Will I Be Able to Play the Violin?

Text: Mark 1:40-45

Why all the healing? This is the third healing story in the first chapter of Mark. Jesus has healed a person with demons, Simon's mother, and now a leper, and evidently so many more that it overwhelms even Jesus, who has to leave town. Why are these stories here? What do they tell us about the mission of Jesus in the world?

There is that old joke about the man who is about to undergo surgery. He asks his doctor whether, after the operation, he will be able to play the violin. The doctor says, Of course you will. That’s great, the man says, because I never could before.

This is a joke because we expect that when someone is healed, he or she will be restored to some previous good state, not that they will emerge a new person, with a new personality and new skills. Illness of any kind is a distortion in the way things ought to be, and we hope that healing will fix that. If all goes well, things will be back to normal. But healing never restores things to the way they were, even when it works perfectly. It does more than that.

The man in the Gospel story has leprosy, meaning in Jesus' time an assortment of various skin diseases. A person with leprosy was legally unclean. The man would have been shunned and an outcast. He would not have been able to go into the city and associate with other people.

The man seems to know something about Jesus. He knows Jesus has healed other people. The word had spread. Whether or not Jesus wanted to be known as a healer, he was. People needed him to help them, and they found him, and he healed them. So when the man says, If you choose, you can make me clean, he uses strong words that convey his trust in Jesus. More like: If you choose, and you do, you can heal me.

Jesus touches the man, and declares the man clean, and so he was. But in the process, by his touch, Jesus has himself been rendered unclean. The man now is free to go into the city. But Jesus is not.

There is something about this man, or this man’s situation, that gets to Jesus. The words in our Bible disguise the ferocity of Jesus interaction with the man. He did not only pity the man, as it says, but his stomach turned. His gut hurt. He was deeply and painfully moved. He did not only speak sternly to the man, but he snorted in anger and distaste. He was furious and indignant. Not at the man himself, I think, but at the injustice of things, at the sorrow of life lived in oppression, at the inadequacy of people’s compassion for one another, and at their fear of risk. And also, perhaps, at the sorrow and unfairness of life. We need to be healed because things break. Things go wrong. They need to be patched up. That is how life works, but how sad and frustrating that it need be so.

It was great that Jesus could make the man be clean. Once an outcast, he could now join with others, walk freely again among them. But things are not back to the way they were before the man was ill with leprosy. He is better in many ways, but he is not restored.

Healing does not undo experience in suffering. It does not erase illness and broken things as if they had never happened. They did happen, they are in our memories and the memories of others, for good or ill. We are not the same person we were before. People will not see us as they saw us before. We will not have the same hopes and fears we had before. It may be better or worse, but it will not be the same.

Healing does not make one perfect. It does not fix everything. It does not enable us to play the violin if we never could before. It does not ensure happiness or resolve all issues. Its scope is limited. As a corollary to this: healing is not permanent. Chaos is not forever put at bay, the principles of entropy not invalidated. What breaks can break again, or in a different way.

But healing is not acceptance, or resignation, or surrender. It is not just putting a good face on a bad business. Or simply looking at the half-filled cup in a new way.

Healing is not restoration. But it is transformation. Things change, have changed. The future we fear or anticipated turns out differently. It changes the healed, and the healer, and everyone else.

The man, healed, is changed. He goes about proclaiming and spreading the word, Mark tells us. The word is: Look at me! I am no longer unclean. I am clean. Look what this Jesus did to me! The man is freed to go about the country. He can claim what was denied him. He can become something different from what he could have become. Healing frees us from something—illness in mind or body—that bound us before.

Jesus, healer, is changed. Having touched the leper, Jesus himself is now unclean, and he is bound (for a while at least) to the outskirts, to be alone or with the other lepers. To heal someone or some situation is risky. It takes effort and energy. And it makes you see things in a different way. Helping others connects you to them.

And everyone else is changed. The way the townspeople see the man and their behavior toward him. To them, he is a different person. No longer unclean, they do not need to fear or loathe him. Healing enables others—family, friends, and enemies—to cross over from cruel wariness.

The leper is trapped in one story. The story is full of anger, shame, fear, and distrust. By healing him, Jesus writes a new story, in which the man and others have new roles. The tale is new, the outcome has been changed. The man is clean. Jesus sends him back to the priests, who before had nothing to do with him but now must attend to him, and the people of the town, who now may welcome him. The plot is different, and the outcome, once known (and dismal in this case), is now uncertain (and hopeful).

To heal is to create a new story from old events. Trauma is converted into an event—a bad one, perhaps, but just an event. This healed knee, this reconciled relationship, this fed hunger, this ended war—loses its power. Its memory persists, but its hold on us is relaxed.

Healing is a form of forgiveness (or maybe the other way around: forgiveness is a form of healing). Just as forgiveness frees us from the power of sin (not eradicating the sin itself but the power it had over us), so healing frees us from the power of illness. Not the memory of the illness, but the power it had over us. Like forgiveness, healing gives us a new story.

The world into which Jesus came—then and now—is broken. The story we tell is a vile one. Hatred of others, indifference, oppression, greed and violence that comes from fear. We can understand the ferocious indignation of Jesus. And take heart from his gut-wrenching compassion. He did not come into the world to condemn, it says in the Gospel of John, but to save it, using a word that means to heal it.

We do not need the world restored to normal. We need it to be transformed. We long to be able to tell a new story. We need to be healed.