HEALED BY JESUS’
CHOICE
Sixth Sunday after
Epiphany (Cycle B)
February 12, 2012
FIRST
READING: 2 Kings 5:1-14
SECOND
GOSPEL:
Mark 1:40-45
This
is the third Sunday in a row the Gospels get us thinking about healing, and
today’s Gospel has something of a landmine in it. The leper says, “If you
choose, you can make me clean.” And Jesus, moved with pity and compassion,
touches him and says, “I do choose. Be made clean!” So far,
so good—because the story has a happy ending. The trouble is in this
first little word. “If…. If you choose,
you can make me clean.” What if Jesus said, “No, I do not choose”? What would
happen then? Would the leper remain sick? That certainly seems to be implied.
“But Jesus wouldn’t do that!” we say. “Jesus is a man of compassion; he always
wants what is best for us.” OK. So why are people sick? What if I am sick and I
don’t get better? What does that mean? Does God make choices on who gets healed
and who doesn’t?
The
fancy sixty-four dollar word for this is theodicy—or
to use the popular translation Harold Kushner used for this thirty years ago: When Bad Things Happen to Good People.
Over two thousand years ago the Greek philosopher Epicurus framed it as a
philosophical puzzle called the trilemma:
If God is all-loving and there is evil, God
must not be all-powerful.
If God is all-powerful and there is evil, God
must not be all-loving.
If God is both all-loving and all-powerful,
how can there be evil?
…or…why
should anyone be sick?
There
is a way around the trilemma when it comes to
healing. Perhaps the short-circuiting in failed healing is not God’s problem…but
ours. For the past two weeks I have been challenging my Iliff students to try
to make sense of the kinds of healing which happen in the tobys of Madagascar.
We have had some interesting discussions on “faith healing.” Some North
American Christians who practice faith healing will sometimes express the
problem this way: “God is ready to heal, but you need to take hold of it. And
the way you take hold of it is faith. If you don’t get healed, you simply need
to have more faith.” That takes the problem off of God—and lays it on us. “If
you’re sick, one way or another, it’s your own fault.” By this line of
reasoning the leper in today’s Gospel was healed because he trusted Jesus would
do it. OK. But I have known people who deeply, seriously sought healing and
trusted God would do it, but did not receive that healing. What about them? To
save God’s honor, do we really want to lay this burden of guilt on them—on top
of the hardship of their illness? That is hardly an exercise in Jesus’ kind of
compassion!
I
think it will help if we take a clue from today’s Gospel. An important word
here is choose.
“If you choose, you can make me
clean,” says the leper. And Jesus responds, “I do choose.” This seems to be about choices. The First Reading for
today offers us another case study in people who make choices—choices related
to healing. I’d like to explore that for a couple of minutes.
Naaman
must make several choices along the way in order to get healed by Elisha. First
of all, he must choose whether he will follow the advice of his wife’s servant
and seek healing from the prophet in Israel. Even after Naaman chooses to go
there, the healing almost gets derailed when he balks at the prescription which
Elisha gives him—washing seven times in the Jordan River. “Are not Abana and Pharpar, the rivers of
Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel?” he fumes. Naaman’s
choices and the way he frames them tells us a lot about how he gets healed and
what might get in the way of it. Naaman evidently has a pretty clear picture in
his head of what healing looks like and how this ought to be done. He does not
merely seek healing, but healing of a specific type and done a specific way. He
has made choices; he has a clear agenda in mind, an image of how healing is
going to be achieved. And those images get in the way of the healing God would
offer him.
There
is another clue in today’s First Reading. Pay attention, please to the way the
king of Israel handles this situation. When he gets the letter from the king of
Aram, he panics. “Am I God,” he says, “to give death or life, that this man
sends word to me to cure a man of leprosy?” This verse and the next in the
story are carefully crafted. We are never told the king’s name—he is simple
“king of Israel.” But in the next verse Elisha is identified as “man of God.” So
we have is the king of Israel who cannot heal, and the man of God who can. But
moving underneath this entire story is an interesting counter-theme. It has
something to do with power. On the one hand, you have the man of God, Elisha—a
kind of backwoods character who doesn’t seem to quite have the fancy credentials
to impress Naaman or the king of
Israel. And then you have Naaman and the king of Israel—people of power who
keep making choices that potentially get in the way of healing. I think this
constellation of themes helps us come back to the Gospel and look at it with
fresh eyes.
The
leper comes to Jesus with a style radically different from Namaan’s.
It’s all captured in that first little word that gives us so much trouble: If “If
you choose, you can make me clean.” It is conditional. It is not a foregone
assumption that healing has to take
place or that it will take place. It
might happen…and it might not. This nameless leper assumes nothing. This is
very different from the kind of swaggered posturing which Naaman exhibits. What
if the deepest kinds of healing involve us in a radical openness to a variety
of outcomes? Coming to Jesus for healing means being open to
redefine what our life might look like…be
like. Here we begin to see why powerful people like Naaman or the king
of Israel might find God’s kind of healing difficult. Naaman and the king are a
lot like us. We are privileged, powerful people—wealthy people who have impressive
tools of technological medicine at call. We often tend to come to God, I think,
with a very specific image of what God is supposed to do for us. We approach
medicine and doctors the same way: “Find a pill, identify a procedure that will
fix me the way I think I ought to be fixed.” We find it much more difficult to
approach health and wholeness the way the leper does: “If you choose, you can make me clean.”
Once
again, we may discover—as we did last week—that deep healing is much, much more
than making our unwanted symptoms go away. This deeper healing happens when God
helps us place ourselves into God’s hands. “Here I am, Lord. What do you want
to do with me? How can you love me the best?” Maybe it happens by removing
symptoms and illnesses. Or maybe it happens by learning how to live with them
and be transformed by them into something deeper than what I am now. I don’t
think this is a matter of callously telling sick people, “Suck it up and get
used to it.” Rather, it is a matter of being a man—a woman—of God by truly
letting God be God and asking God to draw us more
deeply into life through health and illness alike.
It
is, you see, a matter of choices. It has to do with the choices we make, but it also has to do with the
choices of Jesus. “I do choose,” Jesus
tells the leper. But the choice to heal the leper must be set beside the
deepest, most profound choice that Jesus ever makes. It is his choice to go to
the cross. Jesus chooses not to wave
a magic wand and make all the troubles and problems disappear. Rather, he
chooses to enter into deep solidarity with human suffering. “This is where you
will find me,” says Jesus. Jesus, too, knows the power of that little word If. In the garden of anguish he prays, “If
you will, Father, take this cup from me.” The power comes when we allow God to
take us into the divine hands, mold us and shape us. “Into your hands, Father,
I commend my life.”
Could
it be that the deepest healing we can ever find is the one we stumble upon at
Jesus’ cross? When we come to God for this deepest healing, we can leave our
expectations outside the door. We can live in the immense power of that little
word if. “If you choose, Jesus, you
can make me whole. But I’ll leave it up to you how to do it. I trust you to
teach me the way of life you so powerfully embody. I want to open myself to
God’s possibilities the way you do. I want to follow you, be your disciple.”
Can
you tell? Lent is coming!
Soon
we will take up the path with Jesus that leads to a cross and an open tomb.
God’s possibilities are so much more immense than anything we can ever imagine.
When it comes to healing, never think too small! Look for something more than a
quick cure. There is a power of life—God’s power—that is stronger than illness,
stronger than suffering, stronger than a cross. It can raise the dead to
life—this side of the grave or the other. This is the gift God waits to give.
Take what God offers now and trust it forever! In the name of
Jesus.
Pastor Ron Roschke
Grace Lutheran Church
Boulder, Colorado
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