Sunday, July 5, 2015

Really Jesus?


An imaginary dialogue with a troubling text.
Mark 6:1-13
First, Jesus, you're rejected. Then you send your disciples to do the same work. Thanks a lot, they'd say. We would. Is this what we are to look forward to as followers of the Way?
Your homecoming really does argue against all those songs and images handed down to us: Come home. “Softly and tenderly Jesus is calling ... you who are weary come home.” Home to a reception like you got? Another home altogether might work perhaps – I guess that's how it's mostly be dealt with – home in another world. But here in the Bible, you are not talking about another world, a totally separate place. You're talking about God's kingdom for real here where we are.
You seem to have been surprised by the home town scepticism – amazed at their unbelief. I guess you were still learning as you go. Not so much learning to be God's son (Mark's key point, we realise): you knew how to do that, to show us who God is and what God is like. But you were discovering for the first time how people react to God's way being put into action.
Because, no, it was not your failure that the healings didn't happen among the home people. Healing, you have taught us, is a relationship. We experience that with good nursing and good friends. Healing that helps make well in the physical sense and that bigger sense of healing – restoring meaning regardless of how the body is and will be.
God's power, what God is like and how God-power works, that's the really hard thing to catch on to; and therefore what it's like to be home with God. Not the expected security and slotting into the family dynamics in whatever role we each might have (e.g. the hero, the rescuer, the scapegoat, the loner, the doer, the clown, or the saint). I can feel for your family. In conventional (non-Kingdom) terms, you were not playing your part. And you were embarrassing them with your free spirit, your God-centredness, rather than family-centredness which normal people expect.
When you went to other communities, you were welcomed as a visiting expert. They are easy to cope with. But a local, someone dependent on the local community, and still a local in terms of his human genealogy: hard to see as worth listening to. We're inclined to get stuck with our own preconceptions about who or what can bring knowledge and really life-changing options. Not the person next to me surely.
And on top of that regular blindness to “prophets among us”, you were falling foul with the powers-that-be, the powers we depend on for living an ordinary life. You don't help us at all to get on better in life, to access the power the world works with. And we can't imagine doing anything, improving anything, without the standard requirements of money and influence etc etc.
Would I be among those you then sent out into the local community to do exactly as you had been doing? Will I say yes?
The Great Reversal. That's what they call your mission in this first half of Mark's gospel. I must remember it: the Great Reversal. This is the Kingdom Way. Upside down values, and understanding that's upside down to the world's way. I need to remind myself that the world's way is in fact bankrupt. Bankrupt and dealing death more than giving life.
If I do as you ask and go out among our own community here, travelling light, not protecting myself from rejection, I sense that I'll learn what you learnt: that God's kind of healing – God's loving – depends on the other in a relationship. It works through simply living compassionately in interaction with others. Slow living it's been called. Local, vulnerable living.
Your ancestor David was a pretty good king. He was a shepherd but then as a king he got mixed up with the powers-that-be and was as much the wolf as the shepherd. The power of armies and taxes. Weapons of destruction. You, son of David, got it right – at last. The power of relationship, and the most powerful “weapon” of all – conversation.
Jesus, you know that God speaks through God's creation and the language used is love. You're doing it. So, yes, you're calling us to speak that way too.  

Questions of Healing

We've crossed the lake with Jesus – a stormy crossing you'll recall. On the other side – foreign territory – a total outcast is healed, a crazy man living among the tombs. Jesus breaks through boundaries of all types, including when he gets back across the lake onto home territory again...
Mark 5:21:43
This is a text with two distinct narratives. But could you have one story without the other? If you'd just had Jairus and his daughter then Jesus would have got on with that healing more quickly and likely avoided the drama of the father hearing his girl was dead. But isn't that part of the power of the narrative? Assumptions, limitations and interruptions.
Mark's primary task in his whole gospel book is to answer the question: who is Jesus? Establish his identity, namely, show us that he is the son of God. That is, show us who God is, how God acts, and what God is like.
About the interruption to the mission with Jairus: God's power of healing love works with interruptions all the time. No boundaries, no fixed procedure, no-one needs to be side-lined for more important things.
These are two stories that belong together: woman and woman-child healed; an aging woman's healing interrupting the healing of a girl on the cusp of child-bearing (she was born in fact the same year that the woman's trauma began).
Two people who risk: the father risks reputation – Jesus is already a target of his synagogue colleagues; what's more, as a father it is risky to love so much a child (and a girl at that) when 60% of children die before their teens. The woman risks extreme censure for touching Jesus in her untouchable state; what's more, she dares to hope against hopelessness. Now that's the riskiest thing of all surely.
One person despairs so much that he crosses boundaries of emotion and honour and gets first hand experience of what God's power of love can do. His despair pushes him to a point of openness to faith.
The other person dares to hope and is healed by the faith revealed to be already part of her being. Her hope is the spring of her faith.
This is a text between fear and faith: each of them fear, yet are able/driven to step out of fear into the place of faith. And for us who read it, it asks us to imagine what we might do.
This contrast of faith and fear means Mark is guiding us to think of faith's opposite not as being simply no faith. What's significant here is not absence or otherwise of faith, but getting through the fear. Getting beyond the fear to be able to do something – for daughter or for self. It can be despair that drives it. That's where Jairus is, desperate and in despair which triggers him to act and try to do something for his daughter's future. But it's even stronger place to be already when it is hope that drives it. That's where the woman is, desperate but holding on to hope. She already knows who Jesus is. She trusts him as agent of God's power to heal.
Both Jairus and this women reach out to where God is – presence, power, strength, wholeness, healing.
But at this point the story also stirs questions about faith and healing, and about prayers for healing. About miracles (and we'll talk some more about that later, if you like), about hope for healing and praying for healing against the odds.
Why isn't everyone we pray for healed, that is, made better? Even when they have faith?
Last November, my wife and I went to our 19-week ultrasound and found out that our baby was only measuring 15 weeks. After a series of tests, we were told we would lose her.
But through eight weeks of repeat scans, she held on. Then through five weeks of hospital bedrest. Finally, Nola was born, a scrappy one pound, one ounce.
She spent 12 weeks in the hospital. Her life is still full of challenges. But yesterday we celebrated four months with our daughter, who now tips the scale at five pounds.
I won't say that God saved Nola. There are too many other beloved children who don't make it. But I must say that God has saved me again and again through these long months. God has sent a legion of angels to my side…
the anonymous person who left a fully-decorated Christmas tree on our porch, when we didn't have the energy to celebrate…
the ten-year-old girl who prayed for Nola every day of her winter vacation…
the church member who struggles with anxiety but sang "It is Well with My Soul" on my voicemail…
Vince Amlin connects this to a couple of verses from Psalm 107:
Give thanks, for God is good. God's love endures forever. Let the redeemed of the Lord tell their story—those God redeemed from the hand of the foe… Psalm 107:1-2
He comments:
Psalm 107 charges us to share our good news. Those who wandered lost…those who sat in darkness...those whose ships were nearly sunk…tell your story!
And he ends his reflection with these words and prayer:
So many angels. So many stories to share. God is good. God's love endures forever. Give thanks, and go tell yours.
Prayer 

Yarn Spinner, write your story of love in me. Send me as an angel to those who are lost and sinking. And bless sweet Nola.