Kendall's Notebook page 5
Healed With No Place to Go
By: Kendall Brown
Sunday, February 16, 2003
Mark 1: 40-45
One cannot encounter Jesus or enter into the Christian faith without being greeted with a paradox. A paradox is a combination of two opposite truths simultaneously present.
Christians learn quickly that we must die in order to live. In order to receive, we must first give up.
To be poor is to be rich and to be rich is to be poor.
To be free one must be bound.
We are called to be in the world but not of it.
In today's lesson, the leper who is healed by Jesus is instructed to be silent when inside he must have been just bursting with desire to share the news with someone.
And share he did. Instead of following Jesus' instructions to tell no one but the priests at the temple, the cured leper spread the word all over the place. The guy was a walking megaphone. Had Jesus wanted a PR person, he couldn't have done better that he did with the advertising given to him by the former leper.
Thus, according to Mark, Jesus had to abandon his urban ministry and stay in the country to avoid the huge crowds that were gathering after him in search of quick and easy cures for all their ailments.
When today's lesson is being considered in a Sunday School or seminary classroom, from the pulpit or in a written Biblical commentary, the leper is usually quickly portrayed as the villain in the story. His dis-obedience is so bad that he is beyond excuse. How dare the guy not only not do, but do just exactly the opposite from what Jesus, himself told him.
I am not convinced that the leper's misbehavior is all that important to Mark. Mark tells about the story in passing, but the Gospel writer's real concern in these verses is: 1. to establish that Jesus carries an authority unlike anything ever seen before, and, 2. to make clear that Jesus' authority is not that of a run-of-the mill faith-healer, but is something far more magnificent.
The leper's disobedience is small change to Mark. Yes, because of his big mouth, Mark reports, Jesus had to change his plans and head for the hills and countryside outside the city walls. But certainly Mark is well aware of Paul's thought "that all things work together for good for those who love God," (Romans 8:28) For God, Jesus' little detour could be quickly made into a major feature in his overall itinerary and plan.
I think the poor leper has been quite thoroughly pilloried from the Sunday morning pulpit for 2000 years. If he deserves punishment, without a doubt he has received more than he ever owed.
Also, flogging the leper for his lack of discretion is a nice comfortable way to keep the life changing power of the Gospel at a distance. We could spend ten minutes this morning reflecting on what a bad boy the leper was, then smugly and confidently return to the highways and byways of our lives having patted ourselves on the backs for being the good people that we are. Of course, Heaven forbid, that we might ever be so naughty as the poor leper.
It is a shame to miss the Gospel. It is an affront to all that is holy to miss the Gospel in our smugness.
For the Gospel's power to be unleashed in our lives, we have to put ourselves back into the story and see ourselves in the characters.
Who was this leper, do you suppose? Is he any one of us? If not, I wonder if he has ever been around in stories of today with which we are familiar.
I think I have met today's leper a number of times and from the stories I can recall, I can understand why the leper was not at all that excited about running to the temple to talk with the priest.
I have met the leper in the stories of individuals who have come to my office to talk and in that talking have told me what a painful place the church has been for them.
I have met the leper in those persons who have begun their story telling with the words, "Mr. Brown, please whatever you do, don't respond to me and my story the way other priests and ministers have done by telling me I need to pray harder." Then I hear the story of pain and suffering. It maybe about a wretched divorce, or a guilt-racking memory of unfaithfulness, or about the recognition of a life-stopping addiction, or one of those many other hells on earth that I mentioned a couple weeks ago.
I think the leper might be one of those persons who had been to the temple before with his suffering and who had been told to take his suffering elsewhere and pray about it. All he and the storytellers in my office wanted was for someone to listen and to love. Perhaps the leper knew all to well that he would find no love somewhere where people don't even have ears to hear.
Today's leper is among those people who find themselves "sinking beneath life's crushing load," as the hymn describes so aptly. There is no balm for the pain. The agony from the loss is unbearable. Then along comes the well-intentioned Christian ("the road to hell is paved with good intentions") who ministers by mouthing mousy platitudes such as:
"God never gives you more than you can handle."
Just what you need to hear as all around you find yourself standing on sinking sand.
The movie "Shadowlands" tells the story of C.S.Lewis and his love, Joy Grisham. Life gives Lewis more than he can handle in the loss of Joy by her agonizing. An Episcopalian priest counsels Lewis with the platitude, "God will hear your prayers."
Lewis responded, "That is not why I pray." "What chokes every hope and every prayer is the memory of all the prayers Joy and I offered and all the false hopes we had." "I don't pray for a result, I pray because I have to, because I need to, because prayer wells up out of me all the time, because on awaking it is the first thing I must do, and I cannot sleep unless I have released my longing in this way."
(friom "Flicker to Flame," edited by C.A.Camp, Year A, V.II, Ash Grove Press: 1995)
Lewis and I think the leper knew that life can offer more than what we can handle. Sometimes life handles us. In the middle of that being handled and whipped around, the last thing we need is the pious platitude of religiosity. The temple was the center of religion. I think the leper had been hurt there before.
Lewis and the Leper were not religious folk. They were spiritual people. Lewis' spirit stayed deeply in touch with God's spirit even in the deafening silence of Joy's suffering and death. The Leper's spirit broke through religiosity in the joy of his proclaiming to all, "Look what this man has done for me."
We can look at the leper in today's Gospel and we can see his disobedience. Or we can look at the leper and we can see his estrangement from the temple. For me, the story becomes more empowering and definitely closer to the details of my own life when I center on the estrangement and not on the disobedience. We need to remember as we read abut this leper that before the whole Gospel story is over, Jesus himself is also with the leper is quite thoroughly estranged from the temple and all that the temple represents.
I began meeting leper-people early in my ministry. My first church was a small community church on the coast of Maine. I was there for two years while at seminary. It was a weekend and part time pastorate.
I received a baptism under fire in that church. My first funeral came along two weeks after I began. Let us call the deceased, John. Several years earlier, John's wife had an incapacitating stroke. Ever since the stroke, she had been in a coma and lying in a nursing home bed a couple miles down the road from the church. In spite of her completely unresponsive condition, John was at her bedside every day. He cut flowers from their yard and took them in. He took her bed clothes home and washed them. He tenderly cared for her every day.
Over time, John struck up a friendship with a widow up the street. She lived a half mile north of the church and he lived a half mile south. John had held every office possible in that little church and for years never missed a service.
But somehow that church remained for him, as the temple did for the leper, a center of religion – a place for rules, regulations and superfluous platitudes. John stopped attending church. Religion did not minister to his troubled spirit. His own life became more than he could handle. How could he love his suffering wife and have any interest in the widow up the street.
A few days after my arrival at the church and many weeks after John had stopped coming, he took his old shotgun off the hooks above his mantle. In the barn behind his house he shot his head off.
Lepers are people for whom life has given more than they can handle. They don't need the religiosity of rules and regulations and pious platitudes. Such thing are of no use to them. Their spirits are grieving and their spirits need spiritual care. That comes with compassion and sensitive understanding, listening with the heart and listening with an allowance – an allowance that we don't have all the answers. Compassion is offered as Jesus offered it with a touch.
Those are the things that the leper, and C.S. Lewis and John needed. The leper had a healing in his life. But he didn't make it to the next step, the step that moves from healing to wholeness.
The church becomes a place for wholeness, not by being religious, but by being Christ-like in the offering of compassionate understanding, and the companionship of listening with the heart and touching with the soul.