the wild, healing God

6TH SUNDAY AFTER EPIPHANY, Year B 12 February 2012 Ss. Peter & Paul, 10:00 a.m.


God our healer, Teach us to proclaim your goodness; give us grace to bring your balm where life is shattered. Give us courage to speak hope in forbidding places, to sing your praise in alien lands, to touch the sick and grieve with those who sorrow. Embrace us with your favor our whole life long that we may see your joy rising with the morning sun and give thanks to you for ever, in Jesus’ name. Amen.

The leper in today’s Gospel had been infected with a disease that could have lasted for decades, and only ended – mercifully – at death. It was marked by unsightly ulcers and corrosive white scales that eventuated in the rotting away of flesh, beginning with the nose, toes, and fingers. Leprosy rendered the afflicted person ceremonially unclean – not to mention contagious – and so the disease caused the sufferer ostracism and quarantine as well, a kind of social disfigurement. Maybe that is why the word “healed” is never used in the New Testament in regard to the disease, but rather the expression being “made clean.” And the cleansing must be certified and authenticated by the priests as outlined in Jewish Law - see Leviticus.

Celsus, the pagan philosopher of the 2nd century who attacked Christianity for its doctrines of the Incarnation and the Crucifixion, remarked in his Discourses: “Christianity attracts the sick, the fools, and the sinners.” No decent, upstanding “god” would have anything to do with lepers, he maintained – except Jesus.
Jesus held an unwavering conviction that disease was not necessary to God’s good creation. It was not an established part of the Divine Plan. And it had nothing to do with Divine retribution. God was a Lover – not a monster or a fiend who would inflict a child with leukemia or a mother with a brain tumor.
As the very agent of Creation himself, Jesus invokes and directs the power of connecting life itself to heal human existence. Expressing the will of the Father everywhere he went, Jesus never met a disease he did not cure. Disease, according to Jesus, was an “enemy” of God to be defeated, a sign of the fissure - the crack - in creation that God desired to be redeemed. When he looks on the leper, Jesus was “moved with compassion,” more accurately translated from the Greek, “his guts (bowels) were churning.”

There was once a farmer with a sick wife, who asked a monk from a local monastery to say a series of prayers to alleviate her condition. The monk began to pray aloud fervently in the man’s presence, but he asked God to cure all those who were ill.
“Just a moment,” said the farmer. “I asked you to pray for my wife, and there you are praying for everyone who’s ill.”
“I’m praying for her too,” the monk answered.
“Yes, but you’re praying for everyone,” her husband protested. “It might end up helping my neighbor, who’s also ill, and I don’t like him.”
“You understand nothing about healing,” said the monk sadly. “By praying for everyone, I am adding my prayers to those of the millions of people who are also praying for their sick. Added together, those voices rise up to reach God and benefit everyone. With selfish restrictions [like yours] they lose their strength and go nowhere.”
Here the leper received this heavenly power of life made new – concentrated in the touch of Jesus. Once “cleansed,” he defied the stern order of Jesus to keep quiet about the healing. Again, the Greek: Jesus made “snorts of indignation” at this point in the story.
The healed leper went on to broadcast the good news – if not verbally, then through the display of his glistening new skin. You can’t blame him. Conventional wisdom of the day regarded the healing of a leper to be as likely as the dead being raised. He was a walking miracle, and he knew it.
But at some point he would go on, like the rest of us, to die from something else – if not a disease, then old age. After all, almost everybody dies. You would hope that the healing that Jesus performed on the leper that day penetrated down deeper than the skin – that it went all the way into his soul, for healing from within.
Fred Craddock has said that healing or forgiveness or grace or love are not strategies of God to force changes in us, either by being withheld or by being given on condition. When we hear the story of the high-ranking soldier, Naaman, in today’s Old Testament reading, who had to “jump through hoops” – jump in the pool seven times – before he could be healed, we might think that this was a sort of “strategy” conjured up by Elisha the prophet. (It is not!) Jesus creates no “hoops” for the leprous man, but cures him straightaway. If anyone is in doubt about how God works in situations like this,
just ask any father who has made the dreadful error of saying to a child, “If you make good grades, Daddy will love you,” or, no less damaging, “Since Daddy loves you, you must make good grades.” Grades may improve a bit, but who cares? Something of far greater value has been severely wounded, even killed.
Michael King wrote of “Naaman and the Wild God of Israel” [in Spirituality Today, Spring, 1986]:
“We like a tame God, a God we can easily and comfortably believe in, worship and explain. We like a God we can hold warmly to our bosoms when we feel the need, a teddy bear of a God who can be cuddled when the night at bedtime seems too dark (and there are times, certainly, when God tenderly fills just that longing), but who can be, most of the rest of the time, properly ignored. We like a predictable God, a God who will act like we think he should act.
“But is he like that, or is he a God who, just when we think we have squeezed him, like a genie, into a bottle from which he will emerge only upon our command, lets out a great roar and shatters the bottle into sharp shreds? ...

“Our God is not a tame God. We can grasp at him through our theologies of peace, hope, liberation, grace, or personal salvation through Christ. But we always know him only in part, always he rises fiercely and wildly above us just when we think we have him pinned down.
“He is not a butterfly to be chased and stuck to a board and admired. He is, finally, as we see in Jesus, a God of joy and love, but he is a God also whose ways remain partly mysterious and unknowable, and before whom we do well to bow with fear and trembling as he touches and moves our lives in ways our bottles of theology and doctrine are too small and fragile to contain.”
Through these stories of healing the Gospel according to Mark, we are invited to enter into the “impossible,” to view our “wild” God in action in the person of Jesus himself.
What do we see, when Christians gather, when we pray for each other’s healing, when we see “miracles” in the lives of everyday people whom we call by their first names?
Geddes MacGregor in The Rhythm of God tells of a priest who, when asked, “How many people were at the celebration of the Eucharist last Wednesday morning?” replied,
“There were three old ladies, the janitor, several thousand archangels, a large number of seraphim, and several million of the saints of God.”

[H. King Oehmig: Synthesis, 2/12/2012; Ched Meyers: “Say to this Mountain”: Mark’s Story of Discipleship; Fred Craddock: Proclamation 2: Series B, Philadelphia, Fortress Press, 1981, p. 44]

Preached by Phil Ayers+, Feb 12, 2012