Healing Stories
Isaiah 40:28-31; Mark 1:29-39
February 4, 2018
When I was a little boy –
elementary school age – and talk would turn to “what do you want to be when you
grow up” the most respected profession among my peers was medicine. We held
doctors in high esteem, and, we all thought, doctors made a whole lot of money.
That’s about as sophisticated as
our vocational conversations ever got, as I recall: doctors are neat and they
live in big houses. I suppose now it’s tech entrepreneurs, and I reckon the
houses are much larger. Times change, but the need for healing remains
constant.
From the beginning of his public
ministry, Jesus healed people. That’s a consistent theme across all four
gospels. The sick sought him out, and he offered healing to them.
He didn’t seem to be well paid
for this, and, according to gospel accounts, he was pretty much homeless – “the
son of man has no place to lay his head,” as the story goes.
Obviously, pay is not the only
thing that has changed in the practice and understanding of the healing arts
since Jesus’ time. This is also nothing new under the sun.
I picked up my copy of the
Jefferson Bible last week as I was thinking about our passage from Mark. Thomas
Jefferson famously constructed a “new testament” that he called “The Life and
Morals of Jesus of Nazareth” that left out any part of the story that didn’t
ring true to Jefferson’s Enlightenment understanding of the world. Needless to
say, the healing stories didn’t make the cut. Considering that bleeding was
still an accepted medical practice in Jefferson’s age I do wonder what made him
so confident that the healing ascribed to Jesus couldn’t have happened.
But Jefferson was convinced that
Jesus’ disciples – at least those who eventually set the story down in writing
– were simpletons or charlatans whose fabrications detracted from the beauty of
Jesus’ moral teachings.
Jefferson, though, was not as
enlightened as he presumed. For though was surely correct in observing that the
emerging scientific worldview left no room for miracles, he missed the
correlated shift in understanding meaning itself. That is to say, there was an
epistemological revolution happening at the same time as the scientific one.
In still other words, Jefferson
failed to understand what the healing stories meant because he was so caught up
in dismissing them as scientific impossibilities only believable to the
unenlightened.
Now I’m picking on Thomas
Jefferson, but he’s far from alone. Indeed, we walk in his footsteps –
especially here in Virginia – and stand in a long line of descendants of the
Enlightenment. As such, we miss many of the same things that he missed.
In particular, we miss the
social dimension of disease. Missing that, we miss the point of the story. In
missing the point of the ancient story, we utterly miss the contemporaries
stories that are being written in our midst.
This is not merely a pedagogical
nor epistemological concern – this is an urgent moral concern.
You see, people still get sick
and we still misunderstand it – not scientifically, although that does still
happen, of course, but socially and, ultimately, politically.
To understand this I want to
look at two seemingly unrelated texts: the story from Mark, on the one hand;
and the congregational timeline we created during the congregational meeting
last week, on the other.
The story in Mark comes at the
beginning of Jesus’ public ministry, and already we see the lines being drawn. Jesus
and his first followers have just left the synagogue, where he has healed a man
with an unclean spirit. His teaching – with authority, the crowd declares – is
already challenging assumptions about social distinctions around holiness
codes.
They move from the public space
to the private one – the home of Simon and Andrew – and Jesus again offers
healing.
As Ched Myer notes in his work
on Mark’s gospel, “In the symbolic order of Judaism, illness was associated
with impurity or sin, a state that mean exclusion from full status in the body
politic.”[1]
Simon’s mother-in-law is restored to her role as host and provider of
hospitality, to her position as one who serves at table – a position worth
noting on a communion Sunday.
This pattern of restoration
repeats throughout the gospels, and it’s why the healing stories matter.
Jefferson missed their meaning completely by focusing merely on the
supernatural understanding of the act.
As Myers goes on to say, Jesus
“acts were powerful not because they challenged the laws of nature, but because
they challenged the very structures of social existence.”[2]
The structures of social
existence continue to challenge our own understandings; they even continue to
challenge our understanding of disease, as the other text I mentioned reminded
me.
Our congregational timeline
notes that, at some point in the 1980s, session was approached by the
Whitman-Walker Clinic asking for space in the church building for meetings of
support groups for people with AIDS.
Some of you are old enough to
remember what the AIDS crisis felt like in the mid-1980s. The toxic and
volatile stew of fear and hatred led to the kinds of divisions and exclusions
that would have felt remarkably familiar to the lepers and demon-possessed
people whom Jesus touched. The bigotry behind all of that started at the top
and trickled down throughout the Reagan years in America. In 1987 Congress
banned the use of federal funds for any AIDS education or prevention campaign
that in any way seemed to encourage “homosexual activities.”
By the end of that year more
than 86,000 Americans had died from AIDS.
The Whitman-Walker Clinic had
just begun to provide services in NoVA and faced a great deal of resistance
from potential landlords who acted out of fear of the disease and homophobia.
In that context, the session
here welcomed support groups for people with AIDS.
I’ve heard the story from a
couple of folks who were on session back in the mid 80s. Whitman-Walker
approached the church about using space. The session discussion raised all of
the questions you would imagine, including questions about bathrooms and how
parents of childcare center kids might react. No doubt that discussion
reflected a combination of due-diligence and fearfulness, but, as I’ve heard it
told, after a fairly lengthy discussion one older elder who’d been mostly quiet
spoke us, saying simply, “I don’t know what will happen with this, but I do
know what Jesus would do.”
CPC hosted Whitman-Walker
support groups until the last group decided to disband about 10 years ago.
In first century Palestine,
disciples didn’t follow Jesus because he was a healer through whom the
unlearned natural science understanding of the day was altered. In fact, it
wasn’t. No, they followed him because the unjust social order of the day was
altered.
In the mid 1980s, the disciples
at Clarendon followed Jesus not because the natural science understanding of
the day needed to be altered. No, they followed him because the unjust social
order of the day needed to be altered.
What healing stories do we need
to hear and heed today? Where is Jesus calling us to follow next?
posted by David Ensign at
6:52 AM
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