Jesus' Healing

Jesus’ Healing

Mark 7:24-30

So, this is the third week in which we are going backwards in the Gospel of Mark.  Two weeks ago, we heard the story of a blind man who is brought to Jesus to be healed.  Jesus takes him away from his friends and everything that is familiar.  He lays his hands on the man and he is healed—sort of.  We decided, in fact, that he had a vision.  And then his vision is fully restored.  The man sees everything clearly.  Jesus tells him to head straight home.

Last week, we heard a story from earlier in that same chapter in Mark’s Gospel, the story of a man who was deaf and mute.  Again, Jesus takes the man away from his friends and everything that is familiar.  Again, Jesus lays hands on the man until he is healed.  This time, though, as he is healing the man, Jesus says in Aramaic, “Ephphatha!” which means, “Be opened!”  The man’s ears are opened.  His speech is restored.  Jesus tells the man and the crowd to tell no one but the people just can’t stop talking!

So, we’ve heard two stories about people in need of healing.  In order to be healed they have to leave everything and everyone behind.  They have to be willing to be opened, literally, and figuratively.  Things are going to be uncomfortable.  Jesus spreads saliva and mud on the blind man’s eyes.  He puts saliva on the mute man’s tongue.  We should be squirming right along with these vulnerable, hurting people.  In the end, lives are changed.

So, why would I tell these stories in reverse order before we get to today’s text?  Every Gospel is different in how they put the stories together into a plot.  The writer of the Gospel of Mark—the first Gospel written—always seems intent on telling every story in the fewest words possible.  As I have said to you before, this is the “USA Today” of the Gospels.  As a result, a reader who isn’t up to speed with Mark’s style can feel, at moments, like his words have just slammed us into a brick wall.  We are unprepared to hear what we are hearing.  So…I’ve been trying to prepare you to hear something that is honestly hard to hear.

This text is one of the most challenging texts in the New Testament.  Let’s set the stage to hear it.  If our two men who were healed had to leave what was familiar and comforting behind, this is exactly what Jesus does—first.  Jesus has had a pretty tough set of things that have happened.  He has had a bad run in with the Pharisees and some scribes over the fact that some of his disciples are not washing their hands properly.  (The Pharisees were famous for making quite a show out of their personal hygiene, and their prayers and pretty much everything else they did.) 

Now, we’ve all had this moment.  We’re doing something that really matters to us.  We’re completely immersed in what we’re doing and someone rolls along and offers some jaw droppingly trivial complaint.  We’re overwhelmed with the pettiness of what we’ve just heard.  It’s discouraging and disheartening.  It just kind of sucks the life right out of us.  Then, we get angry.

Jesus fires right back at the Pharisees, suggesting that maybe, just maybe, they might want to spend more time practicing their faith and less time worshiping rituals.  Fighting with the Pharisees was dangerous.  Things escalated even further when Jesus spoke to the crowds, assuring them that what matters isn’t what they eat or how they wash their hands but what’s in their heart.  Spend more time making sure what is in your heart is pure and less time on the purity laws.  Jesus turns up the heat.

Then, the most disheartening thing of all happens.  It’s not a surprise to Jesus that the Pharisees wouldn’t understand what really mattered, that they’d focus on the wrong things.  This was old news.  Honestly, the people he would really want to connect with were the folks in the crowd.  He had hard things to say but this is why he was there, even if he could see the Pharisees in the back of the crowd taking notes and actively plotting his demise.  None of that compared, though, to the utter disappointment he felt when, having done and said all this, the disciples—his closest followers—don’t get what he’s saying.  

We’ve all been there and done that.  There are the people who have no interest in understanding our mission or message.  Then, there are the people who we really want to connect with, the folks we really want to understand.  Then there are the folks whom we are certain get what we’re about…until they make it clear that they don’t—and we’re crushed:  “Man, if they don’t understand this mission or this message, then maybe nobody does…”

If you’re with me so far, then you’ll be ready to hear what Jesus does next:  he leaves town, apparently by himself.  He’s had it with the Pharisees and the crowd.  He’s definitely had it with his disciples.  Let’s clarify my previous statement:  Jesus doesn’t just leave town, he heads out into Gentile territory.  He leaves everything and everyone who are familiar behind. 

Stop!  Are you with me?  Did you hear what just happened.  Before Jesus led the blind man away from everything that was familiar, before Jesus led the deaf and mute man away from all the comforts of home, Jesus went first.  (Really, Jesus pretty much always goes first…)  Jesus left everything and everyone he knew behind and became a stranger in a strange land.  To put the matter differently, having grown entirely sick of the rules in his own land, he went to a place where they played by a different set of rules.

Now, here’s the part that you may or may not be ready to hear.  I think Jesus is about to have a healing experience of his own.  I know this is upsetting for folks who insist on Jesus’ perfection in all ways.  In my mind, Jesus, like the rest of us, has been growing his whole life.  I assume that there are things that he understood at 17 that he didn’t understand at 12.  I assume that there were lessons he learned in his twenties that guided him in his thirties.  I assume that he changed his mind about things and (bear with me here…) that he came to see everything more clearly over time (kind of like the blind guy down the road.)

So, here’s what happens.  Jesus goes to the region known as Tyre.  All he wants is to be left alone.  Therefore, he enters a house and basically hides.  Mark, with his usual economy of words, says, “Yet, he could not escape notice.”  Who hasn’t had it with things and you just want to get away?  “I just need the world to give me a break here!”  That almost never works out.  That certainly does not happen for Jesus.  If you read the Gospels carefully, he tries to get away on a fairly regular basis, “Yet, he could not escape notice.”

(As an aside, there’s a wonderful movie called “Savings Grace” about a young Pope who feels like he’s lost touch with regular people.  So, he runs away from the Vatican and tries to blend in.  He meets real people.  He talks with folks who have nothing to do with the church.  Then, one day, someone looks him in the eye and says, “You’re the Pope!”  So much for getting away…)

It is a woman who finds Jesus, in the house.  This woman had heard about him.  She was desperate to find him because she had a daughter with “an unclean spirit.”  In our present day understanding, this probably meant that the daughter had a chronic mental illness.  She was depressed or anxious or psychotic and she was suffering through this about 2000 years before anyone would know what to do.  The mother, though, is desperate, which pretty much all of us understand because almost all of us have been touched by the way that a mental illness can ravage someone’s life.  The daughter was “possessed” in ancient terms but the mother was out of her mind with heart-stricken grief and worry.  We get that.  She comes to Jesus and bows before the man who is her last, best hope.

What follows is one of the most disturbing moments in the Gospels.  The woman begs Jesus to heal her daughter.  Meanwhile, the Gospel writer points out that she’s a Gentile.  She’s not Jewish.  She’s one of them, not one of us.  At which point we assure ourselves, if we get this woman’s pain, then surely Jesus gets it, too!  The question is not if Jesus will heal the girl.  The question is simply how he’ll do it—laying on of hands or just a few words or some new way?  Yet, that is not what happens…

Here is what Jesus says:  “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”  If those words don’t stop you in your tracks then you are not paying attention.  Who are the children?  The children are the people of Israel, God’s “chosen people.”  As God’s chosen people, they deserve to be fed and taught and healed before anyone else…

Understand…Jesus was a deeply committed Jewish man.  As such, he would have been steeped in the notion of Israel as God’s chosen people.  He would have been taught from an early age all of the cultural rules about foreigners being unclean.  He would have been immersed in a shared understanding that God simply loves us more than God loves them.  All Jesus is doing is repeating the party line…to a fellow human being, a mother, who’s heart is broken with worry for her suffering daughter.

Now, you might excuse Jesus any number of ways here.  The writer must have gotten the quote wrong.  Maybe Jesus was just teasing the woman and didn’t really mean what he said.  Maybe he was just having a bad moment…

I have to be honest, though, and tell you there is no excuse…other than the truth that Jesus is fully human.  He’s one of us.  All of us have been taught in ways subtle and not so subtle that there are people about whom we do not need to care or if we do need to care, then we only have to care as a last resort.  These things are so deeply embedded in us that we’re not even aware of them until they get exposed—to our horror.  The boys don’t have to care about the girls.  The rich don’t have to care about the poor.  People of one religion don’t have to care about anyone from any other religion.  And on and on and on.

I think Jesus is sincerely wrong here and he’s about to be healed by a Syrophoenician woman— of all people.  She hears Jesus’ words and stands her ground:  “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.”  Essentially, she says that even dogs get to eat the crumbs that the children spill.  The implied question is, “Won’t you treat my daughter and me at least as well as you would treat dogs?”  And, the painful dignity underneath it all is, “Mind you, my daughter and I are no dogs, sir.”

In this moment, the woman’s words “open” Jesus up—“Ephphatha!  He hears the truth of what she has to say.  He sees everything clearly.  His mouth, which seemed so contorted by the hurtful words he just said is set straight.  His words and his heart align again:  “For saying that, you may go—the demon has left your daughter.”  The woman goes home and finds her daughter, healed.

In that moment, I believe that Jesus is healed, too. After all, it happens to the best of us.  We finally see the blind spots that we didn’t know we had.  We finally hear the truth we could not hear before.   God’s love turns out to be bigger than we ever imagined.  The question isn’t whether anyone is perfect.  The question is this: “Can you hear the truth and actually grow as a result?”