Meeting Jesus the Healer
Mark 1: 21-28
Unclean Spirit Healing
This passage took me back. I had the honor of travelling the holy land with a mentor back in 2015. We visited Capernaum. So, when this passage says Jesus preached at the synagogue, I remember it being just to the left after you enter the city gates. Peter’s mother in law’s house is just a few blocks from there. They built a church with see through floors above the excavation sight. One is struck by the simplicity of this place where the greatest man who ever walked the earth changed the world through his teaching and gentle touch.
Last week we read from Mark about Jesus the caller and about the importance of casting and mending in following Him. This week He is introduced to us as a healer. Following Jesus, going out in his name implies healing. Your own, inner healing. The healing of others and even of physical and societal ills. When the unclean spirit asks Jesus in this passage what his business is with Him, Jesus tells him to be quiet. Probably because Jesus knew this spirit knew the answer. He is in the healing business. If you need healing, Jesus has some business to do with you. And we all do need healing.
What do people on the extreme end of spectrums teach us? People like severely disabled, mentally ill and autistic? Much. They make explicit what is implicit in each of us. They actually help us to see ourselves if we engage with them graciously. We can read this passage and see this man as an out shooter, which he probably was. The extent to which his broken spirit controlled him and took over his life was severe. It is interesting that when this man addresses Jesus, he or the spirt in him refers to himself in the plural: “What have you got to do with us? It gives us a peek perhaps, in his conflicted identity.
But then we can and should also see in this man, not as someone wholly different from the people around him and from us but someone who in his affliction is also like us. Some translations translate the state of his spirit as evil. The best translation is to say his spirit was unclean. Leonard Sweet says we all ooze our spirit. The reason why we have preachers delivering sermons in person and not just have bible reading or a person reading the sermon of a theologian is because we ooze spirit. The spirit of the one who wrote and deliver a sermon whether that spirit is troubled or excited, in mourning and pain or upbeat, speaks to us as much as the content does. Quite a scary thing to realize if you are a preacher! But also good. Our spirit picks up things as we go through life. It makes us real and authentic, identifiable as a fellow human being to others.
Sometimes your spirit is joyous and lighthearted. Sometimes it is gloomy or in mourning. That variation is normal. You can still mean much to somebody even when you are in mourning or down. But our sprits do not only fluctuate between these extremes. It is also polluted with lies about who and whose we really are. To the point that we can feel torn between responsibilities, choices, and identities. We can so become entangled in all this that we begin to resent life…and God. In this Spirit asking Jesus what business he has with Him, I hear myself and others sometimes cynically asking: Does God really care? Why do I sometimes feel so desperately lost if I am really his child and what He taught was the absolute, life giving truth? All people’s spirits might not be equally dirty, but all spirits need cleansing and healing. We are all called to partake in the healing Jesus does to our spirits.
Lets have a look at the essential elements of Jesus’s healing…
Jesus’s healing flows from and is grounded in his teaching.
He who won’t be taught, cannot be healed. What do people do that think they know better than the doctor? They don’t follow his advice. They get sicker. Sometimes they die. It is so interesting that Mark starts a story that is all about Jesus healing by starting off with the fact that Jesus taught. Healing, starts with receiving and accepting teaching. Also, if I want to partake in the healing Jesus does, I must be willing to being taught and to teach others. No healing without teaching. This is not the only place in the New Testament where we find Jesus’s healing and teaching close to one another.
Now, we should not overlook the fact that Jesus got to teach in a synagogue. That must mean that he carried a fair decree of academic street credit. One did not simply preach in a synagogue. You were asked to if you have a track record behind you of studying and mastering the basics and beyond. Also, only when you reached the stage were you are known to be someone that had the ability to apply and demonstrate the principles you knew. To follow a rabbi, meant that you got covered by his dust, that you followed him not only in theoretical teaching but in life and practise as well. To become a healing teacher took discipline and respect for the traditions you stood in. If even Jesus respected that, and came through the ranks of his time, so should we. Know the content of your faith well. Apply it to your life. Don’t allow it to never penetrate any deeper than surface level. Have Jesus preach in your mind and heart’s synagogue, not only on the side streets of it. This is all the more important because in Capernaum, the synagogue was kind of one of the centre stages of the town. Nowadays, Jesus’s teaching aren’t given centre stage, it is pushed out to the fringes of society. That is not necessarily a bad thing but don’t push it to the fringes of your mind and heart just because it is pushed to the fringes of society. Make time to study the Bible, listen to sermons and read up on Jesus.
An ever-expanding openness towards being taught by Jesus is essential in staying on the long path of healing. I like to think that this man on this day gave, with the help of Jesus, one huge leap towards his freedom but it was a lifelong process also. One in which he remained open to be taught by the Rabbi he so antagonised that day in Capernaum.
Jesus’s healing was saturated in an air of authority
It is so interesting how not only what Jesus taught but also the way in which he taught it, drew a response. It drew a response of amazement from the crowd and a response of animosity from a man with an unclean spirit in this passage. And then this way in which He taught is commented on and described not once but twice as being “with authority”. What does that even mean?
Authority in our day and age in the west doesn’t have a positive ring to it. Being “upstairs” and condescending is what would come to mind to especially younger people when they hear the word authority. Eastern cultures, like for instance the Korean culture, highly regard authority and has a great respect for it as a matter of habit (ask Suname about this if you want to know more). But what exactly do we say when we say somebody is authoritative?
Well, you would be able to hear the word “Author” in Authority. An Author would be somebody that understand a story the best because it was born out of his very own imagination and writing skills. If we really want to understand a novel, we invite the author to speak about it to us. We respect what he says about the story above what anybody else says (well, hopefully!). Now to me this is very helpful when I contemplate Jesus being authoritative in work and deed. Ephesians describes Him as the one through whom everything came into being. He is the author of creation and life with the Father and the Spirit. You could enjoy and appreciate a good story without ever getting to meet and know the author. Most do. But you would probably enjoy and appreciate a good story best if you have a relationship with the author.
And that is what we have in Jesus when it comes to life. When these people listened to him, they heard someone that aptly describes the realities of life…because He was, unbeknownst to most of them, the author of life. That probably meant that he seemed to have grasped and explain the tradition very well because their faith tradition to them, was what carried authority. Authority, to a certain extent, can mean “being about something bigger or more than yourself” or “understanding something as if you wrote it”.
But authority also has a less philosophical and more practically illustratable form and I think this also was what the people saw in Jesus…Someone that speaks with authority speaks with just the right balance between confidence and humility. Have you ever noticed how someone who really speaks about something he knows and understands well, never sounds arrogant about it? Yes, the person may speak and share confidently but he would simultaneously give you the impression of speaking humbly. When we understand how big and deep something is, when we have insight in the long history behind something, it makes us feel small and makes us humble. Yet, it also inspires us to share what we know confidently as we know what we are saying is backed by more than just our own opinion and feelings.
If I were to ask you to think of one of the persons who inspired you most in your life, most if not all of you would come up with a person who had exactly this trait. A confidence tempered by a deep humility. People with this demeanour, has a way to touch your soul in a healing way. When we arrive at this stance, we will inevitably touch people’s hearts in a live giving and healing way.
Now you would look at yourself and think, yes, I lack confidence. Or you might feel that you are too arrogant and need more humility. When you lack confidence, what is a good response? You go and learn more. When you lack humility, what would be a good response? You also go and learn more so that you can discover how little you really know.
The world has too many people walking over others in confident arrogance. The world also has too many people hiding away, not bringing to the table what they have to offer because they lack the confidence to do it. In such a world we are called to be the people, who in following Jesus, is humble in our confidence and confident in our humility.
Close
What ties confidence and humility together and calibrates them is courage. Healing involves an invitation to live a courageous life. A life where you do the most difficult learning there is to do, learning to embrace a new identity in Christ. Can you imagine…this man healed was set free, but his identity was tied up to being the man with an unclean spirit. We read about him violently shaking when Jesus freed him from this spirit, but I dare say even that wasn’t the most difficult part of his journey. It was to come afterwards. To come to terms with who he was, who he was in Him, that was the difficult part…and the one we are all called for.
May God grant us courage. May his grace make us open, confident yet humble and on a journey of healing that heals the world alongside as we travel on it trusting the One to Whom all authority in heaven and on earth has been given!
Amen