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A Figure of Mystery and Power

5th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B Mark 1: 29-39 5 February 2012

One of the most popular books of the 19th century was Ernest Renan’s, "Life of Jesus." He portrayed Jesus as an extraordinary human being, a gifted teacher, an inspiring individual, but certainly not the Son of God. Nor did he accept that Jesus worked any miracles, since Renan believed that miracles simply didn’t occur. So what was left in this controversial book was an unusual life beautifully described with some imaginative power.

The trouble with this secularised version of Jesus is that it simply ignores what stands out on page after page of Mark’s gospel - that his immediate followers regarded him as a figure of mystery and power - someone they treated with respect and awe - and who quite frankly terrified them at times. Think of their reaction when they saw him walking on water towards their boat - or when he calmed a storm. This was someone with mastery over the forces of nature.

From the moment Mark’s gospel begins Jesus comes across as someone whose word has the power to uproot human lives, so that they abandon their occupations and follow him. And while Mark stresses that Jesus gives high priority to his ministry of preaching, it doesn’t actually give us much detail about what he taught. But we are given a lot of information about the way in which the words of Jesus have authority over demons, and about its power to heal many varieties of human distress. Jesus is interested in rolling back the forces of evil, and he backs up his teaching with demonstrations of his capacity to do just that on a here and now basis. Indeed, what we listened in to this morning was the tail end of a typical day in the life of the ministry of Jesus, and healing miracles are high on the agenda.

As we dig beneath the text of Mark’s gospel and consider how he writes about the healing miracles, we find out that he has a singular approach to this aspect of Jesus’ ministry. Miracle stories (exorcisms, healings, resuscitations, and nature miracles) take up over 200 verses, a greater amount of text than is devoted to the Passion narrative, and just about half the content of the gospel prior to the arrival of Jesus in Jerusalem. Whereas in the rest of the gospels miracles are called semia, "signs," Mark calls them dynamies, in other words "works of power."

At dusk, as the Sabbath ends, people are free to move about again, and so the inhabitants of Capernaum cluster around the door of Simon and Andrew. They are hoping that the various illnesses they are presenting with will be met by the overflowing quality of the benefits that flow from the presence of the Spirit empowered stronger one. Their hopes are not in vain.

I mentioned before that we have been listening into a typical day in the life of Jesus of Nazareth. Through every part of the day he is giving out, raising people up, restoring them to new life, whether inside or outside the house he is staying in. We might note in passing that in the midst of all this activity he avoids the trap of running on empty. Rising before dawn he goes away to be by himself and commune with God. In silence he is listening to the still, small voice - tuning in to the one who is the source of all this healing energy. This is the indispensable recharging point if he is going to be able to go on having other typical days of healing and helping. We might like to quickly ask ourselves, "Do I have these oasis times with God as a regular part of my life?" It is particularly the case that when we are in fields of endeavour that require lots of talk, talk, talk, that we need regular times of listen, listen, listen.

In the weeks that follow we will be hearing about the healing ministry of Jesus in all sorts of situations, and in response to all sorts of needs. There will be a steady escalation in the depth of human misery that is tackled - a leper, a paralytic, a man with a withered limb. In steady progression these terrible scourges will be overcome as Jesus goes about bringing comfort and joy. As the sway of evil over human affairs is step by step pushed back, it is as though we are getting closer and closer to the heart of darkness.

The story that we are being drawn into has a particular destination point in mind. The narrative is being shaped in such a way that each of these stories of healing and deliverance is taking us to the foot of the cross. Mark sees what will take place there as being the most powerful act of healing imaginable for all of humankind.

We have become accustomed to seeing the death and resurrection of Jesus as being about the overcoming of guilt and death. An act of healing -that is a novel thought. It means that we are brought to consider what one recent commentator has called, "the love behind the passion." What is it that brought Jesus to offer his very self as the stuff of our deliverance? It means that as the story unfolds we move from considering what he is - a healer and exorcist who goes about doing good - to the who he is - the person who confronts evil at its source and absorbs its impact in such a way that it is carried into the heart of God, where it is contained and neutralised. Jesus and God are so attuned to one another - in the continual exchange of love going on between them - that he is prepared to go to the root cause of our distress in a way that means he has gone looking for trouble.

The Church of our day is recovering the ministry of healing, and that is great. But often our rationale for doing that is simply about being kind, and about relieving human distress. The perspective of Jesus was different, and went deeper than that. He saw his ministry of healing as a frontal attack on the forces of evil that were the source of the disease and death that made life miserable for everyone around him. And he had no illusions about the response of the forces of evil to his highly effective ministry. As one contemporary Eucharistic prayer puts it:

He healed the sick, though he himself would suffer; he offered life to sinners, though death would hunt him down.

Those who desire to major in the ministry of healing, to make God’s signs and wonders powerfully evident in the lives of those they reach out to touch, had better be prepared for this costly dimension to what they propose to do. The forces of evil wont just sit around and let their control of the neighbourhood slip away from them. They will fight back, and will seek to take out those who have become channels of God’s inconvenient healing grace. And sometimes the way they will seek to do that is through the inner flaws and weaknesses of these ministers of grace. The temptation to become drunk on all this spiritual power is great indeed.

Which is why Jesus went into the wilderness before he got started in his ministry. He wrestled with his temptations and got the better of them before he presumed to go and sort other people out. We need to do the same. Which is why the Lenten invitation to go into the wilderness to spend time with God in a time of self-denial will be very good news for us. Thank goodness Lent is near.