Jesus Heals People

Jesus Heals People

Mark 2:1-12

Let’s begin with a few basic facts.  We have four Gospels:  Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.  There were others but they didn’t make the “cut.”  Of these four Gospels, three—Matthew, Mark, and Luke— clearly share common source material.  The Gospel of John is much more philosophical and theological in nature and includes Jesus speaking much more explicitly about who he is—“the light of the world,” “the way, the truth, and the life,” “the vine and the branches.”  If you spend any time with the four Gospels, it is immediately obvious when you’re hearing John’s words.

You can compare listening to the Gospels to being at a family reunion.  Every family has one family member who just has a different take.  That different take doesn’t make their stories irrelevant or less true.  You just have to remember that you’re listening to “Uncle John.”  It helps to know a bit of background, too—that he didn’t spend as much time with the rest of the “family,” that over the years, he had a lot of time to think for himself and to formulate his own ideas.  The rest of the “family,” though—Mark, Matthew and Luke—they were participating for years in a shared conversation before things ever started to be written down.

So, in this sense, who is “Uncle Mark?” The first thing to know is this:  Mark is the earliest of the Gospels.  The other three Gospels were written significantly later.  Twenty years after Jesus’ death, there would have still been people alive who were first-hand witnesses.  Twenty years after that, when the other Gospels were being written, those witnesses were long gone.  Being the first Gospel doesn’t necessarily make Mark the most accurate Gospel.  It should, however, be something we keep in mind 

Second, Mark, more than the other Gospels, is brief.   For example, Matthew and Luke tell us that Jesus was tempted in the wilderness. They tell us there were three temptations.  They give us Jesus’ answer in each case.  In contrast, Mark almost in passing, mentions that Jesus was tempted and moves on without any details.  Everything just comes at us fast in Mark.  Jesus and the disciples seem like they are running from town to town. 

Third, like all the other Gospels, Mark offers us an answer to the key question:  if Jesus was the Messiah then why did so many people fail to recognize this?  Why was it so hard for people to see Jesus for who he really was?  The religious experts want to kill him, not worship him. Almost everyone else listens to what he has to say and then moves on.  How could this be?

Mark’s answer is that people didn’t understand that Jesus was the Messiah because they thought he was the greatest charismatic healer of all time.  People were “wowed” by the way that Jesus healed people and thought, “That’s good enough for me!” However,  Mark keeps pounding home the message at every turn:  “Yes…Jesus healed people but he was so much more!”  In fact, in Mark’s Gospel, every time that Jesus heals someone, he tells them, “Don’t tell anyone!  Seriously, let’s keep this between us.”

Now, today, unless we are Christian Scientists or part of a narrow group of splinter forms of Christianity, the stories about Jesus healing people are problematic but in a very different way.  It’s not that we hear those healing stories and think, “That Jesus…he’s the man!  That’s all I need to know!”  Rather, we hear about him laying hands on people or spitting in someone’s eyes or exorcising demons and we fell kind of embarrassed and think, “Oh…now that takes things just a little too far!” To the degree that we are willing to grant that something healing happened, we’re happy for the people.  However, mostly the whole thing just makes us uncomfortable.  We think, “Could we just get back to Jesus, the moral and ethical teacher?  Now, there’s a man I could know and love!”  We kind of wish that Jesus would have stuck with the stuff that we could explain, the stuff in our comfort zone.

In our world, if you get sick, you call your doctor and hope for a diagnosis and a prescription that will make you better.  (We also hope that our doctor still accepts our insurance.)  We pray for people, sure, and I know how much those prayers matter because I’ve been through medical challenges and knew that people were praying for me.  However, today, God inspires people to become doctors and nurses.  Today, God inspires people to be scientists and do great research.  Today, God gives us minds that can take in scientific information and make informed choices.  Illness is still scary but knowledge is power and science can make us brave. 

None of this was true for our ancestors.  Even in the most advanced societies (Egypt), real medical expertise and knowledge was centuries away.  Germ theories and pain management and anesthesia, were about 1900 years in the future.  In the meantime, people got sick and were expelled from the community as “unclean.”  If you were rich, you might go to someone who called themselves a physician but we would have called them a quack.  If the doctor didn’t work out, you might make your way to a priest.  Mostly, though, he was likely to tell you it was your fault you were sick because you must have offended God.  Neither option was great and both required a lot of cold, hard cash.

Sooner or later, everyone got sick.  Almost none of the people who got sick were rich people because almost no one was rich.  What did all those other people do?  They waited for charismatic healers to come to town.  (Think of the snake oil selling, huckster—“Dr. Hook and his traveling medicine show.”) These healers knew that there were a lot of sick, poor people living out there in the sticks.  Where there is a need, there is money to be made.  Maybe you just worked with crowds instead of individuals—volume is where it’s at! When people are feeling hopeless, they’ll do anything for a little hope for themselves or for someone they love.

So, for us, the healing stories are icky and uncomfortable because we’ve had better options our whole lives. We’ve got the insurance card.  We’ve got science and data to rely on, even if what we’re really relying on is for our doctor to know the science and the data.  Here’s the crux of the issue though:  we know that we have access to good medicine but we also know that the poorer you are, the quicker that access disappears.  Poor people die a lot younger in this country.  Poor women die much more frequently in child birth.  Poor children, by the time they are 5, are already behind developmentally because they haven’t been fed properly and they haven’t had access to crucial medical care.  Why are poor people more likely still to ask their pastor to lay hands on them or to turn to some community member for a folk remedy?  The answer, all too often, is that they don’t have any other choice.

When we hear about Jesus healing people, we should not ask how he is doing this but who is he doing this for and why is he doing this.  No one had good access to medical care in Jesus’ day but the poorest of the poor had the worst care of all.  They also lived in crowded living situations, worked incredibly hard, and had meager diets, all of which we scientifically know is enough to make anyone sick.  Who is Jesus caring about?  The overlooked and the ignored.  Why is he doing this?  Because they are God’s children and deserve care.  Jesus stepping into the role of a charismatic healer is an act of solidarity with the people who needed that care most.  It is a direct challenge to the people who dared to declare others to be worthless.

Almost as soon as Jesus’ ministry begins, he starts.  Yes, he calls disciples.  Yes, he teaches and everyone finds him so much more clear and concise that the muddles mouthed priests and Pharisees.  (Is it really a surprise that our clear and concise Gospel writer, Mark, would want us to know that Jesus was clear and concise, too?) However, all the way along, Jesus is healing people.  In fact, the word spreads so fast that Jesus is an actual healer that Jesus is completely overwhelmed by the mass of hurting people who start chasing him.  He leaves the area to try to catch his breath.

From the start, one other thing is true.  Charismatic healers would have been all about collecting whatever fame and glory (and money) that they could collect.  They would not only encourage people to spread the word about their healing powers, they would have spread that word themselves at every opportunity.  That’s the weird thing about Jesus.  He’s a genuine healer but he’s not much of a business man.  Mark implies that Jesus is happy to heal people but what he really wants is a chance for people to be whole.  It turns out being whole is even harder than being healed.

Part of being whole is feeling like you actually matter to other people.  You learn that through concrete acts of care.  Jesus lived this truth, one person at a time.  Though there were crowds who chased him, Jesus keeps retrieving one person at a time from the crowds.  In the first chapter of Mark, a leper calls out to Jesus, “Jesus, I believe you can cleanse me if you choose.”  Jesus answers, “I do choose!” That’s the moment when healing begins—when someone cares.  In our advanced world, so many people remain heartsick and broken because they’ve concluded that no one really cares.  If we can get over our aversion to healing stories, part of what we might discover is that we can be healers ourselves, if we are willing look the overlooked and the ignored people in the eye and say, in our own way, “Actually, I do care.  I do want to help.”

This is what is so interesting about the moment captured in our text.  A group of friends care about a paraplegic man.  By definition, this man’s needs would have been ignored by most.  He can’t work.  He can’t contribute.  And yet…this man has a whole group of friends who are so devoted to him, who care so much, that when they hear Jesus is in town they have to take him.  They carry him to where Jesus is.  And when that house is jammed full of needy people, they cart him up to the roof of that house.  Covered in sweat and standing knee deep in thatch and mud, they do the next caring thing.  They tear off the roof and lower him in.

Mark tells us that their faith and their bold action are what moves Jesus to heal the man.  Again, the healing began as soon as people cared, the tide of judgement and blame was turned by the force of the statement:  “We have your back. We’re going to do whatever it takes.”  Of course, Jesus could do things we can’t do—that much seems obvious to me.  However, it seems equally obvious that this is not an excuse for us to not do what we can do.  When we see a person who is overlooked and ignored, we have no choice but to care, to declare that we do choose to help, to make it clear that we will tear the roof off if that is what it takes to care for a person who is nothing less than a fellow, beloved child of God. 

Mark’s not letting us off the hook:  Jesus was a healer and more—deal with it.   As his followers, our job isn’t to figure out how he did what he did.  Rather, our job is to figure out what we can do and then do it.  Some days, that will be a matter of eye contact and a little care.  Some days, it will be our turn to tear off the roof.