Sermon 3rd May 2015

Today, one of our Lay Readers, Trevor Tayleur, continues our study of the Gospel of Mark. The reading is from Mark 1: verses 35-45.

The Teaching Healer

Doctor, doctor, I've heard that exercise kills germs; is it true?
• Probably, but how do you get the germs to exercise?

Doctor, doctor I've become invisible.
• I'm afraid I can't see you now.

Doctor, doctor, I've swallowed my pocket money.
• Take this and we'll see if there's any change in the morning.

Before you groan any more, I can reassure you that I won’t tell any more doctor doctor jokes this morning. There is a vague connection with today’s sermon title which is ‘Jesus the Teaching Healer’. We continue our series from Mark’s gospel. Two weeks ago Cameron explained the message that the Kingdom of God was very close and about how we need to repent. We also heard that Jesus called to the fishermen: “Follow me” and they did. Last week Adrian talked about about Jesus’ authority and compassion. Adrian told us how he captivated the people with his teaching that really got to the heart of the matter. And he showed us how Jesus reached out to those whom society had excluded. And today’s reading builds on those themes – Jesus’ call to follow him in response to his authority and compassion.

Mark packs a lot of action into a short space, and perhaps the main event in today’s Gospel reading is Jesus’ encounter with the leper. But that’s not all that happens. Today’s reading brings home two key points about Jesus’ ministry –

Firstly the richness of his internal life with God, and secondly the richness of his external ministry to others.

Let’s look at verse 35, the first verse in our reading; “Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed.” Why did he go out to a solitary place? The answer comes two verses later: when the disciples found him, they said to him, “Everyone is looking for you.”

Last Sunday we saw how Jesus healed scores of people. Indeed the heading in our Bibles for part of last Sunday’s reading is, “Jesus Heals Many.” When the people learnt that Jesus had miraculous powers, the power over nature, the response was overwhelming. Everyone wanted to see him. We have an election coming up on Thursday, and if any of the party leaders were experiencing anything remotely like what Jesus was experiencing, they would make the most of it. They would be out there, shaking hands, making the most of the short time left before the general election. They would be making the most of the opportunity. After all, there’s a general election to win!

Jesus’s response was the opposite.  Jesus had literally come to change the course of history, to save the world, and in the midst of the busyness, in the midst of all the excitement, what did he do? He went to a solitary place, a place far away from people. This shows the absolute priority that Jesus gave to prayer.

This was actually quite a wakeup call for me this week. During Lent I had been reading some chapters from Celebration of Discipline, our Lent book, I resolved to put some of the book’s ideas about meditation into practice. But since Easter I’ve felt busy – a lot of pressure at work, Action Group meeting, APCM, sermon to prepare and so on. And what gets squeezed out? Spending time with God. I don’t find meditation easy: I’m still very much a beginner, but if we follow Jesus’ example, then spending time with God should be a priority. The busier Jesus got, the more he prayed. Yet I suspect that for some of us at least the busier we get, the less we pray. The first thing that gets squeezed out is quiet and solitude. We are flawed, fallible people. If Jesus needed to spend time with God, how much more do we need to spend time with God? 

The richness of Jesus’ internal life led on to the richness of his external ministry to others. We’ve already seen how Jesus healed the sick and suffering; Jesus ministered to the people in deed, but we also see from our Gospel passage that Jesus also ministered in word. We know from the parallel account in Luke’s Gospel that the people didn’t want Jesus to go, but Jesus said, in verse 38, “Let us go somewhere else – to the nearby villages – so that I can preach there also. That is why I have come.” Jesus had come to preach the word as well – to minister to the whole person.

As we saw earlier in Mark 1 Chapter 1, when Jesus preached the word he said, “Repent!” That was at the heart of his ministry – the call to repent and to follow him.  You need God’s mercy and grace, he was saying to the people. You need to turn away from your sins and follow me.

Yes, Jesus fed the hungry and healed the sick. He met people’s physical needs, but he also came to meet people’s spiritual needs – by calling on them to repent and to follow him. His call to repent still applies today, and it isn’t a popular message, but that’s nothing new. Lady Huntingdon was an aristocrat in the 18^th Century at the time of a great revival. She became a Christian and wanted to share her joy with fellow aristocrats and invited some of them to hear her favourite preacher, George Whitfield, along with John and Charles Wesley one of the founders of Methodism. The Duchess of Buckingham, one of Lady Huntingdon’s friends replied as follows: “It is monstrous to be told you have a heart as sinful as the common wretches that crawl on the earth. This is highly offensive and insulting and I cannot but wonder if your own ladyship should relish any sentiment so much at variance with high rank and good breeding.”

The Duchess of Buckingham had it all, or so she thought. But, unlike her friend Lady Huntingdon, she didn’t realise her deep spiritual need, the need to repent.

Jesus is interested in the whole person. He made it clear that he needed to go and preach God’s word. His mission wasn’t only to heal, although that was a key part of his mission. It was also to preach – to address our spiritual as well as our physical needs.  His mission included calling people to personal conversion – telling them that they needed to repent of their sins and to be saved by God’s grace. And Jesus poured himself out and calls others to do so, to show sacrificial love through words and also through deeds – through word and deed. Jesus’ mission – and our mission – is multi-dimensional, reaching out to people in their social, physical economic and spiritual needs. Jesus has a ministry to everyone – rich, poor and middle-class!

So Jesus travelled all over Galilee – but we also see that we was healing people as well – casting out demons, as the GNB puts it. As well as preaching Jesus was reaching out to those who were excluded from society.

And now on to Jesus’ encounter with a man with leprosy. Here we have a perfect case study of the multi-dimensional nature of Jesus’ salvation. Leprosy in those days was not just a disease; it was a total condition – physical, social and spiritual. Physically leprosy literally meant that you were falling apart in pain and misery. Socially you were a pariah, an outcast. You were contagious and weren’t allowed in inhabited places. You had to stay out in the solitary places, out in the wilderness. Absolute social and emotional isolation. If a leper came near a person, they had to shout out, “Unclean, unclean.”

Spiritually they were also outcasts. At that time most people believed lepers were cursed by God. But be that as it may, they were contagious and excluded from worship. They were also at the receiving end of complex social codes. Lepers were punished if they came into an inhabited place, and ordinary people were punished if they came near a leper.

So a leper came before Jesus and begged for help; “If you are willing,” he said, “you can make me clean.” He didn’t simply say, “Make me well.” No, he asked to be made clean – clean before God, clean before his community and clean physically. He knew that he needed it all. And Jesus gave it to him. Jesus reached out and touched him.

Did Jesus need to touch him? No, Jesus could have healed him with a word, at a distance. Jesus didn’t touch him because he needed to do so to heal him, but because the man needed it spiritually and emotionally. This man had lived in isolation and had probably not been touched by a loved one for many years. Jesus touched him out of love and compassion. Jesus gave the man the multi-dimensional salvation he needed. Filled with compassion, Jesus made him clean -physically, socially and spiritually.

When you love someone, you want to meet all their needs. I grew up in South Africa, during the time of apartheid, and there was a debate, chiefly among white Christians, about whether the church should get involved in politics. Some argued that the church should be preaching the Gospel, and that politics was for the politicians. Others argued that if the church wanted to follow Jesus’ example, Christians should get involved in the anti-apartheid struggle. Nearly 40 years on from my involvement in those debates, it’s hard to believe there was ever an argument on those lines. Of course Christians should have been fully involved in the struggle against apartheid.  If you love someone, you don’t debate if evangelism is more important than social justice, or vice versa. You meet their needs because of love, because of the richness of Jesus’ love for others. 

And there’s more that we can learn from Jesus’ encounter with the leper. A common perception of religion is that you get to heaven by being good. You have to work very hard and be very pure if you are going to get to heaven. You will have to avoid the sinners, the stained and the soiled. In Jesus’ time you had the clean and the unclean, and whenever the two came together, the clean became unclean. If you came into contact with a leper, you became unclean and had to be ceremonially cleansed. The clean became unclean. But Jesus touched the leper, and it all changed.

Jesus told the man to do all the ceremonial cleansing, which he needed to do in order to return to life in the community. He had to do these things to be reintegrated into society.  But Jesus didn’t do it. Jesus touched the leper, and by every rule and regulation he had become unclean. Jesus should have gone and been ceremonially cleansed. But he didn’t. And by not going to be cleansed, Jesus turned the traditional thinking upside down. He is saying that when the two come together, the clean and unclean, the unclean becomes clean. By not going to the priest, Jesus is saying, “I am cleanliness. I don’t care who you are, how bad it is. I don’t care how inadequate you feel, what you’ve done. If you come into contact with me, you are clean.  It doesn’t matter how stained you are, how tainted you are, I am cleanliness itself. Through me anyone can come into the presence of God.”

Jesus the teaching healer. What does he teach us in today’s Gospel? Last Sunday Adrian challenged us to think about who are the excluded classes in today’s world. As leprosy became less of a problem, the places where lepers were incarcerated emptied and the lepers were replaced by another excluded class, the mentally ill. Robben Island is best known as the prison where Nelson Mandela spent 18 of his 27 years in prison as a result of his fight against apartheid. Before being a prison, it was a leper colony. But as apartheid became more entrenched, it became a place where the apartheid regime sent a different excluded class, black political prisoners. White political prisoners were kept in somewhat better conditions in a different prison.

Thankfully, apartheid is now over. Nelson Mandela was released from prison and became President of South Africa. We live in more enlightened times in the treatment of mental illness. But, as Adrian said last week, as one excluded class went, it was replaced by another.  Are we in danger of creating new excluded classes – the migrants and asylum seekers or some other group?

Jesus ministered to the whole person. He preached the need to repent and to follow him. He healed the sick and the suffering, and he reached out to those excluded from society. He had an amazingly rich external ministry to others. It was a ministry based on the richness of his internal life with God. In the midst of his busyness, Jesus always spent time with God. Through this he gained the strength to preach and teach and heal, to make the unclean clean and to restore those excluded from society. Jesus said to the fishermen, “Follow me.”  And that is what he is saying to us too, here in Herne Hill.

Let’s pray:

 Father, help us not just to follow the example of Jesus but to follow Jesus himself. Help us to be close to you so that we can show your love and compassion to those around us, including those excluded from society. In Jesus’ name. Amen.