Palm Passion

Text: Mark 1:11–11 and Mark 14:1—15:47

Palm Sunday

The gospel of Mark is the shortest of the four Gospels. It is also moves the quickest. It starts fast and ends suddenly. Scenes are jammed together, one thing happens immediately—Mark’s favorite word—immediately after the other. Short and sweet.

Which is also what sermons are supposed to be on this day. Preachers are advised, the handbook says, not to preach at all, or at least hardly at all. The text is supposed to speak for itself.

Except it does not. At least the way things are arranged on this unusual, double-named Sunday. Palm and Passion. One moment Jesus is greeted as a king would be. The next, as we will hear about in a few minutes, he is condemned to death, mocked as king, and executed. Immediately, it seems, from glory to humiliation.

But that abruptness is not in the Gospel story. It is an artifact of the church’s fear that people would skip the Passion, the church’s crabbiness that many people go from the triumph of the Palms to the triumph of Easter, skipping over the carefully detailed drama of Holy Week and the cross altogether. So we get the Passion now, a few days premature.

In Mark, the frantic pace of things at the beginning of the Gospel is not present at the end. Time flows differently, more slowly. Two thirds of Mark is about the life of Jesus up until his arrival in Jerusalem about which we just heard. (There are no palms, by the way, in Mark’s of account of Palm Sunday, or in Luke’s or Matthew’s. They appear only in John). One third of Mark’s Gospel is about Jesus’ last week. And half of that is about the trial and execution. It is as if the camera zooms quickly in from the big picture, gradually slowing down as it focuses on what Mark, as director, wants us to see as the main point.

Organizing the readings as we do today is like showing clips rather than the whole movie. We would do well sometime, on this Sunday of the year, to read the entire Gospel of Mark. It would take about ninety minutes. What we would learn is that it is all one story about one Jesus.

We would learn that something happens with Jesus from the time he arrives in Jerusalem until his trial. It is not just empty space. We would hear some of the most memorable parts of Mark that we now miss. Of Jesus tossing the check-cashers and religious objects salespeople from the Temple (calling these honest merchants a bunch of thieves). Of his teaching that with enough faith we might throw a mountain into the sea, that we should give to Caesar what is Caesar’s but to God that which is God’s. And of his admiration for the widow who gave all she had. We would hear him denounce those in authority and predict the destruction of God’s house, the Temple. We would see that the death of Jesus is the predictable end of the life of Jesus. And that he is killed not because people hate the good but because Jesus actions make them as worried, angry, afraid, and protective as we would be, and often are.

We would learn that the life of Jesus is not a bunch of episodes, like beads on a string, any more than ours is. One event does not explain or validate another, nor does one thing undo another. The ministry of Jesus is not vindicated by his Palm Sunday procession. And that triumph is not undone by the events of the Passion. And that sorrow is not overturned by his resurrection, which we celebrate one short week from today. His life, like ours, was glory and sadness woven together; hopes met and unmet, both; plans both fulfilled and frustrated, like ours.

Perhaps it seems absurd to say so, but in Mark it is not all about Jesus. In Mark, the people by the roadside cry “blessed is the coming kingdom” not, as in the other Gospels, the king. The joy of Palm Sunday, and the heartbreak of Passion Sunday, and the hope of Easter Sunday are all one story, the same story. We cannot, do not, have one without the rest. It is a story about a new realm, God’s kingdom. And about our deep longing for it, and about our struggles finding it, and about the promise of hope given to us by God through Christ that it will come to be. It is a story that speaks for itself. Let us hear it. (reading follows).

User Manual

Text: John 3:16
Other texts: John 3:14-21

For many Christians, John 3:16 is the most significant verse in the Bible. For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, so that all who believe in him should not perish but may have eternal life. In one view, this verse answers all questions about the nature and purpose of Jesus and summarizes God’s plan. It is amazing because it bundles in a neat, small package the essence of theological cosmology, telling us all we need to know.

But in another view, this verse is amazing for the opposite reason. Rather than providing answers, it raises all sorts of important questions. The verse is significant not because it is the end of an important quest but because it is the start of one.

First, some context: The Gospel of John was the last of the four Gospels to be written. By then, followers of Jesus—no one was called Christian yet—had begun to coalesce into competing groups, organized into communities of like mind, background, or origin. John likely wrote for one of those communities. It was an sectarian endeavor. Like all such things, each group thought it had the truth and that the competition did not. John’s task was to define his community, encourage its members in their choice, to recruit new members to it, and to defend it against others. The dualism we hear so much in John—people described as inside or out, walking in the light or the darkness, condemned or saved—is largely the result.

John’s emphasis is on recruiting and encouraging more than it is excluding and judging. His portrayal of other groups as evil is more by way of contrast than condemnation. This is an invitation. John is arguing through the tactic of elevating one group while at the same time diminishing others. John is promising, more than he is threatening.

Seen in this light, John 3:16 seems to be a promise coupled with a method, or an instruction, about how that promise might be realized. Yet if that it so, it opens up some hard questions about how to go about things. For example, what is belief? What is it that people are to believe? Must they believe it all the time or can they have doubts from time to time? Or can they just believe it once and have done with it? Must they be fervent in their beliefs; or can they hold them grudgingly? And what if they do not believe; do they forfeit salvation? Must they perish?

This last question is central. There seems to be conflict here between—using the words of Reformation theology—between grace and faith. God so loved the world, Jesus begins. The world in John’s view is not a very nice or good place, and yet God loves it. God seems to wish to save the world from perishing. At the same time, the offer here is partially qualified by the necessity of belief in God’s son and a few verses later much more vehemently. Does God love the whole world or only those who believe in Jesus? Is this good news for the world or only good news for those who have faith?

We teach that God loves all of us unconditionally. This is grace: grace equals undeserved and unconditional love. Yet we also teach that faith—belief—is essential to salvation. But isn’t faith something we do, some work on our part? Is faith a condition, therefore, to God’s love? And if so, how can we call God gracious?

There seems to be a tension between these two teachings. We cannot resolve it easily because we can see the danger. If we focus solely on grace, then salvation is (possibly arbitrary and) independent of human action. And if we focus solely on faith, then it becomes a result of human action or accomplishment. If salvation comes through grace, then is faith good but redundant? If it comes through faith, is grace nice but unnecessary?

There are two things going on here that tangle us up. The first is that though grace and faith might be in tension, they are not in competition. The Bible is a story of the interaction between God’s love for the world and people’s response to that love. We know from our own experiences that our understanding of and gratitude for God and what God does affects what we do, which in turn affects our connection with God. We are in a relationship with God, which is sometimes rocky and sometimes sweet, but which is always developing somehow.

The second tangle is that belief is not a very good synonym for faith. For one thing, it is not the best translation of the meaning of the word used by Jesus here in John. For another, it is much more about doing something than thinking or saying something. In fact, and amazingly, the noun for faith never appears in this Gospel at all. Only the verb form. Faith is not intellectual assent. Believing in Jesus is not agreeing to something he said or naming what he is, but following his guidance. Doing what he said to do. The opposite of belief is not disbelief, but disobedience. To believe in someone is to trust them into the future. When you tell someone you believe in them, it means that you trust in the way the future will unfold, and, often, that you are willing to follow them. To believe in Jesus is to trust Jesus with your future.

The Bible is one long love story. A story about God’s love for us, God’s people, God’s creation. Even when we were acting like idiots, even when we did not repent, even when we did not believe God cared one way or the other. God’s love is not in question. It is not in short supply. There is plenty of it. That is grace.

This means that John 3:16 cannot be about a transaction, a trade, or a deal. God does not require us to believe in Jesus in order to gain God’s love.

In the Gospel of John, the phrase “eternal life” describes something that happens now, in our actual lifetimes. Abundant life, or the good life. Or life in Christ, as Paul says. Something not started by but also not changed by death. Not quantity of life but quality of life. A non-anxious or confident life, or a trusting one. To live in any other way is to perish. To be disconnected from God. That is the way most of us live much of the time. But it does not have to be so. That is what Jesus promises here.

What Jesus offers in John 3:16 is like one page from the user manual of the world. 1) Introduction: God loves the world. 2) Do this: trust in Jesus. 3) Get this result: eternal life. Believing in Jesus, trusting Jesus with your future, is a method, a way, given to us by God because God loves the world. Because God is gracious. It is not some kind of payment to God or requirement of God. It is not a moral issue. It has nothing to do with God’s righteousness. Rather, it is the physics of faith. It is something that Jesus tells us will work to get abundant life. If we want that. It seems that God wants us to.

John 3:16 is sometimes used as a weapon to attack others with. But it is not a weapon. It is instruction. Belief in Jesus is not a one-time event nor a one-time proclamation. It is an ongoing, sometimes uneven, often surprising, life-long development. As we respond to God’s gracious hope for us: trust Jesus; do not perish.

Remember the Sabbath

Text: Exodus 20:1-17

God leads the Israelites, already tired of wandering about aimlessly, to Mount Sinai. They have been freed from slavery in Egypt. The redemption they have long hoped for has been accomplished.

Now what? They are stuck in a place without boundaries. They are a people without definition. No longer slaves, free but uncertain. Who are they? What shall they do next? Where shall they go? Freedom can seem like chaos, a limitless landscape can make one feel agoraphobic.

The commandments given at Sinai are therefore a gift to the people. They are a confirmation of God’s presence, a reaffirmation of God’s promise, and a guide to being God’s people.

People of faith share the conviction that life is to be lived before God, in the light of God, with God in mind. Our actions come from more than the urgings of our consciences, from somewhere in addition to our moral reasoning. There is more to us than us. We hope to live our lives in alignment with God for our sake and the sake of the world. We are made complete and whole, as we say in Sunday worship, by conforming our lives to God.

We need guidance, as the Israelites did. We ask ourselves: Who are we and how shall we define ourselves? And also: how shall we live and what shall we do? And also: how can we save ourselves and the world from destruction? And, finally, how might we be a light to others, to serve our brothers and sisters?

The commandments—the top ten, which are called in the Bible the ten words or ten sayings of God, and the other 600 or so that follow—served to create boundaries in which the Israelites might best operate.

Commandments, like these but also the ones Christians learn from the teachings of Jesus, do a least three things. First, they define a people who belong to God and for whom this God alone is their god. Commandments create a community of those who acknowledge particular limits and procedures. Second, they are criteria by which the people judge their actions. Like gauges and warning lights, the commandments help people know when things are working well and when not. And third, they are guidelines to life in God, like roads and signs that make journeys of life easier and more predictable.

The Ten Commandments are customarily divided into two parts, or two tables: the first deals with our relationship with God and the second with our relationship with other people. But of course they are interdependent and make up one cloth. Loving God both enables us to love and reflects our love for one another. On the cusp, or at the hinge, of these, is the commandment regarding the sabbath, the one I want to talk more about today.

This commandment is unusual in many ways. First, it contains in itself a little essay about why we should follow it. The reason given in Exodus, in the version of the Ten Commandments we heard today, is that God the creator rested on the seventh day, and that therefore God blessed this day as special. The sabbath was created for us, God’s creatures, as part of the nature of the world. In Deuteronomy, however, there is another version of the commandments. It differs from the one in Exodus mostly in this commandment regarding the sabbath. In that version, we are reminded that God brought the people out of slavery. We are not slaves and do not have to live as slaves, working non-stop. Sabbath is thus the child of both creation and freedom.

Second, the commandment is unusual because before it tells us how to behave (as the other commandments do) it asks us to remember: Remember the sabbath. We need to remember that the sabbath is a gift from God, and therefore not to discard it or squander it. We need to remember that the sabbath is as important to us as the rest of creation is. It is as important as dry land to live on, food to eat and water to drink, companions to love. The commandment asks us to keep the sabbath holy, which means keep it separate or special, a day that is not the same as every other day.

This commandment respects God’s wish to interrupt our lives. Though the commandment tells us to rest, and though it talks about God’s resting, it is is more about carving out a special space (a holy space). It is certainly true that we need to rest, but this commandment is not so much about therapy as it is about obedience to God’s direction. God tells us to put aside the things that usually drive us—and that sometimes drive us crazy. On the sabbath we are to honor God’s request to think about God first.

Worshiping God with others is one good way to be mindful of God, but it is neither the only way nor the complete way to do that. Sabbath itself is worship. Sabbath gives us quiet and space to pray. It gives us a big chunk of time in which our thoughts can settle and our hopes and fears become clearer.

Sabbath is more than downtime. It purposely pushes away those things that make us most fearful and anxious. Things like performing well and having enough. For many people, days of sabbath are the days in which they feel most close to other people, to their families, and to the wonders of the world. We need some slack. which is the sabbath of everyday life.

Yet, we are forgetting the sabbath and letting the boundaries between the seventh day and the other six crumble and become porous.

Maybe that is because to observe the sabbath is inconvenient and annoying. It is visible to others. It brands you, marking you as part of a particular (and maybe peculiar) community of religious people. It requires that you trust God to provide for you even if you abandon work and commerce for 15% of the week. It demonstrates in humility that you need and welcome rest. Observing a day of sabbath is a spiritual discipline. It takes practice. It takes time to learn. It takes time to do. Its benefits are sometimes obscured at first by its drawbacks.

Or maybe we are forgetting because we are frantic because we are so afraid. We think perhaps our strong efforts and constant vigilance can make things less scary. But they do not. They have not.

We are forgetting the sabbath. And now our culture is starving for it. To have forgotten that we need a sabbath is like forgetting that we need to eat. We need to remember that God has created us to live and to be free. To remember who we are and what we are called to do. To remember the sabbath, and keep it holy.

Center of the Universe

Text: Mark 8:27-38

How misguided Peter seems to us from two thousand years away. We who read this story backward, so to speak, from the ending. We see it through the eyes of tradition, theology, and centuries of learned interpretation. Jesus is not to us as he was to Peter. And we know that Peter often played the fool to Jesus’ wisdom, a tool used by the Gospel writers to reveal a hard truth. Seen this way, with these eyes, history concludes that Peter got it wrong, that he did not see that Jesus was a new kind of messiah.

Yet let us try reading this story forward, as it is played out. Let us become as ignorant as Peter is, and see what it tells us. Let us forget the crucifixion whose story Mark is about to tell. Let us forget the resurrection that we celebrate on Easter and every Sunday, but which has yet to happen in Mark. Let us take things—as much as we can—as Peter saw them.

First, we have to know three things that Peter knew. One: Jesus is the Messiah. Peter has just identified him that way: you are the Christ, he says, the Greek word for messiah. Peter confirms what Mark has told us from the beginning: that this Gospel is a story about Jesus Messiah. Messiah means the anointed one. The anointed one is the one that will be king, for in the Bible, the prophets confirmed the king by anointing him. Jesus is a king.

Two: the Messiah, a king, rules in order to change the world. People’s hope for the Messiah was that he would be a king that would make the world better. People hoped for the Messiah to come to fix things. To repair what is broken in this world. When Peter talks about the Messiah, he is not talking about life after death. He is talking about life now, in times of trouble and pain. This world.

And three: The cross is an atrocity. Crucifixion is a horror. The disciples and Peter do not think about the cross as a symbol of life. That has not yet happened in the story. For disciples and Peter, crucifixion is simply hideous torture followed by death. There is nothing good about it. When Jesus says that his followers must take up the cross—that is a scary thing; that is not a good thing. He is not recommending it; he is acknowledging it.

The disciples are doing something really hard. They are doing something that is so compelling that they are willing to do it even if it means there is a chance they will be executed by hanging on a cross.

Starting from here—Jesus is the Messiah, the Messiah makes the world better, and following Jesus risks crucifixion—Jesus then instructs his disciples how it will be and what they must do if they still want to be part of the program. “If any want to follow me, …” he begins.

The Gospel of Mark is interested in discipleship—our word, not one that appears in Mark—interested in what a disciple is and what a disciple is called to do. Mark defines discipleship as a contrast between what humans value and what God values. Human values: being the greatest, sitting at the head of the table, being privileged, being served. God values: being the least, sitting at the foot of the table, eating crumbs, being a servant. You are thinking like a human, Jesus tells human Peter. Think instead like God.

Here’s how, he explains: If you want to follow me, deny yourself. That’s the first thing on Jesus’ list. To think like God seems to be to think of someone else besides you first. To live for the sake of others rather than your sake. To put someone besides yourself at the center of your concerns. Or everyone else. This is what Jesus did. This is what a Messiah does. This is what, ideally, a king does. This is what a leader of a nation should do. Jesus in John calls himself a good shepherd. This is what a shepherd does, risks all—even his life if necessary—for the sake of the sheep, Jesus tells us. Being a leader is not about the leader but about the led. Being a follower of Jesus is not about us, but about someone else. It is a contrast between human values and Godly values, for sure.

Deny yourself, Jesus says. The word he uses is used most famously to describe what Peter does when, on Good Friday, Peter denies knowing Jesus. To deny yourself is to ignore—to not acknowledge or agree to—the strong claims that you have on yourself in favor of the claims of others. Not, though, out of some creepy joy of suffering or modesty, but for the sake of the Gospel, an expression, according to Mark, of the kingdom of God, a better world.

Jesus is the Messiah. The Messiah makes the world better. The world is made better by the disciples who deny themselves. The kingdom of God can come to be when the followers of Jesus put others at the center of their concern. And cannot when they do not.

Putting others first has consequences. Sometimes pleasant ones, sometimes not so pleasant ones. How far can this go? Pretty far. Even to giving up one’s life for others. Those who wish to save their selves—the word Jesus uses here means heart or soul or psyche as much as it means life—it does not work so well if in the end you cannot commit yourself to others. If you wish to follow the Messiah and to help change the world for the better, letting go of your self might be necessary for the sake of the kingdom of God. Jesus is not asking people to plunge carelessly to their deaths; he is saying that there is nothing—even life, if it comes to that—that his disciples can finally value more than the Gospel, more than the kingdom of God.

Jesus does not teach that we should have no fun. Jesus was a fan of good food and drink and companionship. He liked a good argument. He seemed to enjoy the camaraderie of his friends and colleagues. But Jesus was not afraid of risk, risking as much as necessary, without calculation. The disciples are known as those who take risks in this way.

The season of Lent is a good time to ask ourselves and God how we should and can live as Christians. What is it that being Christian calls us to do? And more important, what is it that having the benefit of the life of Jesus, the death of Jesus, and the resurrection of Jesus enables us to do?

You are thinking like the human you are, Jesus tells Peter. Think instead like God thinks. Is not that what we are trying to learn to do through our lives of faith: when we pray, and worship, and study, and talk to one another, and serve others? When we take little experimental risks for the sake of the Gospel?

Aren’t we trying to learn how God thinks? So that we may be followers of Jesus Christ, a Messiah who teaches his disciples how to help bring about a changed world, the kingdom of God.

Grace from the Get Go

Text: Genesis 9:8-17

Christians, and especially Protestant Christians, and especially Lutheran Protestants, seem to think they have a lock on grace. We seem to think Luther discovered grace, which was conveyed to us only through Jesus Christ. But this is neither true nor generous. Grace is a characteristic of God. Grace is God’s work. Jesus is an embodiment of grace, but Christianity did not invent grace.

The story of Noah is a very long story as Bible stories go, taking up the better part of four chapters. It is about human wickedness and God’s saving power and the re-creation of life, and it reaches its satisfying conclusion in today’s reading from the book of Genesis. With an act of pure Godly grace.

The story starts with God’s observation that people are wicked. Not a surprise to us and perhaps not to God—though I’m not so sure about that—but certainly disappointing. God created the whole world—which was good, God said at the time, very good. But within five chapters there have been murders and general mayhem. “The Lord saw,” it says, “that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil—and all the time.” The world was corrupted—meaning not so much moral unpleasantness, but rather violence and destruction. God created; humans destroyed. God sees this all, and as a consequence proposes Plan B, which is the bulk of the story of Noah—about the flood and the animals and all that—and about which we are not going to talk today. Except to say that the story is less about anger than it is about God’s regret, less about judgment than God’s grief.

Today’s reading describes what happened after all that rain had come and gone, and God and Noah have a little talk. Or rather, God has a little talk and Noah just listens. This is a post-event evaluation. God says to Noah: I’m not sure what your plans are, but as for me, here’s what I’m going to do. And God establishes an agreement—a covenant—with Noah and humans and every living creature.

It is an odd agreement. For like the conversation it is totally one-sided. Only God agrees to do anything. Only God is bound by it. Although humans and the rest of the earth seem to be the beneficiaries, it only describes God’s duties and responsibility. Never, never, never (God says it three times)—never will I do this again. The actor is God—who speaks in the first person ten times in these verses we just heard. There are no conditions. God’s promise is unconditional—the covenant is an example of God’s grace. It requires nothing of humanity. No repentance, no turning over a new leaf, no promise to try better.

The flood does not wash clean the wickedness of people, who in fact are hardly changed at all by the flood, and who get in trouble again almost immediately. Extracted from chaos, humankind seems inclined, against the hopes of God, to return to chaos and nothingness.

God’s desire for good creation is at odds with God’s love for it. Unhappy with human’s tendency to undo what God has done, rather than threaten them with Plan C if they do not shape up, God instead promises not to. Knowing that in fact humans are human and that if you love them, you have to take the inevitable bad with the amazing good. Humans are not going to change, it seems to say. So God will have to—or better, is willing to—live with that. We sometimes act—in spite of our Lutheran theology—as if in order for things to be all right, we have to conform our soft selves into an inflexible mould that is God. But this story seems to say that God is unchanging only in God’s refusing to give up on us, in refusing to hate us.

This may not be all that easy for God, though, which we conclude because God creates a sign in the clouds. Not a sign to remind humans of God’s promise but to remind God of that promise: I have set my bow in the clouds, and when seen, I will remember my covenant. The bow means both the weapon—which God in restraint sets aside, pointing away from earth—and the rainbow, which is how we more often interpret it. Rainbows appear frequently enough that God will remember—perhaps in the face of strong temptations to forget—what God has agreed to. It is a seal on the deal. And conveniently it does remind us that God is being reminded.

At the time this story was recorded, people would certainly have accepted that it was God’s prerogative to flood the earth and to save no one. The world was God’s to make and unmake. But the story tells us that God purposely refuses that right and purposely limits God’s self, in an agreement that lasts forever. In agreeing to those limits, God gives up authority and power. Rather than insisting on the right to make the world perfect, God agrees to live with the grief and disappointment, along with the joy and hope, that is the life of humans in the world.

This is not so strange—it is what happens all the time in relationships of respect, guidance, and love. People purposely relinquish power in favor of the life of another. Parents, spouses, lovers—step back for the sake of those they love. If we are lucky, so do bosses and leaders for those they lead and honor. The willful reluctance to not exercise power, though usually difficult, is a blessing. It is a means of grace that we inherit from being made in God’s image. And which we might exercise more often.

God’s wish for a perfect and peaceful world logically clashes with God’s compassion for people, even corrupt and destructive ones. God’s graceful choice is compassion over perfection, for which we should be grateful. And which we should and have the power to emulate.

But nonetheless, there is a gap, a tension in such a choice. Lent is a good time to contemplate that. Just because God lets us off the hook does not mean that God thinks everything is great. We know that it is not. The violence that saddened God continues to sadden us.

The covenant made with Noah and us all is a sign of grace. In it, God reveals a nature that loves even in the face of imperfection, and more: even in the face of stupidity and wickedness. But that love does not require or even excuse stupidity and wickedness. As the Apostle Paul later pointed out, just because we are allowed to do something does not mean that we should, or that it is good. Nor do we have to slip into violence just because we are inclined to.

Lent is an especially good time to ask ourselves this: what are we to do on our unnecessary, unpromised, but nonetheless compelling side of the covenant? What are we creatures, who are made in the image of a graceful God, called to do?

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.

Recall

Text: Isaiah 40:10-31

It is self-evident that God created the universe. Even to those who do not believe in God.

The modern western understanding is that the universe is complete in itself and more or less consistent. It is of one piece of seamless cloth. It has room for mind-boggling complexities, ineffable mysteries, and anomalous miracles. But it is not arbitrary or inconsistent at its foundation. When the prophet Isaiah talks about God the creator, when he says “Have you not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning? Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth? It is he who sits above the circle of the earth,” he is arguing for one God, one universe. Gods of sun and moon and stars and thunder and water are not the creator. Their power is imaginary. The idols that people worship are created things. They are made by woodworkers and goldsmiths, Isaiah says. The universe is of one whole pattern, and the faithful ascribe its existence to God.

Yet, Isaiah writes, Israel has forgotten this. The passage we just heard comes from chapter 40 of the Book of Isaiah. It is the opening chapter in what people call “Second Isaiah.” The consensus is that Isaiah was written over a period of more than two hundred years, and that this second part, from chapter 40 to chapter 55, was written to the Israelites in Babylon, near the end of their period of exile there. They were beginning to forget about God, the God of their ancestors, the creator of all things. They were being seduced by the multiple gods of Babylon.

Isaiah writes to refresh their memories. First, this is the God who created the world. Who was here at the beginning. He reminds them of the creation stories in Genesis and Psalm 104. Second, this is the God who is good. The God who freed them from slavery. Who was with them as they became a nation. And third, this is their God. The one who made a deal with them: I will be your God and you will be my people. Who has promised to be with them forever. “The God of forever,” it says. Do you not remember this God? Has it not been told to you from the beginning? Isaiah asks them: Why do you say, O Israel, my way is hidden from the Lord and my right is disregarded by my God?

But we know why. When times are rough, we wonder: where is God? The Israelites are in exile because their nation has been conquered and the leaders taken away. God was in the land, Jerusalem was God’s home, the Temple there God’s house. Yet now the the land is occupied, and the Temple is rubble. Where is God now?

What can the exiles have thought? They do not complain that God does not exist. They do not complain that God is wicked or intends to punish them. Instead, they conclude that God does not see them. That they are hidden from God. That God is not attending to them. That God is disregarding their suffering. The power of God seems diminished to them, and they—like many people who suffer—have begun to accept the power of their captors. Under constant leveraged persuasion, and being disadvantaged, they grant power to people, structures, systems—laws and markets and politics—that are not God. Our faith is built on memories—that’s why we tell each other these stories—and the Israelites are forgetting.

The God of Israel is powerful, Isaiah reminds them. God stretched out the heavens, measured the waters of the seas, constructed the mountains. God is more powerful than all the temporal things of the earth. All the nations—including (and especially, in this case) Babylon—are as nothing. They are, Isaiah says earlier, like a drop from a bucket. Dust. Less than nothing. The rulers are lightweights—like chaff in the wind. Time is long, but the times of nations and their rulers are so short as to be meaningless.

Yet this same powerful and timeless God, Isaiah reminds us, is close to us, to humans. Like a shepherd who feeds his flock, he says, who cares for them and leads them. God supports the weary, and gives strength to the powerless. What are humans, the Bible asks repeatedly, that God is mindful of us? And what is God, that God is mindful of us?

We should not be harsh on Israelites. It is easy to understand how they might have forgotten. Circumstances can be difficult, preoccupying. Hardships can make us crazy. Sorrow and pain are mind-numbing. It is hard to think beyond the moment; the future seems cloudy at best, or impossible. Our imaginations become diminished. Where is God? Things other than God—idols, Isaiah would say—become seductive solutions.

It is we who disregard God. Which leads us in turn to rely on ourselves. Which leads us—being not very reliable—which leads us in turn to panic. We need, as the Israelites needed, to be re-called. To be repeatedly called back to God. We need to hear in Isaiah a call to us, who are not in exile like the Israelites, but can be just as afraid, just as short on hope, just as attracted wishfully to other gods.

God is big and timeless, says Isaiah in so many words, and we are small and quick. Does it comfort you to know that God created the universe and is mindful of us? That we are just one part of God’s great creation? Or is it distressing, that we are as dust and our history and institutions come and go in a second? Or does it matter?

Is the fate of the present and the future in our hands alone? Is this our job? We humans are not quite up to the long-distance trek of history, nor to the complexity of events and circumstance. It is hard to take comfort in or be hopeful about a universe in which we are careening about and in which our existence is merely a collateral consequence. Once we have forgotten about God, to whom do we turn?

We tell ourselves the story of God’s history for the same reason Isaiah spoke to the Israelites. Because it reminds us that God’s universe is part of that story, that the universe has a trajectory. And that God cares about us—is mindful of us. And that what has gone before leads us to be be hopeful of what will happen in the future, and that God’s promises are reliable. And that though God is universal and beyond comprehension, God is also particular, and is a companion, and a shepherd. God is here.