Texts: Jermiah 23:1-6, Ephesians 2:11-22 & mark 6:30-34, 53-56

Sonia Falaschi-Ray

God, through his prophet Jeremiah, decries the fact that Israel has been badly led.  Instead of its kings being good shepherds, they have scattered the people amongst hostile tribes and looked after themselves.  God promises he “will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land”.  This is to be the Messiah, the anointed one.  Paul talks about the two streams of people, Jews and Gentiles who are brought together into one through Christ.   It is as if through the Old Testament period there are streams of different-coloured sand pouring into an hour-glass, an old fashioned egg-timer.  Each colour represents a separate group, who often exclude each other; Jews and Gentiles, men and women, rich and poor, the sick and the well.  At the neck of the hour-glass they combine and a homogenous flow emerges, each sand gain retains its own colour but they are all intermingled.  Jesus is this neck, he is all in all. His life, death and resurrection are the purifying power of God to reconcile in himself all humanity and, in the words of St Paul, find that, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, …slave or free, … male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”[1]  We, the Church, are still prone to including and excluding people.  There are people of faith and of seemingly none.  There are Christians and non-Christians.  Those who go to Church and those who don’t.  Perhaps most annoying of all, there are those who claim to be Bible-believing Christians but whose views are different from mine about which bits of the Bible should be believed literally or viewed as metaphor, or even deemed to be of their time and culture but not binding on all of us for ever. 

Our Gospel reading takes up the theme of Jesus being the good shepherd.  He is trying to get away with his disciples for some spiritual refreshment, but the crowd anticipates his destination and gets there first.  Instead of being exasperated, Jesus went ashore, saw them and he had compassion, because they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things.  They needed spiritual nourishment.  Our passage jumps over the feeding of the 5000 to Jesus crossing to Gennesaret  “And wherever he went, …they laid the sick in the marketplaces, and begged him that they might touch even the fringe of his cloak; and all who touched it were healed.”  Jesus came to shatter the barrier of sin which had separated people from God; to declare the coming of God’s Kingdom and to demonstrate his fulfilling of prophesy and his divine identity by performing miracles.

I thought we might look at three healing miracles and explore what Jesus was doing and how his contemporaries could have interpreted them, why the Pharisees got so cross, and what it can mean for us today.  I have been helped in this by a book, The Meaning in the Miracles[2] by Jeffrey John, Dean of St Alban’s Cathedral.  Firstly, let’s recognize that people often use one of two extreme approaches to miracles.  There is the literalist approach – it happened just as described and demonstrates the divine power of God, no more no less.  And the reductionist approach – all are natural phenomena, so the illnesses were all psychosomatic and Jesus acted as a great psychologist.  He didn’t actually walk on water, it was just that the disciples didn’t know about the stepping stones!  Stilling the storm was a coincidence.  The danger with either approach is that we become focused on whether or not they happened, rather then grasping their meaning.  What we find in the healing miracles is Jesus systematically breaching the boundaries and conventions which made some people insiders and some outsiders, the included and the excluded.  In this he demonstrated how the Kingdom of God would look and that all were invited, not just self-righteous religious leaders, in fact they seemed to be excluding themselves by their very divisive attitudes and behaviour.

Let’s start with the healing of a leper.  “A leper came to Jesus begging him, and kneeling he said to him, “If you choose, you can make me clean.” Moved with anger, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, “I do choose. Be made clean!”  Immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean.  After sternly warning him he sent him away at once,  saying to him, “See that you say nothing to anyone; but go, show yourself to the priest, and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded, as a testimony to them.””[3]  The term “leprosy” is used in scripture to cover a number of skin diseases; someone perceived to be “leper would be an object of horror in Jesus’ society, not only because of the terror of the disease itself, but also because it rendered the sufferer ritually unclean – non-kosher.  A leper was to be excluded both from corporate worship and from all social interaction, since not only was the disease regarded as physically contagious, but the ritual uncleanness it caused was also regarded as contaminating.  Anyone the leper touched would have been similarly excluded from public worship, and from all social intercourse until examined and declared clean again by the priest.”[4]  We have seen a similar phenomenon with HIV/Aids.  When Aids first appeared in the West, among young homosexual men who started dying of rare cancers and pneumonia, their immune system having been compromised, they were treated as pariah.  Fear about how contagious it was led to people refusing to touch them and they were subject to censor regarding their lifestyle, some even asserting that this was God’s judgment of homosexual practice.  The waters became muddied when it emerged that Aids was far more prevalent in Africa amongst heterosexuals, except no one had noticed – early death being less remarkable there.  The HIV positive are still discriminated against in many African countries, denied help and unable to find employment.

Returning to the leper, he “breaks the Levitical rules by apparently approaching Jesus without warning.  It was shocking behaviour, which expresses both the man’s desperation about his plight and the strength of his faith.  ….  Jesus for his part breaks the rules in an even more shocking way by touching the leper.  It was an unthinkable thing to do because, even if it was no a direct violation of the Law, it should have rendered him ritually unclean.  The implication is of course that Jesus is inviolable.  Instead of contamination flowing from the leper to Jesus, healing power flowed from Jesus to the leper.”[5]…..What might this mean for us today?  “To be a leper remains the proverbial expression for being an outcast.     …..The healing of the leper is the paradigm case, the first in a long list of excluded or marginalised categories of people in Jesus’ society whom Jesus includes whether by healing or by simply by the manner of his dealing with them: lepers; tax-collectors; women- including those tainted by adultery, prostitution or the menstrual taboo; Gentiles; Samaritans; the physically defective of all kinds … [and] children.  These were not the kinds of peole with whom a rabbi was expected to consort; many of them, like the leper, were literally untouchable.”[6]  In each case Jesus breached convention or scriptural ‘rules’ including ‘work’ on the Sabbath, and the religious leaders were increasingly offended as Jesus repeatedly appeared to undermine their authority.

Our second example is the healing of the haemorrhaging woman.  You recall she crept up behind Jesus in a crowd and touched his cloak.  His response when she was identified was, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.”  “In the Judaism of Jesus’ time the concept of religious ‘purity’, one’s labelling as ‘clean’ or unclean’, was a marker of social and religious inclusion or exclusion.  The nature of the woman’s illness ….[had] made her a social and a religious outcast; … for twelve years.  The strength of the menstrual taboo, and the belief that her ‘uncleanness’ was contagious, meant that for a woman to touch a man, let alone a rabbi, during her period was a sternly punishable offence.  Hence the woman’s terror of approaching Jesus.  This taboo… contributed powerfully to the generally negative assessment of women in first century Judaism.  …It was seen literally as the sign of God’s curse on woman for having led Adam into sin.  If we just stay at the “what happened?” level we are left with Jesus’ compassion but miss the extraordinary, world changing meaning of what Jesus did.  “We are shown Jesus overturning the menstrual taboo which subjugated and oppressed women – a taboo that still contributes today to the oppression of women in many parts of the world, and indeed in some parts of the Church.”[7]  We might regard these views incredulously however, they are behind some of the objections to the ordination of women – that we contaminate the Eucharist and that Bishops who ordain women are themselves contaminated.  Male ordinands who believe this refuse to be ordained by those Bishops and won’t take communion not just from a woman but even in a church where a woman has presided! 

Our final example is the healing of the deaf man with a speech impediment (the text uses an unusual word mogilalos).  Jesus had gone to the Decapolis, a Gentile region that Jews on the whole avoided, thereby breaking a geographic boundary taboo.  He took the deaf man aside in private and put his fingers in his ears, and he spat and touched his tongue.  Then, looking up to heaven he sighed and said to him Ephphatha, that is ‘be opened’ and immediately his ears were opened and his tongue released.[8]  For those who understood these signs of Jesus, healing deafness and elsewhere blindness, they were not just physical miracles but a fulfilment of prophesy and a metaphor for the healing of spiritual deafness and blindness as described by Isaiah.  “Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped: then the lame shall leap like a deer and the tongues of the speechless (mogilalos) sing for joy.”[9]  Jesus’ inauguration of the Kingdom of God is reversing the earlier situation when God commanded Isaiah, “Go and say to this people; keep listening but do not comprehend, keep looking but do not understand.  Make the mind of this people dull and stop their ears and shut their eyes so that them may not look with their eyes and listen with their ears and comprehend with their minds and turn and be healed.  And I said, ‘How long, O Lord?’”[10]

As we have seen in these and many other healing miracles, Jesus systematically breaks down barriers and includes the excluded.  Maybe we should look at ourselves and our society and see where we exclude people, whether from feeling comfortable about entering a church or taking advantage of those things which our society can offer and are often mostly utilised by the educated middle classes.  This week perhaps we should pray for God to open our eyes to someone who is marginalised and see if we can help them become included rather than excluded.  As you know in the Autumn I shall be running an Alpha course which is an introduction to the Christian faith.  Please, over the summer, would you think and pray about finding one person whom you could invite to supper on 15^th September.  There would be no further time commitment on your part.

[1] Gal 3:28

[2] The Very Reverend Jeffrey John, The Meaning in the Miracles Canterbury Press 1988

[3] Mk 1:40f

[4] The Meaning in theMiracles p27

[5] T M in the  M p28

[6] T M in the M p29

[7] The M in the M p10 Italics J.J.

[8] Mk 7:31f

[9] Isa 35:6,5

[10] Isa 6:9-10