On the Relationship Between Healing and Forgiveness

Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

12 January 2020

Mark 2.1-12; 18-22

Listen to the sermon here:

https://soundcloud.com/bloomsbury-1/on-healing-and-forgiveness

I’d like to start this morning

            by setting out clearly a couple of things that I don’t believe,

            before coming on to some things that I think I do believe.

Firstly, I don’t believe that sin causes disability.

Some of you have heard me speak previously about my wonderful grandfather,

            he was a powerful influence on me when I was growing up,

                        and in many, many ways modelled the kind of human being

                        that I would aspire to be.

He was also a convinced atheist.

            The thing is, he had been brought up as a Christian Scientist.

I don’t know if you’ve come across the Christian Science movement,

            and as with many religious groups

            these days it is in something of a decline,

but you can still visit Christian Science reading rooms in many towns,

            and there’s one not far from here up at King’s Cross.

Christian Science originated in the States in the late 19^th Century,

            when Mary Baker Eddy published the book Science and Health,

in which she argued that sickness is an illusion

            that can be corrected by prayer alone.

Mary Baker Eddy described Christian Science as a return

            to what she called, ‘primitive Christianity and its lost element of healing’.

And whilst there are some superficial similarities

            with the more mainstream Pentecostal traditions

            of praying for physical healing,

there are also some significant differences.

Christian Scientists believe that reality is purely spiritual

            and that the material world is an illusion,

which means that, for them, disease and disability are mental errors

            rather than physical disorders,

and that the sick should be treated not by medicine

            but by a form of prayer that seeks to correct

            the beliefs responsible for the illusion of ill health.

Those of you who know your classical philosophy,

            or who have been watching The Good Place on Netflix,

will recognise echoes here of Platonic Dualism,

            which has dogged Christianity for the last two thousand years,

                        dividing our spiritual selves from our physical selves

                        to no-one’s real benefit.

What Christian Science boiled down to at a practical level, for my Grandfather,

            was an argument over a tooth abscess.

He was about 14, and needed to go to a dentist because of the pain he was in.

            His mother refused, and told him that he must devote himself instead

                        to prayer for forgiveness for whatever spiritual sin it was

                                    that had crept into his life,

                        and was causing the painful illusion of toothache.

            Well, he was 14, and we can all guess what thoughts had recently crept into his life

                        that he might be concerned were sinful.

Eventually, after six months of physical, sexual, and spiritual torment,

            his father relented and took him to the dentist to have the tooth removed.

Quite reasonably, I think, my grandfather rejected religion at this point;

            I would probably have done the same,

                        and I am grateful that I was brought up in a less abusive religious tradition.

So, my first point:

            I don’t believe that sin causes sickness and disability.

However, you could be forgiven (so to speak) for thinking that Jesus did,

            on the basis of our first reading this morning from Mark’s gospel.

I remember learning this story in Sunday School,

            colouring in drawings of the man being lowered down

                        by his friends through the roof of the house,

            having his sins forgiven, and then standing up,

                        taking up his mat, and walking out.

I remember learning lessons about the power of friendship,

            the importance of forgiveness,

            and how the unfortunate man could never have got to Jesus on his own.

But I don’t remember anyone ever addressing the question

            of what was going on here in terms of the link

            between forgiveness and physical healing.

Which brings me to the second thing I don’t believe:

            I don’t believe that we should set up expectations of physical healing

            for those who come to church or to Jesus.

Another story:

About a year ago, when I was on Sabbatical,

            I attended church with a friend.

It was one of those places where you sing enthusiastically for 40 minutes,

            then have a 40 minute ‘sermon’,

            and then sing again for another half an hour

                        whilst people pray for those who have come forwards for ministry.

The preacher had been speaking about healing,

            and how God wants to heal everyone of whatever is wrong with them.

The sermon then went what I can only describe as ‘slightly off-piste’

            and said that God specifically wanted to bring physical wholeness

                        to those who had had injuries and operations

                        that had left them with metal in their bodies - pins, plates, and so on –

            because these are unnatural and need removing.

The preacher claimed to have been present at a healing gathering

            where he had seen people experience

            the miraculous removal of metal from their bodies.

The prayer ministry at the end was an invitation

            for those who had such metal to come forwards and receive prayer for its removal.

At one level this is laughable nonsense,

            but we should note that this was a well-attended mainstream church,

                        with an educated and intelligent congregation,

                        some of whom went up for prayer for healing.

I’m afraid my mind started wondering what would happen

            if someone with an artificial hip or heart valve went up

            and it suddenly vanished!

Anyway, the serious point I want to make

            is that this is abusive religion, because it sets people up for failure.

If, as my grandfather discovered,

            you faithfully yearn and pray for healing that doesn’t happen,

there is a good chance that you will feel very let down

            by God and by God’s people.

So, I don’t believe that we should set up expectations of physical healing

            for those who come to church or to Jesus.

In the light of which, what are we to make of the paralysed man,

            lowered through the roof,

                        who receives forgiveness for his sins, and healing for his paralysis?

Well, the golden rule for biblical studies is always consider the context,

            and we need to remember that Jesus lived in a world

                        where people didn’t have access to a scientific understanding

                        of disease or disability.

            They didn’t understand genetics and the processes of heritability;

                        and they didn’t understand about bacterial infections, or virus transmission.

So, in one way, as twenty first century readers of this ancient story of Jesus,

            we’re at a profound advantage

            in terms of our understanding of the mechanisms of disease and disability.

However, there is an area where I think the first century Jewish worldview

            was way ahead of us.

I mentioned earlier the influence of Platonic Dualism on Christianity,

            of how it invites us to divide the physical from the spiritual,

                        to see the body as a cradle for the soul,

                        or the mind as the master over matter.

Well, here’s the thing - this dualism, this separation,

            is alien to the Hebrew mind-set.

To read Jesus as healing the man’s paralysis

            through the mechanism of forgiving his sins

is to impose a dualistic perspective

            on actions that are not dualistic, but holistic.

Jesus wasn’t enacting a kind of early Christian Science approach

            where the physical ailment was mechanistically resolved by addressing spiritual sin.

Rather, he looked at the man and saw him as a holistic being,

            mind-body-soul in unity rather than in division,

and he recognised that the man on the mat, as with all of us,

            had multi-dimensional needs.

To have simply healed his paralysis with a wave of the hand

            would have been to do only half the job;

this man needed wholeness in every area of his life,

            from the physical to the spiritual to the relational.

And in publicly forgiving him his sins,

            Jesus was acting to restore the man to right relations with society

            by healing not just his body, but his relationships.

I think there is an important key here in the words of the Lord’s prayer,

            where Jesus instructs his disciples to pray,

            ‘Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us’.

The Scribes might have accused Jesus of blasphemy

            for daring to offer forgiveness of sins,

but in their anger they missed the point of his doing so,

            which was that forgiveness that starts with God to the individual,

            finds its fulfilment in the forgiveness that restores people

                        to right relationship with each other.

This, then, is the context in which the man takes up his bed and walks;

            he has been healed holistically, rather than physically;

            it is forgiveness and restoration which creates the environment for his enabling.

In terms of what we might take from this

            for our own understanding of forgiveness, healing, and prayer,

            there are a couple of key points I’d like to draw out.

Firstly, I think that Jesus was enacting here

            something akin to what we might today call the social model of disability.

This is a way of viewing the world developed by disabled people,

            and in a nutshell says that people are disabled by barriers in society,

            not by their personal impairment or physical difference.[1]

So, for example, a person whose legs don’t work

            is disabled not by their impairment,

                        but by the physical barriers in the world

                        which prevent them from getting around.

If they have access to a wheelchair, suitable ramps, lifts, and toilets,

            they still have the impairment of non-functioning legs,

            but that impairment doesn’t disable them.

This means that the healing of the disability

            is something that is the responsibility of the community,

            rather than the individual.

It is social, not personal.

SCOPE, the disability equality charity says,

‘Barriers can be physical, like buildings not having accessible toilets.

            Or they can be caused by people's attitudes to difference,

                        like assuming disabled people can't do certain things.

The social model helps us recognise barriers that make life harder for disabled people.

            Removing these barriers creates equality and offers disabled people

            more independence, choice and control.’[2]

I’m aware that not all people who live with disability find the Social Model helpful,

            and there are other ways of framing the dialogue between society and impairment.

However, when I look at the story of Jesus encountering the paralysed man,

            it is I think very profound that Jesus doesn’t simply resolve the physical impairment,

but rather starts with a holistic approach

            which restores the man to right relationship with God and with others,

            to create the context within which his disability can be addressed.

We need to keep remembering that the world of the first-century

            was very different to ours,

            particularly on attitudes towards disability and illness.

A paralysed man would have been an outcast in his society,

            unable to work, judged as sinful by others,

            prevented from accessing the temple or the synagogues for worship,

            quite possibly ostracised from his family.

And I think there is something profound that we can learn

            from Jesus’ encounter with this man,

which addressed first his relationship to society,

            as a prerequisite to addressing his disability.

I think that if, as a church, we are to talk about healing

            in a meaningful and non-abusive way,

we have to stop fixating on the part of the story

            where the man picks up his mat and walks off.

I’m not going today to get into the big discussion about, ‘yes, but did it happen?’,

            because I don’t think that’s the point of the story.

The point, as Mark tells it very clearly, is not that Jesus can heal,

            but that Jesus can forgive sins.

This is the crucial aspect that we need to grasp here.

Jesus is bringing into being a new world,

            where the old rules of sin and suffering are torn up.

The scribes, as always in Mark’s gospel,

            are locked into their worldview of mechanistic legalism,

declaring Jesus a blasphemer

            for doing what they say only God should do,

and consequently declaring the man still unforgiven;

            while missing the point entirely that Jesus is bringing a new world order into being,

                        where forgiveness and restored relationships

                        are now available to everyone,

            inaugurating a new community based on inclusion rather than exclusion.

Last week I argued that Mark’s story of Jesus healing the man with the skin condition,

            was less about the condition itself,

                        and more about reversing the exclusion he suffered

                        at the hands of a society that declared his condition ‘unclean’.

Well, this week the story of the man let down through the roof on his mat

            is told by Mark as another example of this new world,

                        where everyone has access to the forgiveness and restoration

                        that Jesus is offering.

That which was previously unclean is declared clean,

            that which was previously unforgivable is declared forgiven.

Outsiders become insiders,

            and those who were once the guardians of the border between ‘in’ and ‘out’

            find their power to exclude torn away from them.

One of the implications of this new world

            is that it affects the way we view and understand forgiveness.

Too often churches have focussed on eliciting personal forgiveness for personal sins,

            a bit like my poor grandfather being told to seek forgiveness for being a teenager.

Dare I say that this is not what Jesus has in mind when he speaks of forgiveness?

            Or at least, it isn’t the whole story of what he offers

                        when he pronounces forgiveness.

Rather, he has in mind the creation of a new community

            of right and restored relationships,

where forgiveness is both given and received by those who are part of it,

            as the natural outworking of the forgiveness they have received from God;

and this new community is the context for holistic healing to occur.

It is through the transformation of community and relationships

            that disability is removed.

Those church traditions which have overly focussed

            on personal morality and individual salvation

            frequently miss this communal aspect.

Simply telling individuals that they must repent of their personal sins

            to be acceptable to God and God’s people

is a distortion of the forgiveness that should be shaping us together

            into communities of love, restoration, transformation and wholeness.

But still the scribes, both ancient and modern, don’t get it,

            they can’t see the benefit of this new world that Jesus is inaugurating,

                        this new ‘kingdom’ as Mark calls it,

            which is as different to the old way of doing things

                        as day is different from night.

And so they oppose it,

            challenging Jesus and those who follow after him,

            whenever we proclaim the radical, communal, universal,

                        transformative, healing power of forgiveness.

Our journey through Mark has already given us glimpses

            of the disruptive nature of who Jesus is, and what he does;

starting with his baptism in the river Jordan

            when the heavens were torn open

                        and the Spirit descended on him in the form of a dove,

            with a voice from heaven declaring him to be God’s son.

This language of the ‘ripping apart’ of the heavens

            is echoed in the two little parables

                        that we heard towards the end of our reading this morning,

            about new wine in old wineskins, and new cloth on old cloth.

‘No-one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old cloak,

            otherwise the patch pulls away from it, the new from the old,

            and a worse tear is made.’

The word ‘tear’ here is the same word Mark used

            to describe the heavens being torn open at the baptism of Jesus.

And the lesson here, is the same as it was at the baptism,

            which is that Jesus is disruptive of the way things are,

                        he is doing something new which is incompatible with what was.

The world of the sceptical scribes,

            built on rules and boundaries,

            and on exclusion and power,

is coming to an end.

Similarly, says Jesus, the new wine of the kingdom of God

            will burst any old wineskin that tries to contain it, tearing it apart.

Religious systems built on definitions of who’s in, and who’s out;

            who’s clean, and who’s unclean;

            who’s forgiven, and who’s unforgiven,

are incompatible with the radical grace of the Kingdom of God

            that breaks into the world in the life and ministry of Jesus.

The scribes had lost,

            because their system of mechanistic religion

            could no longer contain God.

But the people rejoiced,

            because here was God coming to them in Jesus to offer forgiveness,

            to rebuild society, to transform relationships,

            and to bring healing and wholeness to those cast aside.

And this is the gospel that we have inherited.

Churches have a depressing tendency towards institutionalism,

            we become scribes and write things down,

                        defining God with ever more constrictive formulations,

            and the Spirit of Jesus is always working to tear that apart,

                        with acts of inclusion and mercy and grace and forgiveness.

Last year, as part of our Inclusive Church series,

            my old college friend Glen Graham preached here on disability inclusion,

and Glen, who is blind, said

            "We must include everybody, there is no opt out clause...

            because we are being shaped into the likeness of Christ's body".

We are the body of Christ, and as such we are the community of Christ,

            we are the new kingdom which he proclaimed as coming into being.

We can, and should, be the place

            where this new society takes shape,

inviting the world to participate in the gospel of Christ

            which is good news for all people.

We are those who can proclaim forgiveness to one another,

            even as we are forgiven by God and by others.

We are those who can model healing and wholeness,

            where no impairment or characteristic is exclusionary or unclean.

This is why it matters so much that we, as God’s people in this place,

            take seriously what it means to see others brought to healing and wholeness,

and it is why we continue to offer our persistent challenge

            to a world still hell-bent on scapegoating and violence.

This why it matters that we take seriously our commitment

            to making our church accessible to all.

Whether this is physical adaptation of the building,

            to the way we structure ourselves communally.

This is why it matters that we work with others from different faith traditions and none,

            to bring transformation to society

            through our involvement in London Citizens.

If we are to be the people of Christ, our mandate, our manifesto,

            is to tear, to rip, the fabric of any society or institution

            that tries to contain the and constrain the new kingdom of Christ.

And it is all because we are ourselves declared absolutely forgiven,

            we know what it is to be declared unconditionally clean,

            we know what it is to be part of a community

                        of healing, restoration, and wholeness.

---

x

[1] https://www.scope.org.uk/about-us/social-model-of-disability/

[2] https://www.scope.org.uk/about-us/social-model-of-disability/

By whose authority?

Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

5 January 2020

Mark 1.21-45

To listen to this sermon click here:
https://soundcloud.com/bloomsbury-1/by-whose-authority

Having read the original trilogy some years ago,

            I’ve been very much enjoying the BBC adaptation

            of Philip Pullman’s superb book ‘His Dark Materials’.

If you’ve not come across these,

            they are set in an alternative universe which is a bit like our own,

            but with some significant differences.

Not least, people’s souls are visible

            - personified as various kinds of animals.

A lot of the story focuses around whether a person

            can exist in separation from their soul,

and this provides the opportunity for Pullman

            to address some profound questions about what it means to be human.

For a self-professed atheist, I have always found

            that Philip Pullman shows a deeply spiritual side to his writing.

One of the characters in the books is known as ‘The Authority’,

            and he is first encountered as the spiritual head, and focus of, the church.

For a while it looks as though The Authority

            is the His Dark Materials universe’s equivalent of God,

but eventually it becomes clear

            that The Authority is actually an imposter posing as God,

            exercising political power through the structures of the church that serves him.

The critique here of the dogmatic power-focused abuse

            of religion in our own world is obvious.

But what particularly interested me,

            as I was preparing to preach on our passage today from Mark’s gospel,

was the fact that Pullman named this character as ‘The Authority’.

I don’t know if you noticed it in the readings,

            but one of the key debates surrounding Jesus’ teaching and actions

            is the question of where he gets his authority.

We will find ourselves coming back to this again and again

            as we go through the gospel,

and it is clear that for Mark, the authority of Jesus is a central issue.

One of the enigmas of Mark’s gospel

            is that Jesus is frequently described as a preacher and teacher,

but as we read through the gospel

            we find that it gives us almost no record

            of what it was that Jesus actually said.

Matthew and Luke attempt to fix this, of course,

            by adding various blocks of teaching into Mark’s basic structure;

passages such as the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew,

            or the Sermon on the Plain in Luke.

John’s gospel takes a different approach altogether,

            ignoring Mark’s gospel completely

            and offering a very different narrative of Jesus’ ministry and teaching.

But in Mark, which is going to be our gospel for this year,

            we get no real hint of what it is that Jesus teaches.

All we really know is that it is a ‘new message’

            which contrasts significantly with the preaching of the Scribes

            by having an authority that theirs lacked.

So, Jesus preaches with authority,

            but authority to do what?

You might well ask, given that we don’t get to hear Jesus

            preaching or teaching much at all in Mark’s gospel.

We would find some clues if we read a bit further on into the gospel,

            such as Jesus having the authority to forgive sins (2.10),

but in our reading for this morning

            we get our first glimpse of what will become

            the dominant aspect of Jesus’ teaching and message

                         - which is that he has authority over unclean spirits,

                        and can reverse their effects on the people they afflict.

In the first of the stories in our reading today,

            we encounter Jesus casting the unclean spirit

            out of the man in synagogue.

He has gone into the synagogue to teach,

            and the people in there are, we’re told,

                        ‘astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority,

                        and not as the scribes’ (1.22).

And then, after he has cast the spirit out of the man,

            Mark tells us that the people witnessing this

                        ‘were all amazed, and they kept on asking one another,

                        "What is this? A new teaching-- with authority!

                        He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him." (1.27).

The contrast here with the Scribes is crucial

            - it’s their synagogue, but they have no authority in it.

After all, why is a man with an unclean spirit in the synagogue in the first place?

            Why haven’t they done anything about him before?

Either they should have cast out the unclean spirit themselves,

            or they should have cast the man out of the synagogue.

He simply shouldn’t have been there,

            because one of the rules of the priestly purity code,

                        that governed the Scribes’ behaviour,

            was that unclean people should be kept away

                        from the holy places such as the synagogue.

However, they had neither healed him,

            nor had they cast him out.

It seems that they had no authority

            to resolve this situation in either direction.

The Scribes are trapped in a system of their own making

            where the unclean person is perpetually present,

                        yet perpetually other-ed;

            always there, but not-there.

To understand this,

            I think it’s worth spending a few moments with the Scribes,

            getting to grips with the basis for their authority.

They were the priests of their world,

            maintaining the worship life of the synagogues.

And their authority derived, at least in their eyes,

            from their careful custodianship of the scriptures,

                        and the many additional texts

                        that detailed how the Hebrew Bible was to be interpreted and applied.

However, as is so often the case

            with those who look for a legalistic base to their authority,

they were the kind of leaders who had learned to play the populist game

            to ensure that no-one ever had the temerity

            to question their interpretation of their sacred texts.

They knew how to use the rhetoric of othering,

            and strategies of apart-ness,

to whip up the mob majority

            into supporting whatever proposal it was

            that they were offering to solve their society’s ills.

The true basis for the Scribes’ authority wasn’t the scriptures,

            it was their ability to manipulate and control the mob.

And of course, a mob-mandated solution is rarely good news.

Populist leaders who base their spurious claims to authority

            on appeals to the masses

are always bad news for minorities,

            for those who get to be othered, set apart and sent packing

                        as the easy and obvious scapegoats

                        for whatever it is that ails the majority.

We see this all too often in our world,

            in the populist dog-whistle rhetoric of politicians in our own world,

who tell us that if only we could deal with the… insert unpopular minority here…

            then order and prosperity would be restored to society.

It almost doesn’t matter who is to blame,

            or the grounds on which they are scapegoated;

but ethnicity, education,

            culture, ability, and dependency are all popular targets.

The Scribes of our day are very good at defending

            their own right-ness according to the letter of the law,

all the while casting aspersions on those

            whom the law was never very good at defending in the first place.

This is where you end up,

            when you base your authority on popular appeals to the masses,

it’s true in our world,

            and it was true in the first century.

The Scribes ruled the roost, and defended their power

            with a carefully constructed system of scapegoating,

whereby they could blame anything that went wrong

            on those whom their law declared ‘unclean’.

And the people went along with it,

            because to take a stand against such a system

is to run the risk of being declared unclean yourself,

            and of becoming the next target for othering.

So, is it all the mob’s fault?

            Do people simply get the leaders they deserve?

            Do we???

Well, at one level, yes of course.

            Without popular support, populist leaders fail.

But at another level,

            the mob are as much a victim of the oppressive system

            as they are the sustainers of it.

So in Mark’s gospel,

            when Jesus starts teaching a new message,

                        with a different authority,

            which breaks the power of sin over people’s lives,

                        and which restores back to community

                        those who have been ostracised,

            the mob start to show an interest,

                        because it opens for them the possibility of their own emancipation.

And so we come to Jesus teaching in the synagogue

            and confronting the man with the unclean spirit.

Have you been wondering why the Scribes

            were keeping an unclean man in the synagogue?

They lacked the authority or motivation to declare him clean,

            but they hadn’t cast him out either…

The answer, it seems to me,

            was that he was useful to them.

He was their on-hand scapegoat.

At any moment, if anyone questioned them or their authority,

            they could point to him and say, ‘it’s all his fault - he’s unclean’.

This is the context in which Jesus casts out

            the unclean spirit from the man.

He does what the Scribes couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do.

            He restores the man back to society

            by removing from him his uncleanness.

We don’t often talk much in our society

            about demons and spiritual warfare,

and in church life it is usually the more conservative and charismatic traditions

            that take such language seriously.

I remember as a teenager reading Frank Peretti’s novel This Present Darkness,

            with its vivid depiction of a world of demons and angels

                        just beyond our sight, fighting for the souls of humans,

            and thinking that I found this an unlikely explanation

                        of what Jesus was doing when he cast out spirits from people.

I think we can get a bit closer to the way

            in which this language functioned in the first century

with a phrase such as, ‘the demon drink’

            referring to the addiction of alcohol;

or if we speak of someone’s battles with poor mental health

            as them ‘battling their demons’;

or if we refer to the recent general election campaign

            as a ‘fight for the soul of the nation’.

In the first century, it was much more common than it is for us,

            to use the language of a spiritual battle

            to dramatise the conflicts of both soul and society.

But this isn’t to reduce such language to mere metaphor.

            It rather conjures a world-view, which we have mostly lost,

                        where the universe consists of two orders,

                        the normal and the demonic.

It’s not so much a battle between Good and Evil, between God and Satan,

            as it is a battle against the human tendency

                        to take God’s good creation and mess it up.

In the world of the first century,

            the casting out of the demonic was the restoration of normality.

And for the man with the unclean spirit in the synagogue,

            his life was anything but normal.

He couldn’t worship normally, he couldn’t work,

            or have a normal family life.

He was condemned by his having been declared unclean

            to the role of perpetual scapegoat in the synagogue.

And Jesus’ casting out of the unclean spirit,

            the dramatic declaration of him as clean,

restored him to normality,

            to his normal and rightful place in society.

The interaction between Jesus and the demon is interesting.

The demon speaks to Jesus, and says to him

            ‘I know who you are, the Holy One of God’ (1.24).

But Jesus silences him,

            and immediately casts the spirit out of the man.

Since the early 20^th century scholars have pointed to this

            as the first instance of what they call Mark’s ‘Messianic Secret’

which is that if you read through Mark,

            Jesus seems repeatedly to silence those

                        who try to spill the beans on who he is,

            until we get to the point half way through

                        when Peter recognises Jesus as the Messiah.

Whilst there may be something in this, as a rhetorical device,

            I think there is a more compelling reason

            why Jesus silences this demon.

I think it’s because the demon is trying to label Jesus

            in an attempt to take away his authority.

The phrase ‘Holy One of God’ is a priestly title,

            and if Jesus accepts this holiness

he is immediately sucked into the holiness system of the scribes

            which keeps them apart from the unclean and the outcasts.

The demon is trying to root Jesus’ authority in the holiness tradition

            of keeping things apart to keep them pure,

and if Jesus had accepted the title

            he would have been unable to exorcise the demon,

because he would have found himself co-opted

            into the very system he had come to overthrow.

This is how systems of oppression work

             - they co-opt and compromise, they flatter to deceive,

            they reward complicity and compliance.

The holiness system of the synagogues

            was built on a foundation of scapegoating the vulnerable,

and Jesus’ threat to that had to be silenced;

            so the demon tried to label Jesus as just another priestly scribe,

                        as compromised as the rest.

But Jesus is having none of it

            - he silences the demon and casts him out,

clearly demonstrating that his authority to act

            is very different from that of the scribes.

The mob turn to Jesus at this point,

            although of course they will turn on him later in the story.

But for now they are drawn to his teaching,

            which comes with the authority to forgive sins,

                        to cast out demons,

            and to declare clean those who have been labelled as unclean.

And of course, as they are drawn to the new and different authority of Jesus,

            the authority of the Scribes,

                        rooted in their control and manipulation of the mob,

            starts to erode.

And so the demons, which are dependent on system of the Scribes to exist,

            try to counter this power shift

by misrepresenting Jesus

            as just another bearer of priestly authority.

He resists, and silences them

            because the system they have existed within

            has no power to declare people clean, only unclean.

It creates demons rather than casting them out.

Jesus then does something interesting,

            and he heads out to the wilderness to pray.

Sometimes, this is preached as an example

            of Jesus going on some kind of spiritual retreat,

as if we should all head off into the wilderness

            to be silent and pray from time to time.

However, as we have seen in our sermons

            over the last couple of weeks

            (available on the podcast if you missed them - just saying),

the wilderness in Mark’s gospel

            is more than somewhere quiet

            to have a bit of a prayerful think.

It is the place where the prophets go

            to proclaim their messages of radical transformation.

Jesus repeatedly ends up in the countryside and the wilderness

            rather than the towns

because the true home of the radical

            is removed from, rather than enmeshed in,

                        the compromising complexities

                        of the commercialised urban centres of civilisation.

Jesus, you see, has in mind the radical transformation of society

            - it’s religion, politics, and economics,

and this can only be achieved

            if he keeps himself outside the system.

So just as he refuses the priestly title from the lips of the demon,

            he makes a point of physically removing himself

                        from the structures of his inherited religious tradition,

            by going from the priestly synagogue space,

                        into the prophetic place of the wilderness.

He has already gone into the wilderness for baptism at the hands of John,

            and into the wilderness to be tempted,

and in today’s reading he symbolically steps out of the synagogue

            and back to the wilderness,

removing himself from the violent sacrificial scapegoating structures

            of religion and society,

so that when he later steps back into the towns and the holy places

            he does so as one who come to transform them,

            not be co-opted into them.

So Jesus then, once the crowd have tracked him down,

            comes back into the synagogues of the area,

preaching and casting out demons,

            systematically restoring people to ‘normality’

                        by removing the causes of their exclusion,

            and silencing the demons from speaking their lies

                        which would undermine his power to act.

And it occurs to me that we live in a society

            which systematically excludes.

I don’t think our world is all that different

            from that of the scribes in the first century.

We too have leaders whose authority is mandated on populist politics,

            and on the othering of the weak and the vulnerable.

And I’m not just talking about national politics

            - we encounter this in church life too,

where leaders bolster their popularity

            by taking moral stances about who’s in and who’s out

            - dressing it up as a commendable concern for holiness.

And what happens to those who challenge this?

            Who argue for a kinder way, a more inclusive path?

They are themselves tainted and scapegoated,

            or they are compromised and co-opted.

And so we come to the final story in our reading this morning,

            the man with the skin complaint

who comes to Jesus not wanting to be healed,

            but to be made clean.

He has been othered by scribal purity regulations

            which have excluded him from society and faith.

He has become just another convenient scapegoat

            for the ills of his society.

It occurs to me that there are two possible ways

            that his request could have been answered.

Firstly, by healing his skin condition,

            or secondly by overturning the purity law

                        which meant that someone with a skin condition

                        was deemed unclean and unacceptable in the first place.

And this is where I start to get a bit uncomfortable.

Because when I think about the way in which the church

            has sometimes responded to people who are excluded

                        and othered and scapegoated

                        because of their gender or sexuality,

            it has done so by abusively using the language of healing.

The conversion therapy approach to minority sexuality

            has a long and profoundly un-Christ-like history

            of trying to change people away from their God-given natures.

So what are we to make of what Jesus does here,

            responding to the man’s desire to be made clean,

            by simply healing him?

Is this Jesus selling out on the project to transform society and faith,

            and simply giving the mob what they demand - yet another miracle.

I’m not so sure.

            Jesus is clearly furious.

The Greek for ‘sternly warning him’ in v.43

            is more like ‘growling with fury’ or ‘snorting with anger’.

And it seems to me that Jesus’ anger is directed not at the man,

            but at what the need to heal him represents

                        - at the system of exclusion

                        that created his uncleanness in the first place.

In his case, of course,

            the skin disease was not an essential characteristic of his person,

            and so healing him does no violence to his created nature.

Perhaps we should not push the analogy with conversion therapy too far.

But Jesus clearly only reluctantly addresses the man’s symptoms,

            whilst keeping his eye fixed firmly on the bigger battle

                        with the deeper sickness

                        of a society built on systems of exclusion and scapegoating.

So when we in our world encounter those who are othered,

            set apart, and scapegoated

- either within the church or within wider society,

            what should our response be?

            What is the Christ-like path that we can tread?

At a personal level, Jesus never does violence to the individual.

            He always seeks to raise a person up,

                        to remove the barriers to their exclusion,

            and to restore them to the deep blessings of normal life.

And we too are called to acts of mercy, of love, of inclusion.

But Jesus’ authority to do this was derived, as we have seen,

            from his own set-apartness,

            from his intentional resistance to the compromises and rewards

                        that complicity in the systems of power can bring.

And so we too need to guard our own hearts,

            to take ourselves into the wilderness from time to time

                        and discover again within our own selves

            the prophetic voice that calls to us from beyond.

And finally, we need to pay attention to ourselves.

What is it that we do that makes people unclean in our midst?

            Who would we exclude?

The lesson of the Scribes is that whenever anyone is declared unclean,

            the authority in play is not from God.

Divine authority always casts out uncleanness

            and restores people to community.

In God’s eyes, there is no one who is unclean,

            no one who is unwelcome in his kingdom,

            no one who deserves to be turned away. 

Today is Epiphany Sunday,

            when the church remembers the revelation of God to the gentiles,

as the wise men from the East came to visit the infant Jesus.

And here we discover the same story,

            rooted in the infancy story of Jesus,

which is that God will not be constrained by border and boundary,

            that God transcends ethnicity and social standing,

that God is for all,

            for me, for you, for each of us,

coming to us in love and peace

            to bring us to wholeness, as individuals and as a community.

And in a divided world, with nation turned against nation,

            we need this revelation of God

                        in and through the birth, life, and ministry of Jesus,

            made flesh in our time through those of us

                        who are the body of Christ in our world.