Jesus risks everything to heal us – Mark 1:40-45

OT Wk 6, Yr B; Holy Cross - St. Stan's

A hand reaches out to ask for help, and he can’t turn away.  Praying with this story over the past week, I kept coming back to the image of the Whisky Priest from Graham Greene’s novel, The Power and The Glory.  As I was preparing for ordination this time last year, person after person told me that if I was only going to read one novel in the months before my ordination, this should be it.  It’s set during the persecution of the Church in Mexico.  The main character, the unnamed Whisky Priest, is forced underground, on the run from the also nameless Lieutenant who seeks to have him killed.  Finally, towards of the end of the book, the priest has made it through an arduous border crossing into a neighboring province where he’ll be safe, leaving his home state priestless.  A known informant for the Lieutenant tracks him down and begs him to come back across the border, telling him that another fugitive, an American murderer, is dying in the desert and that he needs a priest to hear his confession.  The whisky priest knows in his head that this is a trap, that he’s being baited to return into the Lieutenant’s snare.  But, at that moment the courage that can only come from being moved with pity grabs him, and he consents.  He can’t leave a man to die with murder on his soul.  He returns with the informant, and he’s arrested, and shot.

There’s no-one seeking to kill Jesus, at least not yet.  We’re still in chapter one of Mark’s gospel; that’ll change by chapter 3.  But he knows it’s coming.  And I’m not talking any kind of supernatural, exclusively divine prediction knowledge here.  In Roman occupied Palestine, a person who cannot enter a town openly, a person who goes out into the desert and even there attracts huge crowds… there’s a name for a person like that: a threat.  Drawing crowds of people into the desert: that’s how revolts are fomented!  He’s a threat.  And Roman Imperial Power, together with its local collaborators, eliminates threats.  Swiftly, decisively, and with zero regard for the suffering of its subjects.

It doesn’t matter that Jesus isn’t trying to stimulate armed revolt, that’s he’s preaching love and peace and forgiveness.  They can’t see that.  Unlike the physically blind people Jesus will go on to heal, oppressive power is blind to possibility of being moved by pity at suffering and acting at personal risk to heal, is blind to who Jesus is. So, in a way, they’re right: Jesus is a threat.  Jesus is a threat to any system which fails to regard human suffering, which fails to be moved with pity at human suffering.  Jesus is the ultimate threat to any system which delights in human suffering.  Because Jesus heals.  And he warns the man, sternly: tell no-one.  Because he knows what effect the telling will have.  He knows how the crowds will flock.  He knows how secular power will understand that. 

And he doesn’t want to suffer, so he doesn’t want that.  He wants to conquer sin and suffering and death, not create more of it.  But, even more, he doesn’t want this man to suffer.  He doesn’t want him to suffer the physical distress of his scars and scabs.  He doesn’t want him to suffer the shunning and separation from his family and community.  He doesn’t want him to become infected with what’s far more deadly than leprosy: the dejection, cynicism, fear and loathing that comes from being constantly rejected.  He wants him to live.  And so he heals.  He heals knowing that this man won’t be able to keep quiet about what a wonder just happened to him, even if he sternly warns him.  He heals knowing what that will lead to.  Jesus will act to heal us no matter what the cost.  That’s the central confession of the cross.  No cost to himself compares with the incomparable value to him of acting to heal.  And the central confession of the resurrection is that it works: not even death can deter him from healing, and not even death can thwart his power, exercised in vulnerability and love.

A series of secret epiphanies cannot be hidden.  At least, they can’t unless we go against our nature and try.  Unless we shirk from telling out from our soul all that God has done for us in Christ.  Unless we let fear get the better of us.  Unless we shield ourselves and fail to be moved with pity for a world searching for the tender love of our wounded Creator, who we know, who embraces us, walks with us, feeds us and has prepared a place for us.

St. Paul says something incredibly daring at the close of our reading from 1 Corinthians: “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ.”  Paul puts himself forth as the mediator between the Corinthians and Christ.  They didn’t know Christ, but they knew him, so to imitate Christ it was enough to imitate Paul.  A commentary I re^ad noted that most preachers would shrink from holding themselves up for imitation in the same way, and I do.  Most Christians would too.  But do we dare at least dream of being able to honestly say, “imitate me, for I imitate Christ”?  Because no matter what the cost, Christ dares to dream that for us, and acts to heal us of all that stands in our way.