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Jesus and Healing
Mark 1:29-39
February 4, 2018
Title: Jesus and Healing
Right away the news about him spread throughout the entire region of Galilee. After leaving the synagogue, Jesus, James, and John went home with Simon and Andrew. Simon’s mother-in-law was in bed, sick with a fever, and they told Jesus about her at once. He went to her, took her by the hand and raised her up. The fever left her, and she served them.
That evening, at sunset, people brought to Jesus those who were sick or demon-possessed. The whole town gathered near the door. He healed many who were sick with all kinds of diseases, and he threw out many demons. But he didn’t let the demons speak, because they recognized him.
Early in the morning, well before sunrise, Jesus rose and went to a deserted place where he could be alone in prayer. Simon and those with him tracked him down. When they found him, they told him, “Everyone’s looking for you!”
He replied, “Let’s head in the other direction, to the nearby villages, so that I can preach there too. That’s why I’ve come.” He traveled throughout Galilee, preaching in their synagogues and throwing out demons.
I think I’ve shared this story with you before, that when I became a Christian at the age of 13, I went to my parents, who were not church goers at all, and I asked them what we were, meaning what denomination or tradition had they been before they stopped going to church, which is probably the mid-1960’s. My mother said to me, “I think we’re Southern Baptist,” and so I went to the yellow pages, and start looking up Southern Baptist churches in and around our home in Edmond, Oklahoma, which was a suburb of Oklahoma City. I eventually found a church, and pretty much throughout my junior and high school years, I remained a Southern Baptist, including during stops in Texas and Alabama. When we moved to rural East Texas in my freshman year of high school, that pattern continued, but the interesting thing about moving from a moderately large city like Oklahoma City to a town of 1500, and to a place where you would have to drive an hour away to see a movie, was that the religious complexion of the place was so different than the one I left in Oklahoma. Yes, the Southern Baptists were still the top dogs of the Protestant world in that area, as they were in Oklahoma, but they had stiff competition from the Pentecostals, who at times, seemed as prevalent as the Southern Baptists. What was interesting was the mistrust and gentle ill will that was shared between the two, with the holy rolling, miracle believing and speaking in spiritual tongues Pentecostals being looked down and dismissed by the quieter and more subdued – but still very conservative – Southern Baptists.
Aside from the whole “speaking in tongues” disagreement between the two groups, it was the belief in possibility of miraculous healings that seemed to generate a lot of heat. In many Pentecostal churches, there was a belief that one need only pray over the sick and they would and should return to health. Sometimes these healing prayers would be done during the time of prayer in the church, where someone in need of healing would be brought up before the congregation, and the preacher would lay one hand on the hurting person, raise one up the other hand up in the air, with his eyes closed, and he pray vigorously and with passion as the congregation would extend their hands in the direction of the person in need of healing prayer. Now, this is not the practice of every Pentecostal church I’ve visited, but in the area I lived in at the time, in East Texas, it was very common. You see, the Pentecostals believed the spirit of God was still doing works of miraculous healings in this day and age, and was also still empowering some with the gift of speaking in tongues – Pentecostal fire, some early Pentecostals historians called it. But my tradition at the time had a belief that was shared by the vast majority of Christians around the world, which was that the further the church moved away from the initial outbreak of healings and miracles and speaking in tongues, the time around Jesus, the less one would see these kinds of healings and gifts being manifested in the present. The further away from that initial flame around Jesus ministry and the ministry of the apostles, the further away from that flame, the less warm we Christians would become, so to speak, until, finally, the age of miracles, or the kind of miracles that Jesus and the apostles performed, ended.
But I have to admit, I’ve wondered about that explanation, thinking perhaps the church was trying to explain away the absence of these kind of miracles done and experienced by Jesus and the early disciples in its present day. Could it because the miracles in our New Testament never happened and this was simply an explanation for why the miracles weren’t showing up in the lives of those now hearing and reading the stories of Jesus and his disciples? Well, that might be an explanation, but the Gospels and the book of Acts themselves took decades to actually be written down on paper, so to speak, but surely the oral traditions of these healings were heard all over the church, and these stories didn’t seem unreasonable or unbelievable to those who could easily count the few years between their own lives and time of Jesus’ death and resurrection. They were, to use the terms of our Pentecostal sisters and brothers, still very close to the age of miracles where they could see still feel the warmth of those miraculous flames. It didn’t seem unbelievable to them, and perhaps it shouldn’t seem unreasonable to us that when Jesus walked among his brothers and sisters, which is all of humanity, that he possessed a special healing power, one that did actually stun the people around him when it was displayed. Personally I do believe that Jesus did heal people, that it was one of the things that seemed to deeply impress the people around him. Historically, we know that others claim to be healers in the time of Jesus, but their stories never went anywhere, never seemed to have the impact that the stories of Jesus’ healing did – the flame died out quickly, if it ever existed, while the temperature of the stories about Jesus and his healing powers continued to warm those early Christian listeners, decades and decades after his death and resurrection.
So, what are we to do with these stories, and how we are to understand the healing power of God, in this day, in this age, far removed from that initial and brief flame? You and I have prayed for hundreds, if not thousands of people, in our lifetimes, prayed for their healing, sometimes of mind, sometimes of body, and sometimes of both. First, I think it is important to note that not every healing is a supernatural miracle, something that God does alone. We know that our bodies have a miraculous force within them that help the body heal itself, which, in a way, is simply a marvel and miracle found in God’s creation of our bodies – but it is natural, ordinary miracle, something that most of us have within us. Other times doctors and treatments help to cure us, treatments developed by researchers, which are themselves a sort of miracle, created and used by minds and hearts who were created by God. It is amazing what human minds have done to help humans live longer and better lives, even in comparison to fifty years ago. But these are ordinary healings and miracles from God that come through our bodies or through the minds of others, in their development of treatments that can fix our body, heal our body – these are not what I think most of us are speaking of when we pray for a healing miracle – most of us who are praying for a miracle are usually praying for some direct action from God that will heal the body and sometimes the soul, when all the ordinary miracles are not enough. Do they happen, even now, these kinds of miracles, these unexplainable healings done by the hands of God, do they happen now? Yes, I think they do happen, but they are rare, so rare, and that is why when they do happen, we are so often stunned when we get the miracle we are praying for, the healing we wanted for ourselves or for another. When we pray for another, we are hopefully not trying to convince God to do a miracle, or trying to get enough people praying for a particular thing so that God will finally relent and give us or them that miracle. We’re aren’t going to argue God into giving us a miracle, or badger God into a miracle by having a more and more people pray so that God will finally relent to our wishes. And, if you think about it, if our prayers for healing have this kind of logic behind them, we really don’t really have compassionate picture of God, a God who we somehow have to bother and hassle or beg enough to finally get our wish for some sort of healing. A God with an ego who will only do good for us if we ask hard enough, or have enough people asking for us – that is not a picture of God, but a picture of an egoist, a narcissist. But that isn’t God, that is not the God whose other name is love, at least according to the words of Jesus.
So, let’s look at today’s text from Mark to see if we can get a clue, or some idea that what has perhaps happened to us, some healing we’ve experienced, is no ordinary miracle, not one done completely by our bodies or the intelligence and treatments of others. So, remember that last week we had Jesus casting out a demon out of a person who was believed to bearing an evil spirit, and he does this within a synagogue, which is where he has just been when our text begins today, when he arrives at the home of two of his disciples named Simon and Andrew. Simon’s mother-in-law is sick with fever, confined to a bed, suffering a natural illness, and something not usually attributed to demonic possession in antiquity. Jesus is told about her and goes to her and he takes her hand and helps her up, raises her up, literally and figuratively. The fever is gone, and she begins to serve her visitors. Now, I must admit that the idea that she gets well so that she can begin to serve her guests, likely her male guests, is difficult for many of us, we who are aware of how the patriarchy often assigns women these roles of service, of helping others, and especially helping men. I also want to acknowledge the possibility that her spiritual gift is a desire or willingness to serve others, a gift that you see in men as well. But service of some sort also seemed to be a response to her particular healing, something that you sometimes find in others who have survived cancer or some other illness – the response to their healing is to serve others, especially those who have suffered the same illness or challenges they’ve experienced. Maybe one of the clues that we have been healed directly by God is that we find purpose in helping others after the challenges that we’ve experienced, either with those who have faced what we just faced, OR simply because we just feel called to serve more broadly, to help others in need of our help.
Now, it is said that the evening came after this woman’s healing, which is when people brought others for Jesus to heal, or to have him cast out the demons that were supposedly inflicting them. He does both with those brought to him – and he does so with the kind of passion that almost indicates that he too had been healed somehow, because Jesus, over and over, lives his life in service to others, gives himself away for the sake of others, serves those in need. But a self-giving life does not come without the need to replenish oneself, to take care of oneself and so before daybreak he goes to a deserted place, where he could pray, be alone, refill his spiritually empty coffers. He will do this many times in his ministry – go to a deserted place, be alone, rest, pray – so that they he will be ready for the good work that will surely find him in the coming hours or days. And that good work finds him quickly again, perhaps too quickly, when Simon and those with him track him down – the original Greek here is actually more dramatic, rather than having merely tracked him down, it could also mean that they “hunted” him down – because they needed him in that place and in others places. He tells them they should go in another direction, he sets limits to what he can do in a particular place and moment, and so he sets forth to the nearby villages, to preach and teach, and we are left with the almost humorous ending line: “He traveled throughout galilee, preaching in their synagogues and throwing out demons.” It makes me smile thinking of him ordering the demons out and away – “alright, everyone out, get out of here!” To be of service to others, one must attend to one’s own needs, to do what Jesus did, which was find time for ourselves. Maybe if God heals, God does so with a purpose, for a reason, for some service that only we can provide to others – but that does not mean we do not also need to take time for rest, for prayer, for self-care.
Do I believe in healing power of God? Yes, oh yes, and I would invite you to do the same. When Douglas and I first started dating about 14 years, it was not an easy beginning, because of where he was at in his life and where I was in my own life. We kept missing each other in so many different ways, and eventually someone recommended a woman who might help us to process such things, something who brought her wisdom, but something else, something I have never ever experienced elsewhere. We went to see her, and by the end of our one and only session with her, something just had shifted within us, a healing of some sort that allowed us to go forward together with each other. I have never felt or experienced that kind of spiritual power in any other person, this God-given ability to bring forth God’s healing spirit into a place and into a person. That experience of that woman’s spiritual gift of healing some 13 years ago is why I believe there are some people who have a healing gift, something other than their training or education or anything else could provide – they have been given the spiritual ability to heal. Jesus had that gift in spades, in abundance, in ways that startled the people around him, and if, having experienced that kind of spiritual healing years ago in my own life, even in a small way, small in comparison to Jesus’s healing gifts, I too would have been in those crowds around Jesus, amazed and stunned and almost terrified at this man’s ability to heal and to make others whole. But those kinds of moment don’t happen every day, they just don’t and I don’t know if a spiritual healing will ever happen to me again, or to you again, if ever. They are called miracles for a reason – they are uncommon moments, set apart moments, once in a lifetime moments that some never do get in their lifetimes, a moment that can change our lives forever. And if the clues in this story are true, maybe the test of whether or not what we’ve experienced is a miracle from God is whether or not it changes profoundly, that it propels us to serve others, that it shifts our lives into a different direction, in service to others or some other good and positive direction, rather than simply going back to the way things used to be, or the old ways of doing things. With a great gift comes a great responsibility, that of service to others in need of our help, the story we heard seems to tell us. We may have been healed for a purpose, we may have been healed for a reason, which is to do as Jesus as did, to help others, to serve others, to pass the fruits of that moment of healing onto another, someone who needs what you and I can only help them with. Amen.
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By Kevin McLemore
Mark 1:29-39
February 4, 2018
Title: Jesus and Healing
Right away the news about him spread throughout the entire region of Galilee. After leaving the synagogue, Jesus, James, and John went home with Simon and Andrew. Simon’s mother-in-law was in bed, sick with a fever, and they told Jesus about her at once. He went to her, took her by the hand and raised her up. The fever left her, and she served them.
That evening, at sunset, people brought to Jesus those who were sick or demon-possessed. The whole town gathered near the door. He healed many who were sick with all kinds of diseases, and he threw out many demons. But he didn’t let the demons speak, because they recognized him.
Early in the morning, well before sunrise, Jesus rose and went to a deserted place where he could be alone in prayer. Simon and those with him tracked him down. When they found him, they told him, “Everyone’s looking for you!”
He replied, “Let’s head in the other direction, to the nearby villages, so that I can preach there too. That’s why I’ve come.” He traveled throughout Galilee, preaching in their synagogues and throwing out demons.
I think I’ve shared this story with you before, that when I became a Christian at the age of 13, I went to my parents, who were not church goers at all, and I asked them what we were, meaning what denomination or tradition had they been before they stopped going to church, which is probably the mid-1960’s. My mother said to me, “I think we’re Southern Baptist,” and so I went to the yellow pages, and start looking up Southern Baptist churches in and around our home in Edmond, Oklahoma, which was a suburb of Oklahoma City. I eventually found a church, and pretty much throughout my junior and high school years, I remained a Southern Baptist, including during stops in Texas and Alabama. When we moved to rural East Texas in my freshman year of high school, that pattern continued, but the interesting thing about moving from a moderately large city like Oklahoma City to a town of 1500, and to a place where you would have to drive an hour away to see a movie, was that the religious complexion of the place was so different than the one I left in Oklahoma. Yes, the Southern Baptists were still the top dogs of the Protestant world in that area, as they were in Oklahoma, but they had stiff competition from the Pentecostals, who at times, seemed as prevalent as the Southern Baptists. What was interesting was the mistrust and gentle ill will that was shared between the two, with the holy rolling, miracle believing and speaking in spiritual tongues Pentecostals being looked down and dismissed by the quieter and more subdued – but still very conservative – Southern Baptists.
Aside from the whole “speaking in tongues” disagreement between the two groups, it was the belief in possibility of miraculous healings that seemed to generate a lot of heat. In many Pentecostal churches, there was a belief that one need only pray over the sick and they would and should return to health. Sometimes these healing prayers would be done during the time of prayer in the church, where someone in need of healing would be brought up before the congregation, and the preacher would lay one hand on the hurting person, raise one up the other hand up in the air, with his eyes closed, and he pray vigorously and with passion as the congregation would extend their hands in the direction of the person in need of healing prayer. Now, this is not the practice of every Pentecostal church I’ve visited, but in the area I lived in at the time, in East Texas, it was very common. You see, the Pentecostals believed the spirit of God was still doing works of miraculous healings in this day and age, and was also still empowering some with the gift of speaking in tongues – Pentecostal fire, some early Pentecostals historians called it. But my tradition at the time had a belief that was shared by the vast majority of Christians around the world, which was that the further the church moved away from the initial outbreak of healings and miracles and speaking in tongues, the time around Jesus, the less one would see these kinds of healings and gifts being manifested in the present. The further away from that initial flame around Jesus ministry and the ministry of the apostles, the further away from that flame, the less warm we Christians would become, so to speak, until, finally, the age of miracles, or the kind of miracles that Jesus and the apostles performed, ended.
But I have to admit, I’ve wondered about that explanation, thinking perhaps the church was trying to explain away the absence of these kind of miracles done and experienced by Jesus and the early disciples in its present day. Could it because the miracles in our New Testament never happened and this was simply an explanation for why the miracles weren’t showing up in the lives of those now hearing and reading the stories of Jesus and his disciples? Well, that might be an explanation, but the Gospels and the book of Acts themselves took decades to actually be written down on paper, so to speak, but surely the oral traditions of these healings were heard all over the church, and these stories didn’t seem unreasonable or unbelievable to those who could easily count the few years between their own lives and time of Jesus’ death and resurrection. They were, to use the terms of our Pentecostal sisters and brothers, still very close to the age of miracles where they could see still feel the warmth of those miraculous flames. It didn’t seem unbelievable to them, and perhaps it shouldn’t seem unreasonable to us that when Jesus walked among his brothers and sisters, which is all of humanity, that he possessed a special healing power, one that did actually stun the people around him when it was displayed. Personally I do believe that Jesus did heal people, that it was one of the things that seemed to deeply impress the people around him. Historically, we know that others claim to be healers in the time of Jesus, but their stories never went anywhere, never seemed to have the impact that the stories of Jesus’ healing did – the flame died out quickly, if it ever existed, while the temperature of the stories about Jesus and his healing powers continued to warm those early Christian listeners, decades and decades after his death and resurrection.
So, what are we to do with these stories, and how we are to understand the healing power of God, in this day, in this age, far removed from that initial and brief flame? You and I have prayed for hundreds, if not thousands of people, in our lifetimes, prayed for their healing, sometimes of mind, sometimes of body, and sometimes of both. First, I think it is important to note that not every healing is a supernatural miracle, something that God does alone. We know that our bodies have a miraculous force within them that help the body heal itself, which, in a way, is simply a marvel and miracle found in God’s creation of our bodies – but it is natural, ordinary miracle, something that most of us have within us. Other times doctors and treatments help to cure us, treatments developed by researchers, which are themselves a sort of miracle, created and used by minds and hearts who were created by God. It is amazing what human minds have done to help humans live longer and better lives, even in comparison to fifty years ago. But these are ordinary healings and miracles from God that come through our bodies or through the minds of others, in their development of treatments that can fix our body, heal our body – these are not what I think most of us are speaking of when we pray for a healing miracle – most of us who are praying for a miracle are usually praying for some direct action from God that will heal the body and sometimes the soul, when all the ordinary miracles are not enough. Do they happen, even now, these kinds of miracles, these unexplainable healings done by the hands of God, do they happen now? Yes, I think they do happen, but they are rare, so rare, and that is why when they do happen, we are so often stunned when we get the miracle we are praying for, the healing we wanted for ourselves or for another. When we pray for another, we are hopefully not trying to convince God to do a miracle, or trying to get enough people praying for a particular thing so that God will finally relent and give us or them that miracle. We’re aren’t going to argue God into giving us a miracle, or badger God into a miracle by having a more and more people pray so that God will finally relent to our wishes. And, if you think about it, if our prayers for healing have this kind of logic behind them, we really don’t really have compassionate picture of God, a God who we somehow have to bother and hassle or beg enough to finally get our wish for some sort of healing. A God with an ego who will only do good for us if we ask hard enough, or have enough people asking for us – that is not a picture of God, but a picture of an egoist, a narcissist. But that isn’t God, that is not the God whose other name is love, at least according to the words of Jesus.
So, let’s look at today’s text from Mark to see if we can get a clue, or some idea that what has perhaps happened to us, some healing we’ve experienced, is no ordinary miracle, not one done completely by our bodies or the intelligence and treatments of others. So, remember that last week we had Jesus casting out a demon out of a person who was believed to bearing an evil spirit, and he does this within a synagogue, which is where he has just been when our text begins today, when he arrives at the home of two of his disciples named Simon and Andrew. Simon’s mother-in-law is sick with fever, confined to a bed, suffering a natural illness, and something not usually attributed to demonic possession in antiquity. Jesus is told about her and goes to her and he takes her hand and helps her up, raises her up, literally and figuratively. The fever is gone, and she begins to serve her visitors. Now, I must admit that the idea that she gets well so that she can begin to serve her guests, likely her male guests, is difficult for many of us, we who are aware of how the patriarchy often assigns women these roles of service, of helping others, and especially helping men. I also want to acknowledge the possibility that her spiritual gift is a desire or willingness to serve others, a gift that you see in men as well. But service of some sort also seemed to be a response to her particular healing, something that you sometimes find in others who have survived cancer or some other illness – the response to their healing is to serve others, especially those who have suffered the same illness or challenges they’ve experienced. Maybe one of the clues that we have been healed directly by God is that we find purpose in helping others after the challenges that we’ve experienced, either with those who have faced what we just faced, OR simply because we just feel called to serve more broadly, to help others in need of our help.
Now, it is said that the evening came after this woman’s healing, which is when people brought others for Jesus to heal, or to have him cast out the demons that were supposedly inflicting them. He does both with those brought to him – and he does so with the kind of passion that almost indicates that he too had been healed somehow, because Jesus, over and over, lives his life in service to others, gives himself away for the sake of others, serves those in need. But a self-giving life does not come without the need to replenish oneself, to take care of oneself and so before daybreak he goes to a deserted place, where he could pray, be alone, refill his spiritually empty coffers. He will do this many times in his ministry – go to a deserted place, be alone, rest, pray – so that they he will be ready for the good work that will surely find him in the coming hours or days. And that good work finds him quickly again, perhaps too quickly, when Simon and those with him track him down – the original Greek here is actually more dramatic, rather than having merely tracked him down, it could also mean that they “hunted” him down – because they needed him in that place and in others places. He tells them they should go in another direction, he sets limits to what he can do in a particular place and moment, and so he sets forth to the nearby villages, to preach and teach, and we are left with the almost humorous ending line: “He traveled throughout galilee, preaching in their synagogues and throwing out demons.” It makes me smile thinking of him ordering the demons out and away – “alright, everyone out, get out of here!” To be of service to others, one must attend to one’s own needs, to do what Jesus did, which was find time for ourselves. Maybe if God heals, God does so with a purpose, for a reason, for some service that only we can provide to others – but that does not mean we do not also need to take time for rest, for prayer, for self-care.
Do I believe in healing power of God? Yes, oh yes, and I would invite you to do the same. When Douglas and I first started dating about 14 years, it was not an easy beginning, because of where he was at in his life and where I was in my own life. We kept missing each other in so many different ways, and eventually someone recommended a woman who might help us to process such things, something who brought her wisdom, but something else, something I have never ever experienced elsewhere. We went to see her, and by the end of our one and only session with her, something just had shifted within us, a healing of some sort that allowed us to go forward together with each other. I have never felt or experienced that kind of spiritual power in any other person, this God-given ability to bring forth God’s healing spirit into a place and into a person. That experience of that woman’s spiritual gift of healing some 13 years ago is why I believe there are some people who have a healing gift, something other than their training or education or anything else could provide – they have been given the spiritual ability to heal. Jesus had that gift in spades, in abundance, in ways that startled the people around him, and if, having experienced that kind of spiritual healing years ago in my own life, even in a small way, small in comparison to Jesus’s healing gifts, I too would have been in those crowds around Jesus, amazed and stunned and almost terrified at this man’s ability to heal and to make others whole. But those kinds of moment don’t happen every day, they just don’t and I don’t know if a spiritual healing will ever happen to me again, or to you again, if ever. They are called miracles for a reason – they are uncommon moments, set apart moments, once in a lifetime moments that some never do get in their lifetimes, a moment that can change our lives forever. And if the clues in this story are true, maybe the test of whether or not what we’ve experienced is a miracle from God is whether or not it changes profoundly, that it propels us to serve others, that it shifts our lives into a different direction, in service to others or some other good and positive direction, rather than simply going back to the way things used to be, or the old ways of doing things. With a great gift comes a great responsibility, that of service to others in need of our help, the story we heard seems to tell us. We may have been healed for a purpose, we may have been healed for a reason, which is to do as Jesus as did, to help others, to serve others, to pass the fruits of that moment of healing onto another, someone who needs what you and I can only help them with. Amen.