Like
many of my generation, I had the measles in elementary school. Why anyone would
not want to spare their child this harsh and dangerous illness (especially when
a vaccine is available) is beyond me. Nevertheless, we seem to be in a moment
when questions of the common good and personal choice are once again at odds
with each other. This tension is nothing
new in human history. We’ve been there
before. Unfortunately, the resolutions
of it are never easy.
One way into
thinking about public and private health is to look to Jesus as both a personal
and social healer. Each of our four gospels shows a different picture of
Jesus. We’re reading Mark’s gospel this
year, and Mark shows us a Jesus who is at once more stark and yet to my mind
more credible than the other three versions. The Jesus of Mark’s gospel is a
no-nonsense Jesus. His message is brief,
brisk, and clear. He is, to use a Washington idiom, a “one-issue candidate”,
and here is his mission statement: “The
time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in
the gospel.” [Mark 1:15]
The passage we
just heard now portrays Jesus in this brisk and clear manner. It tells a familiar yet fascinating
story. After making that missional
announcement, Jesus visits Peter’s house, and once there he learns that Peter’s
mother-in-law is ill with a fever. Jesus
heals her, and not surprisingly the news of that miracle spreads. Soon Jesus can get no peace. Everyone in town
comes to Peter’s house bringing their sick and demon-possessed for healing at
Jesus’s hands.
The next
morning, Jesus does his best to get away from the house, so he goes to a
deserted place to pray. But Peter pursues him into his solitude, and he urges
Jesus to come back to the house because everyone is looking for him. Apparently he wants Jesus to settle down,
stay put, and open a kind of first-century urgent care center. Jesus declines
that invitation, and says instead, “Let us go on to the neighboring towns, so
that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do.”
[Mark 1: 38] Mark concludes the story by
telling us that Jesus “went throughout Galilee, proclaiming the message in
their synagogues and casting out demons.” [Mark 1:39] And what is the
message? “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand;
repent, and believe in the gospel.”
I find
Mark’s account this morning interesting for two reasons. First, and probably foremost on all our
minds, what’s the deal with demons? How do we understand demon possession in
the 21st century? Second, what’s wrong with Peter’s idea? What would be so bad about setting up an
emporium that would serve all your one-stop healing needs? In the gospels Peter
always seems to come up with one bad idea after another, but this one strikes
Jesus as probably his worst.
First, about
demons: we know, of course, that pre-modern people believed that evil spirits
made people both physically and mentally ill. We also know that the earliest
followers of Jesus were attracted perhaps more by his ability to heal than by
his ability to teach. But when we think about any aspect of Jesus’s ministry,
we should remember that he was, at least in Mark’s eyes, a one-issue candidate.
“The time is fulfilled,
and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the gospel.” His message is as much a social and political
message as it is a personal and spiritual one.
The time has come. God’s kingdom is at hand. It’s time to kick out the demons. And for a first-century Palestinian Jew, the
biggest demon of them all is Caesar.
Physical healing is an important
figure for political wellness in the Bible because the human body provides the
most common analogy to the social structure.
We talk about “the body politic”, and we call the leader the “head of
state”. It is understandable, then, that
premodern people would have seen a relation between the possession of a person
by a demon and the occupation of Israel by the Roman Empire. As one biblical scholar explains,
The physical body is a microcosm of
the social body. There is a dialectic
between the personal and the social, the individual and the corporate. . . .
Roman imperialism meant that God’s people were possessed by demons on the
social level. . . . [Demon possession]
indicates a power admittedly greater than oneself, admittedly “inside” oneself,
but that one declares to be evil and therefore beyond any collusion or
cooperation. [John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus, pp. 313-314]
Peter’s
mother-in-law was sick because she was possessed by the demon of a fever. Israel
was sick because it was possessed by the demon of Rome. Jesus could make his way back and forth
between the personal and the social aspects of his ministry because he saw them
as essentially the same thing. Personal suffering and social suffering are not
unrelated. They are part of one unified
fabric of injustice and pain. It’s not that Jesus chooses to address one over
the other. It’s that he knows he must
pay attention to both.
Many years
ago I had the privilege of spending some time with Kenneth Leech, an English
priest who wrote many books on prayer and who also ran a parish in the roughest
part of East London. Leech gave a talk
where he focused almost entirely on the community justice work he was doing and
not much about spiritual practices.
After his address, a woman came up to him and asked, “Are you ever
amazed by the coincidence?”
“What
coincidence?” Leech asked. The woman
replied, “You’re such an activist. There’s a man with exactly your name who
writes about prayer. Can you believe the coincidence?”
Kenneth
Leech looked at her and very kindly told her that there was no coincidence; he
was the same person who both prayed and organized. The woman was stunned. She had no way to conceive how someone could
be both at the same time.
And that
inability to hold the personal and the social together is apparent in the
second aspect of this morning’s gospel. “The time is fulfilled, and the
kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the gospel.” “Let us go on to the neighboring towns, so
that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do.”
Jesus declines Peter’s invitation to set up shop so that he can instead go out
among the people he came to serve. Peter
offers Jesus the temptation of a settled, entrepreneurial life. Jesus responds
with a personal recommitment to a life on the road. He didn’t come to be only a personal
healer. He came to be a social healer as
well. He cannot announce the kingdom of
God merely by assuaging personal pain.
He must make that kingdom real by addressing social pain as well.
Each of us
here knows something of personal pain:
illness, depression, grief, loss.
Life can be so hectic, so stressful, that we may come into sacred places
like this wanting them to be restful oases that will shield us from the storms
raging outside. The church, we say,
should be personal, not political, dispensing healing for me and my loved ones,
leaving the world to itself. But each of
us here knows something of social pain as well.
Religious extremism, political dysfunction, racial injustice, poverty,
environmental degradation, violence of every shape and description. Jesus would heal us both personally and
socially. “The time is
fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the
gospel.” “Let us go on to the neighboring towns, so
that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do.”
If we are to follow Jesus, if we are to be
faithful to his mission, we will remember that he cast out both social and
personal demons. Our bodies and spirits will never be well until our body
politic and our social spirit is well.
There is a deep analogy between social and personal pain. As Jesus’s
companions in the journey of faith, our job is to love and serve each other and
the world. There is an obvious, but not an easy, answer to the vaccination
question. Our individual wellness is a function of the common good.
Can you
believe the coincidence? A Christian
person must actually care about both prayer and justice. A Christian community must actually care
about the health of its own members and that of the world. We are here, as Jesus was here, to cast out
the demons of illness, pain, and sorrow.
We are here, as Jesus was here, to cast out the demons of hatred,
oppression, and violence. There is no
contradiction. God wants to free us all
from those forces that infect and oppress us.
Measles is but one aspect of a larger problem. Healing and liberation,
justice and hope, are on the way. In the
end it all comes down to one pure unified message. “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand;
repent, and believe in the gospel.” Amen.
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