Wednesday, 08 February 2006
Epiphany 6 Year B
2 Kings 5: 1-14 NRSV text
Psalm 30 NRSV text
1 Corinthians 9: 24-27 NRSV text
Mark 1: 40-45 NRSV text
Jesus has begun his ministry, and the response of the people is “What is this? A new teaching – with authority!” (Mark 1: 27) Capernaum provides the “preview of coming attractions”: first he casts out the unclean spirit from the man in the synagogue, and moves directly to the first healing. By using the narrative device of a day, Mark shows the dramatic effect produced by the preaching of the Good News of the kingdom: the “whole city” gathers around his door, he heals many with illnesses and casts out many demons (1:32). The action which began in Capernaum is now extended throughout the Galilee with the first preaching tour (vv 35-9).
The healing narratives in the gospel aren’t a random – or even biographical – series of “here’s the story of the various people Jesus healed. Impressive, eh?” I noted last week that they are integrally linked to the effect produced by the message Jesus preaches. What they plot for us is the developing opposition to Jesus, provoked by his authority (for a detailed discussion, see this post on the healing narratives). We need to be as aware of the elements of conflict and opposition as we are of the healings themselves. Just as the exorcisms are an attack on the Strong Man (cf 3: 20-30), the healings are an attack on the purity system that made illness a reason for exclusion from the wider community. This exclusion is the “suffering within suffering”, so that the constant emphasis in the healing stories is on restoration.
Read Leviticus 13-14. Two whole chapters in the book, devoted to the subject of leprosy! Then look more closely at the elements in the story:
· The leper dares to approach Jesus, instead of remaining at a distance and calling out a warning: “Unclean!” You can picture how easily and effectively a leper got through the crowd to within Jesus’ reach, can’t you? They’d have parted like the Red Sea! Yet Jesus stands his ground.
· “If you choose, you can make me clean!” If you choose, or if you dare? Is this first and foremost an appeal to Jesus’ compassion, or is this a case of the leper seeing clearly who Jesus is – the one who overthrows the purity system? To be healed and to be cleansed are two different things (as you’ll have noticed from reading Leviticus). Only a priest could declare a leper clean. “Being clean” was a pronouncement, not a condition or disease.
· Jesus responds. He doesn’t only heal, he makes (declares?) the leper clean! Several commentators have remarked upon this and the possibility that Jesus is assuming the priestly role, thereby challenging the hegemony of the priests and scribes.
· Jesus’ response is dictated by compassion. The Greek word is as descriptive as it could be: splanchnistheis. It’s a “guts” word – and sounds like it! It means that Jesus was “twisted up in his guts with suffering empathy and ached to do something about it!” There is a church in the USA called “The Guts Church” – because its aim is to live out the compassion of Jesus Christ. Two things about Jesus stand out in the gospel: his authority and his compassion. In the narrative about power (the powers) that Mark gives us, Jesus’ power is defined by compassion. This is the power of God. It is what motivates the healing of the leper, as indeed it underlies the whole movement of God towards us in Jesus.
· Jesus touches the leper. You don’t do that! Apart from being made ritually unclean (which was more of a bother than a serious problem), it was suspected that leprosy was transmitted by touch. The, as now, the exact processes of transmission are unknown, but it was a deadly and highly contagious disease. It was the job of the priest to examine a leper carefully to establish whether the disease was in the active phase of contagion. Touching a leper was therefore associated with huge personal risk. Jesus touching the leper was akin to the images in the 1980s of Princess Diana hugging the AIDS sufferers.
· Look at the flow of contagion: instead of Jesus being made ill, the leper is made well.
I want to comment further on the notion that Jesus is doing more than healing the leper and restoring him to the community, and is mounting an attack on the purity system. Ched Myers suggests that he is. Now, it is one thing to say that Jesus’ healing provokes the hostile reaction of the purity system, and another to say that this is an instanced of a deliberate attack on the system. But what Myers does do is to make sense of the elements of anger in the story.
Suppose for a moment that the context of the story is one in which the leper has been to the priests to be declared clean (presumably the disease in not in its contagious phase) and that the priest has refused his petition (hence the sense of “if you dare you can make me clean”). Jesus both heals – the leprosy leaves completely so there is no doubt that he is “clean” – not even the priest could argue - and declares him clean. Then “sternly warning him …” The word embrimesamenos, translated “sternly warning”, more readily translates as “Then Jesus, snorting with indignation, sent him away at once”.
Snorting with indignation at what? Jesus sends him away to the priests, to make the due payment for a clean bill of health. What the NRSV translates “as a testimony to them” is actually more naturally rendered, “as a witness against them”. Eis marturion autois is actually a technical phrase in the gospel for testimony before hostile audiences (cf 6:11, 13:9).
In other words, Jesus heals the leper, declares him clean and sends him to the priests as an act of confrontation: “Look! You would not declare him clean, so I have removed all trace of the disease. Whether you declare him clean or not, I have already done so, and he is clean. And now you will make him pay you for an offering! This is indeed an offering to God – but as witness against you!”
Yet Jesus’ strategy backfires. The man aborts his mission, goes public, and Jesus is forced into hiding – not only because of his popularity, but because he is now a marked man: he has touched a leper. If this is so, we have an interesting reversal: Jesus now shares, in some sense, the ostracism from mainstream community life that the leper originally suffered, because of his compassion! Healing provokes conflict and opposition and leads to Jesus sharing increasingly the ostracism of those with whom he is in solidarity.
Psalm 30 / 2 Kings 5: 1-14
Psalm 30 is linked with this week’s texts because it is a psalm of thanksgiving for recovery from a grave illness. Leprosy would certainly be an appropriate context. The sense in v3 that the illness has been a living death – life in the grave – and healing not only “making me feel better” but “bringing me back from the dead” shows the enormous significance of a healing which is simultaneously restoration to full participation in the community.
If we’ve been overly theological about the healing and restoration bit, because of asking what it tells us about Jesus, here’s a good corrective. Psalm 30 tells us about the experience of this sort of illness by the sufferer. And words like “healing”, “clean” and “restoration” begin to bear their weight of personal experience. But so do words like “leprosy”, “unclean” and “exclusion”. They are experienced as living death. They cause desperation – seen not least in the fact that they drive the psalmist (sufferer) not only to pray to Yahweh but actually to rage and cry! “Made supplication” (v8) is a formal term that means to pray, but the prayer is interesting: “What benefit will it conceivably be to you, God, if I die, and go to the grave? What is that would be of sufficient advantage to you that you are killing me slowly and horribly like this? When I am simply dust, is that dust going to praise you? If you’re such a great God, and so need worship and adoration, let me live – then I’ll be in a better position to benefit you and give you what you want!”
There’s a rage simmering under the surface, as well as a desperation. It comes out barely concealed, and couched in what sounds like reasoned .argument. But suffering actually generates pain and anger against God. And there is a pastoral and theological concern here that we often do flick-flacks to avoid: God could prevent suffering and does not. Therefore God must take some responsibility for it, even if God doesn’t cause it.
This is part of Jewish spirituality that can teach us an important lesson. It’s about honesty with God, before God, and with people. It’s about dealing with reality. The excessive Christian politeness about suffering, hedged around so often with “faithful” phrases like, “If it is your will, O God …” in contradicted by the searing honesty of the psalmist. Desperate situations do not encourage deferential behaviour – and God clearly does not expect deference at these points! God is compassionate, and therefore understands pain and desperation. The question, of course, is whether we have an empathetic understanding of suffering – particularly the exclusion that others experience which is the “torment within the torment”. Jesus is right – exclusion is a killer (literally).
At the same time the psalmist teaches us something vital about God: Yahweh is the one who can be addressed from the Pit. What is more, the assumption is that Yahweh can be mobilised by these cries from the Pit. That, after all, was the experience of the Exodus, started because Yahweh heard their groans from the slave pits. Yahweh and acts – because the cries act as a nudge. The psalmist doesn’t sit back ands wait for Yahweh to act – the psalmist cried out! Isn’t this a reminder of the radical grace of God? Whatever our understanding of God’s power, we need to understand that it is driven by compassion, not pride. This is a God to whom we can cry and rage.
That Yahweh is not a God who must constantly be appeased and grovelled to, glorified and worshipped is emphasised in the story of Naaman the leper. This isn’t the main emphasis in the story, but it is enormously significant. Naaman is converted and will henceforth worship only Yahweh. This “clean” man recognises, however, that he cannot remain ritually – or theologically! – pure, because he will have to accompany his master to the temple in the worship of Rimmon. And so Naaman asks Elisha if Yahweh will pardon him for this. That Yahweh will is astonishing. Where is the rigidity of the demands for exclusive worship? Where is the insistence on the due process of law for the failures of purity? Why should Naaman not be condemned as an idolater?
As with Jesus, the answer is grace and compassion. God is a God whose primary concern is people. That is put above God’s holiness, power and divinity. The challenge is for the community of faith to recognise and reflect these priorities. So often the Church reflects the purity code of the scribes and Pharisees, rather than the grace of God. It is significant that the United Churches of Christ in the United States have made their identity around radical inclusion. “Jesus didn’t turn away anybody, and neither do we!” is the slogan. And it has been a powerful message! Have a look at the website and read the testimonies. People speak about how hearing just that one thing, and finding it to be a reality in the church they went to, stopped them committing suicide – suicide from the despair of being declared “unclean” by their home churches and excluded. Something breathtakingly simple, yet life-giving and lifesaving. God’s love breaks down all the barriers that we erect to keep ourselves pure and uncontaminated. God works beyond those. And when the church behaves like the scribes, Jesus works among those people, and says, “Now go back to the church and show them what I have done in your life! Let them try to say that you are not to be accepted! Show them – it is my witness against them!”
Amen.
14:27 Posted in 1 Corinthians , 1 Kings , Mark , Psalms , Year B | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this | Tags: Epiphany 6 Year B, Mark 1: 40-45, Psalm 30, 1 Kings 5: 1-14, healing the leper, healing miracles, restoration, the purity code