handle those interruptions, how to live with the uncertainty of changing schedules and shifting priorities. Jesus may become angry for a moment--it is only natural to feel frustrated or disoriented or, yes, even angered when our hopes and intentions are thrown into chaos. But Jesus does not let that first emotional reaction control his response.
Too often, we get drawn into believing that faithful discipleship means cultivating the correct emotion in our hearts: peaceful contemplation in worship, when truly our minds are roiling with worry; sympathy for a person in need, when truly we are preoccupied with our own concerns; excitement for a mission trip or a life change, when truly we are apprehensive. When Jesus feels anger and then acts with compassion, he reminds us that discipleship can mean loving God and our neighbor with our actions even when we are angry or anxious or distracted. Discipleship can mean responding faithfully to God's surprises and life's curveballs, even when it is hard. And in that endeavor, we are never alone.
The promise of this story is that Christ is always ready to turn toward us. On that Galilee road, with so many limits and demands on his time, with so many consequences for stretching out his hand, Jesus chooses to touch and heal because, to Jesus, each one of God's children matters. Each one of us is a beloved and beautiful child of God. Each one of us is unique and precious. The good news of this story is that you matter to God, and so does everyone else.
What does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton?
The challenge of this story is to go and do likewise. The challenge is to approach those interruptions and disruptions, those unexpected intrusions and inconvenient crises, those times of uncertainty and change, as moments of opportunity. The challenge is to set aside everything we think we know about God's plan for us, all of our rush and hurry, all of our ideas about who and what is important, and to turn toward our neighbors to bless and heal, to be blessed and healed. Because when we do that, when we take a moment, take a breath, and turn towards each other, we see Jesus, with us on the road.
Let’s pray.
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