Mark 3.1-6
They warned me about him before my first Sunday at the church. I was unpacking boxes at the parsonage when a lay leader stopped by with a housewarming gift.
“Watch out for old Les Norton,” Steve said, “His bite is even worse than his bark.”
“Les,” I repeated the name, “Well, how bad is his bark?”
"It's like one of those neighborhood dogs that makes you glad you don't keep a gun in the house,” Steve said.
“You got a picture? How will I know him?’ I asked.
“Trust me, he'll make sure you know him,” Steve said.
Les was short and bald and wiry. The kind of geezer you picture in a tight, white tank top with patches of hair on his shoulders and A1 stains on his tummy.
My first Sunday, I was greeting people in the narthex after worship.
“That’s him,” Steve leaned over and whispered into my ear.
When he came near, I stretched out my hand to him. Suddenly it was like he had shoved his whole body into the pocket of his plaid trousers. He refused my outstretched hand like it was hexed. Then he crept up close to me looking me over like a dermatologist.
“I got absolutely nothing out of your sermon, preacher.”
“Bless your heart,” I yawped into his hearing aid.
My third Sunday at the church, after worship he came up to me in the fellowship hall as I was getting a cup of coffee.
“How much are we paying you?”
“Suddenly it seems like not nearly enough,” I said, “but why do you ask?”
“Because it's obvious you're not called to be a preacher. You're terrible. The only explanation is that you must be in it for the money.”
I was young and defensive of my call.
So I shot back at him, “Well, sir, I may be terrible at it, but then again, I've always thought that churches get the preachers they deserve.”
One Sunday, I preached on Galatians 3.28, “There's neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free.” The following Monday morning, Les barged into my office, throwing open the door so hard it knocked my portrait of Karl Barth off the wall.
“Just where do you get off preaching like that?! You calling me a racist, preacher?”
“Me? No,” I said, “But isn't it interesting you heard the LORD calling you a racist? We really do serve a living God.”
That’s when the frame around the Barth portrait cracked as it fell to the floor.
It went on like that for a couple of months. Then one Tuesday after staff meeting Les wandered into my office to tell me his “miracle story.” As it happens, Les had served in the Pacific during World War II. He was an electrician aboard a ship. One evening Les scuttled away from a work assignment to swipe an extra helping of dessert from the ship’s mess. The chocolate pudding in his hands slowed his ascent up to the deck.
“I was maybe two steps from the top. I stopped for a spoonful when a shot landed right above me. If I hadn’t been eating that pudding, it would’ve been the end of me.”
“So you’re saying…” I started to say.
“It was a miracle!” Les shouted louder than normal, “God worked a miracle for me!”
Then Les glanced at the photograph on my desk of my boys, who are Latino, and made a comment about “wetbacks” taking over the country.
“It’s too bad the LORD didn’t keep on working on you after that miracle,” I said to him.
He stretched out his hand and cupped it to his hearing aid, “What did you say?”
I repeated it. I shouldn’t have.
That time my diploma fell off the wall too.
In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus has just journeyed through the wheat fields outside Capernaum. Ever since Jesus healed a leper— touching the unclean man before restoring him to health, Jesus has been under the Pharisees’ scrutiny. When his disciples eat some of the grain from the field on the Sabbath, they pounce,
“Look, your disciples are doing what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath.”
However, the law does not actually forbid the disciples to pluck the grain with their hands on the Sabbath. The Sabbath commandment forbids only the use of tools. These Pharisees are more inclined to dispose of their enemy than they are interested in obeying God. The confrontation comes to a head with Jesus committing apparent blasphemy, declaring himself to be the LORD who issued the law to Moses on Mount Sinai.
Then Jesus moves straightaway from that confrontation to instigate another confrontation in the synagogue. As he knew they would, the Pharisees follow him.
For all their consternation about the disciples eating on the Sabbath, see who is doing unnecessary work in this passage. The Pharisees are surveilling Jesus. “They watched him,” Mark reports, “in order that they might find grounds to bring a charge against him.” Unlike in other healing stories in the Gospels, the Pharisees see the man with the withered hand first.
The man’s withered hand did not render him ritually unclean, which accounts for his presence in the synagogue. But his deformity did make him a pariah, for all would have assumed that his disfigurement had been caused by either his sin or the sin of his parents. The Pharisees see him first. But they do not see him. They see only a means to entrap their enemy. Jesus responds to their plot by posing the question the Pharisees had put to him earlier.
And take note—
The Pharisees have not uttered a word since the wheat field. They remain silent throughout this entire confrontation in the synagogue. In other words, you do not need to say anything for Jesus to hear you. You do not need to speak for him to know the secret thoughts of your heart.
Jesus raises the stakes on their question about the Sabbath by suggesting that the failure to do good is equivalent to committing evil. But even that uncompromising assertion does not move them. Their hardness of heart, Mark reports, angers Jesus. And actually the word in Greek is orgēs, wrath. He is so enraged because the explicit purpose of the Sabbath commandment was to remind Israel, still damp from running through the Red Sea, that they are not disposable cogs in a machine. They are more valuable than slaves. Because of their antagonism with Jesus they do not see this deformed man any differently than Pharaoh might see him. To treat such a person as valuable is the explicit aim of the fourth commandment.
The Pharisees remain unmoved; therefore, Jesus presses deeper into the wound. He commands the man to to remove his hand from his cloak.” He’s used to hiding it. When the man pulls his hand from his pocket, his hand is healed. And the Pharisees’ affliction has worsened.
“It’s too bad the LORD didn’t keep on working on you after that miracle.”
I shouldn’t have it.
I can see that now.
In 2010, the church offered hospitality to a neighborhood mosque undergoing renovations, welcoming them into our youth wing for their Friday prayers. It even got us featured on The Daily Show and interviewed by John Oliver.
The Sunday before that first Friday, I delivered a sermon on the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats. “In a world of violence and injustice and poverty and loneliness, Jesus has called us to be a people who welcome strangers,” I preached. Pretty standard sermon, I thought. But stood up in the middle of my sermon and marched out, stopping at every other pew in an attempt to persuade others to follow him. Later that afternoon Les filled up my church voicemail, litigating the issue. And later that week, he passed around a petition in the congregation for the bishop to remove me.
One Mother's Day, after worship, Les challenged me to a fistfight in the fellowship hall. With the whole coffee hour crowd staring at us, Les poked me in the chest and challenged me to fight him. He then dropped to the floor and did a dozen pushups to prove he was up to the task.
He was out of line.
But looking back, maybe Mother’s Day was not the best occasion to preach on Luke 14, “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, brothers and sisters, cannot be my disciple.”
Before one of the United Methodist Church’s interminable and expensive debates over sexuality, I brought up the topic in the pulpit. It was a pretty vanilla sermon, yet Les later harangued me in a church council meeting.
“The cheap grace he preaches is going to lead my granddaughters astray,” Les complained to everyone.
“Your prejudice is what will lead them astray,” I muttered too loudly.
I shouldn’t have said it. It was not until his funeral that I discovered that one of his two sons is gay. I had not really seen Les.
Carlos Eire is a Professor of History at Yale, formerly on the faculty at the University of Virginia. His most recent book is titled They Flew: A History of the Impossible. In the preface he recounts how he came to write a scholarly book on anomalous phenomena that modern scientism considers “impossible.”
He was on vacation in Spain.
Eire recalls:
“This project began to take shape unexpectedly on a bright summer day in 1983 at the Carmelite Convent of the Incarnation, outside the medieval walls of Ávila. The tour guide had been escorting us from room to room, pointing out significant details related to the life of the convent’s famous resident, Saint Teresa of Avila.
“This was the refectory where the nuns ate. . . . The kitchen is over there. . . . Here is the chapel. . . . This is the staircase where Saint Teresa fell and broke her arm,” and so on, room after room. Mundane details. Then we walked into the locutorio, the room where the nuns could speak with visitors through a grille-covered opening in the wall.
“And this is where Saint Teresa and Saint John of the Cross levitated together for the first time,” she said, as if there were no difference between that levitation and the pots and pans in the kitchen. It was simply another detail, that dual levitation. A miracle that was somehow just another fact..”
None of the events and people Eire examines in They Flew are from the ancient world. They are all from the Enlightenment— the world of Isaac Newton and David Hume. This is very same world that conditioned us to view claims of the supernatural with suspicion, yet the period is rife with eyewitness accounts of so-called impossible events. Even more remarkably, Eire unearths, many of these sworn testimonies of miracles are legal records in lawsuits and murder trials, “from all sorts of people, not just illiterate peasants but also elites at the apex of the social hierarchy.”
The historian concludes his preface by acknowledging that taking the supernatural seriously in the modern academy is no small difficultly.
He writes:
“To write a history of the impossible is risky for any scholar nowadays, especially if one suggests, even tentatively, that the assumed impossibility of certain events deserves closer scrutiny and some challenging…Taking seriously the testimonies of impossible miracles can prove unsettling. But the best thing about all things truly unnerving and all things impossible and ostensibly supernatural, such as those that are the focus of this book, is the hard fact that none of the questions raised by these testimonials are trivial, even though our dominant culture aggressively suggests so.”
When we read the Gospel’s healing stories, our difficulty in reading them rightly— not to mention our challenge in believing them— very often comes from thinking of Jesus’ miracles as discrete wonders—no different from the improbable marvels Eire describes in They Flew.
For instance:
• On October 15, 1783 a young physicist named Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier levitated in front of a crowd on the outskirts of Paris.
• And on a Friday afternoon in Capernaum beside the Sea of Galilee Mary’s boy from Nazareth healed the withered hand of a synagogue-goer.
We think of Christ’s healings as distinct moments in his ministry. We think of Christ’s healings as individual events that impact individual people with identifiable ailments. We think of Christ’s healings as different from his teaching on the mount or his temptation in the desert or his prayer in Gethsemane.
Our operative assumption is revealed by the language we use.
We speak of his healings.
But properly speaking, Jesus does not do healings.
Jesus heals.
The New Testament term translated into English as salvation is the Greek word sozo. It means healing. Hence, if Jesus is the Savior, then he is never not at work healing. Jean-François did not levitate again on October 16, 1783. But Jesus Christ did heal the day after the Sabbath. Jesus is never not at work healing. Indeed all his work is healing work.
When Jesus ventures into the wilderness, Jesus doesn't need to overcome Satan. He is already the LORD of Heaven and Earth. But you need to overcome the Tempter. So Jesus goes into the desert to face the Devil in order to make it possible for you to say to the Tempter, “Get behind me.”
Jesus goes into the wilderness to heal our nature.
To make us capable of resisting evil and injustice.
He is never not healing.
When Jesus prays to the Father in the garden, the Son doesn’t need reassurance that he’s in his Father’s loving grasp— Jesus is as much God as the Father. But you will need to face death and to hold onto God in hope and faith. So
Jesus prays in Gethsemane so that you will be able to say, “Not my will but your will be done.”
Jesus prays before his passion to heal our nature.
To make us capable of faith rather than fear.
He is never not healing.
He is always the Great Physician.
And we are always his patients.
That is, every person who witnessed Jesus heal a person was a person also in need of healing. Every person who saw Jesus heal a person was also a person who needed Jesus’ healing. Everyone who witnesses the LORD heal is also someone in need of his healing.
Therefore, his healing work is not limited to the miracles we can see.
God is a better God than we give him credit!
He does not cure one person but withhold restoration from another in need.
They are not one-off impossible oddities.
It is who he is.
Just so, there is not a person who knows Jesus who is not receiving his healing work.You are. You are! You might not realize you’re under the Great Physician’s knife until you wake up sore from surgery but you are.
In They Flew, Dr. Carlos Eire refers to St. Teresa of Avila as the “Reluctant Aethrobat.” Teresa is famous for her mystical writing entitled The Interior Castle. Less well-known is that the occasion for her book was the Spanish Inquisition. Teresa was encouraged to write about her relationship with Christ in order to allay concerns that her levitation— a miracle which everyone accepted— was not the work of God but of his Enemy. She so satisfied inquisitors’ skepticism that the church canonized her as a saint almost immediately upon her death in 1582.
Eire calls her a reluctant levitator because, according to church record, Teresa would demand her fellow nuns hold her to the ground whenever gravity loosed its grip on her. Saint Teresa did not want to become a miracle story. She preferred not to talk about the odd and visible way God worked upon her because, she argued, it risked obscuring the ordinary ways the LORD is always at work on each of his creatures.
Most editions of the Bible give this passage the heading, “The Healing of the Man with the Withered Hand.” But go back and reread chapters one through three of the Gospel of Mark. Jesus does not go to the synagogue in order to heal the man with the withered hand. Jesus goes to the synagogue so that he can escalate his confrontation with the Pharisees. The man and his miracle are not the center of the story. The Pharisees conflict with Jesus is the heart of the passage.
God is a better God than we give him credit: Jesus is never not healing!
His healing work is not limited to the miracles we can see.
This is not a random encounter.
This is their second appointment with the Great Physician.
Notice:
The Pharisees leave the man’s healing to hold a bipartisan committee meeting with the Herodians about how best to kill Jesus. They came to the synagogue concerned about the fourth commandment. They depart from the synagogue determined to break the sixth commandment. What began as indignation over blasphemy has festered into a conspiracy to commit murder.
The patient has gotten worse.
The diseased evil inside them has grown darker still. Like chemotherapy that cures you by first nearly killing you, Jesus has drawn still greater evil out of the Pharisees. Their hostility to him has increased because Jesus has pressed more deeply into a wound we cannot see.
Again, God is a better God than we give him credit.
Jesus does not heal the man with the withered hand only to leave the bystanders in the hardness of their hearts. The miracle he performs on the man with the crippled hand is how Jesus goes about healing what afflicts them!
As the ancient church father St. Athanasius comments on this passage:
“In the synagogue of the Jews was a man who had a withered hand. If he was withered in his hand, the ones who stood by were withered in their minds…Before doing the miraculous deed, the Savior ploughed up their minds with words. For knowing the evil of the mind and its bitter depth, he first softened them up in advance with words so as to tame the wildness of their understanding.”
The Pharisees do not simply witness Jesus heal the man with the withered hand. The man with the withered hand is how Jesus goes about healing the Pharisees.
He’s lancing the wound.
He’s cutting to the infection.
He’s drawing the poison out of them.
More often than not, the Great Physician prefers slow medicine.
When I first got cancer ten years ago, Les suddenly saw me in a different light. He wrote me cards effusive with uncharacteristic kindness and empathy. He left food at my door. He visited me in the hospital (where he gave me pointers on a push-up regimen that would keep me “from wasting away”).
Sometime after I returned from medical leave, he patted me on the shoulder and he said, “Preacher, I don't know why it took me so long to hear, but now, some days, the only thing saving me from complete despair is whatever word the LORD's bringing through you.”
I looked at him, surprised, and I immediately repented for never believing it possible that he could say such a thing. It was only then that I realized just how much I had disliked him— for no real reason. Jesus calls my affliction, pōrōsei tēn kardias.
Hardness of heart.
God is a better God than we give him credit.
They are not one-off oddities.
Jesus is never not at work healing.
All that year I had prayed holes in the rug for Jesus to heal me of my cancer. And I thought he had done so, but my cancer came back. As it turns out, the Great Physician had used my cancer to heal a bitterness inside of Les Norton just as he had used Les over all those preceding years to heal a disease even deeper than the one in my marrow.
I held Les just before he died.
His last words to me— he asked me how my boys were doing.
He was in bed, dying. His wife, who suffered dementia, was in the next room watching the John Wayne movie Rio Lobo. Knowing his time was drawing short, he became scared and he asked me to hold him in my arms.
And I did, like I would one of my little nieces.
Before—
Resentment might have kept me from doing so.
Pride would have prevented him from asking.
He died in my arms while I whispered into his ear over and over— like a lullaby, “You've been baptized. You're safe in His death. The next voice you hear will be the LORD Jesus.”
God is a better God than we give him credit.
God didn’t stop with Les’ miracle.
Jesus had been working on him and me both the whole time.
Jesus doesn’t do healings.
Jesus heals.
Healing is not what he does; it’s who he is.
Which is all the more reason to come to the table.
Salvation means healing!
God is a better God than we give him credit!
Jesus does more than forgive you—he is healing you.
He is taking hearts of stone and making them flesh. He is taking lives twisted by sin and straightening them out until they shine with the likeness of God. He is taking every Pharisee within us, every Les Norton in our lives us, every stubborn and bitter and hard-hearted part of us—and he is remaking us until we resemble him.
Until we resemble his likeness.
Because that’s what Christians mean by health and healing!
Not an arm set straight in plaster.
Not a BMI between nineteen and twenty-four.
Not an LDL below one hundred.
To be healthy, to be healed, to be made whole is to be fully formed in the image of Christ.
That is what he is up to in our lives. He will not stop until you are wholly conformed to the image of his Son. He will not rest until you are made new. And to that end he prescribes for all of us slow medicine.
Bread that is his body, given for you.
Wine that is his blood, poured out for you.
To fill you.
And make you whole.
The Great Physician is never not at work healing us.
So come—
Come not because you have it all together,
Come because the Great Physician is here.
And he is never not at work healing us.
Come— this table is “the double cure.” 18
The cup is filled with mercy.
The bread is broken to make you whole.
He makes you more like him by feeding you with himself.
Hear the Good News:
There are no bystanders to his healings.
Jesus heals.
Everyone.
God is a better God than we give him credit.
Maybe he’s lancing a wound that festers deep within you.
Or maybe he’s calling you out from hiding in shame.
But take it to the bank.
The Word that healed the withered hand is at work on you too.
Therefore, this table of impossible things is true.
It is a miracle that is somehow also just another fact.
In the End, every Pharisee will become as Christ.
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