The Rev. Noah Van Niel
June 10th, 2018
St. John the Evangelist
Proper 5 (B): Genesis 3:8-15; Ps 130; 2 Cor 4:13-5:1; Mark 3:20-35
Mark’s is the shortest Gospel. It’s the least refined; most direct. It wastes neither time, nor words. And the focus, for the vast majority of it, is not Jesus’ birth, death, Resurrection (you know, the big stuff) it’s Jesus’ daily life and ministry. From the second half of Chapter 1, all the way to Chapter 14 it’s all about Jesus’ work in this world: healing, calling, preaching, teaching, leading, feeding, saving. In Chapter 14 we get the Passion story and then by chapter 16 it’s done. I tell you this because in this extended season of what the Church calls “ordinary time,” this time when we go green from now until December, we will be dwelling in these chapters of Jesus’ ministry. Just like the splendor of spring blossoms on the trees gives way to the green leaves of summer, which hang on until fall, in the church the radiance of the Resurrection fades and we get down to business; we get on with the daily work of following Jesus as he makes his way around the countryside, changing lives all along the way.
So pay attention to what we’re hearing on Sundays, and how one Gospel reading builds on the next, how the momentum gathers, and the story unfolds. If you do that, one of the things you’ll notice, especially in these early chapters is the remarkable rate at which Jesus is attracting crowds, big crowds, huge crowds.
As the early chapters of Mark tell it, not long after Jesus gets started, “the whole city was gathered around [his] door;” the crowds were so large some people took the roof off the house so they could bring a paralyzed man to him. Then, after he healed the man with the withered hand in the synagogue on the Sabbath, which we heard about last week, Mark says people started coming from all the surrounding regions and towns to see him. It got so out of control that he had to put out in a boat so that they wouldn’t crush him. And finally, in our reading today, it gets to the point where he and his disciples can’t even eat.
And these are not some quiet, courteous, mildly curious crowds of people. By and large the people coming to him are sick, really sick—with deformities or illnesses, or what the scriptures call “unclean spirits.” They were loud, and wild, and frantic. People didn’t come casually to see this impressive young man saying and doing some interesting things. They came because they were desperate for healing and wholeness. And they would not be stopped. No wonder when he shows up at home with these crowds chasing him people think he must have lost his mind—this was no longer the quiet carpenter they grew up with. Imagine what that must have been like. Hot, crowded, smelly, sweaty crowds of ill and infirm, crazed people, bleeding, screaming; it must have been sheer chaos. Imagine what longing, what yearning, what desperation, what hope must have been in the hearts of those people as they traveled, and pushed and squeezed and fought their way through the masses just to be close to him.
Do we long for Jesus that much? Are we that desperate to be near him? Do we need him with such urgency? Do we come to him with a longing that would push us through crowds just to be close to him?
Perhaps we do…when we too are sick and suffering. When we are hit with some ailment, be it a physical or mental illness, or some emotional wallop that knocks the wind out of us, we can find ourselves, very quickly, on our knees in prayer, seeking Jesus’ healing Spirit to be with us and strengthen us for the struggle. And that is well and good and as it should be. But it is no secret that most of the time when things are good, when people are healthy and life is sailing along, our desire, our need, our desperation for Jesus can wane. The thought of pushing through hot, sweaty, crowds to see him just doesn’t seem necessary. We don’t go to the doctor unless we’re sick, the same can be true for Jesus as well. Besides, “those who are well have no need of a physician,” Jesus says a few verses before our reading this morning….which might apply to us, if we were well. But we are not well, at least not completely so. For we are, each of us, afflicted with a malady whose grip on us is unrelenting. A malady from which Jesus is our only hope for healing. And that is the malady outlined in our reading from Genesis this morning: original sin.
Now the term “original sin” has a long and complicated history, and it may not hold much meaning for you, even though it’s a familiar term. But what the story of Adam and Eve is trying to tell us is that we exist in our purest form, in full communion with the divine. That is where we begin. But for reasons that have puzzled philosophers and theologians for millennia, human beings have a proclivity to wander from that state of communion into a state of distance. We choose to disobey God and go our own way. Blame it on Satan, blame it on the snake, blame it on the unclean spirits, the reality is, there is something in ourselves which induces us to choose our own desires over and above the desires of God, and very often over the desires and needs of others. Our original sin is “selfishness.”
And from Adam and Eve on down, that is one affliction we have not been able to cure. We all suffer from it. Some of us are seeking to overcome it; others seem to indulge it to great temporal but not eternal reward. Our desire for self-glorification is the great chink in the armor of light with which we begin our lives; it is the crookedness in the timber of our souls. And as much as any of our physical afflictions, this affliction is the one for which we desperately need Jesus.
I often wonder why so many of Jesus’ healing stories have to do with him casting out demons. Perhaps it’s because those episodes bring to the surface (in an admittedly extreme form) the usually invisible battle that rages within us between our potential goodness and our perpetual less than goodness; our clean spirits and our unclean spirits, our angels and our demons, if you will. And what is made evident in those stories is that there is one force to which the “demons” bow in obedience; one force powerful enough to conquer such an insidious foe as the darkness that lurks within us; one Lord strong enough to tie up the enemy and keep it prisoner: The Son of God. It is to Jesus we must turn for help if we ever think we are going to be able to consistently overrule our inclination to selfishness and the sin which flows from it, because what he embodies, and what he calls us to, is a love that is so strong, and so all-encompassing, so self-sacrificial rather than self-centered, that it is the one force that can pull us free from those thoughts, feelings and desires which keep us separated from God. Jesus is the cure for original sin. And as inheritors of it, we need him with a desperation that would bring us in throngs to his doorstep, pulling off the roof until we got to him. We need Jesus because the health, the wholeness of our souls depends on it. Without him, we are a house divided and a house divided cannot stand.
Another one of the interesting progressions in the Gospel of Mark that will become evident as we work through it over the next six months, is that the healing stories are front-loaded. As Jesus’ ministry continues, the crowds remain but there is not this frenzy of healing, turning every stop on the journey into a triage tent in a war zone. Healings still happen but more and more the emphasis is placed on his teaching and his message. People come to him for healing in body or mind, but they stay because of the healing of soul that they find. If he were just a charismatic healer, the crowds would eventually disperse, but a lot of those people stick around. They stick around because in this wondrous, wonderful man, they have found not just health, but salvation, which is another word for being free of the evil that enslaves us and keeps us apart from God. In the message of love that Jesus came proclaiming, the crowds find their way back to that place that their souls long for, that place of complete communion with the divine. Jesus is not just our way to health, he is our way to freedom. And it is through trusting and following him that we can conquer those powers and proclivities which pull us astray and keep us away from our heavenly calling.
So come to Jesus. Seek out his healing touch in Word or sacrament; open your hearts to his grace and truth in song or prayer, that we might be healed of all dis-ease that burdens us, and shown a love that helps us overcome our sin of self-centeredness, a love that closes the distance between us and God. Jesus is our health and our salvation, our Lord and our Savior, let us put our lives into his hands the way he put his life in ours. For it is through him, and not by our own power, that we can return to that Garden where we walked arm in arm with God through the evening breeze, whole, happy and home.