Mark 1: 21-28

EPIPHANY V | FEBRUARY 04, 2024 | A Sermon based on Mark 1: 21-28 (RCL) | David Zeren |

As soon as they left the synagogue, they entered the house of Simon and Andrew, with James and John. Now Simon’s mother-in-law was in bed with a fever, and they told him about her at once. He came and took her by the hand and lifted her up. Then the fever left her, and she began to serve them.

That evening, at sundown, they brought to him all who were sick or possessed with demons. And the whole city was gathered around the door. And he cured many who were sick with various diseases and cast out many demons; and he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him. In the morning, while it was still very dark, he got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed. And Simon and his companions hunted for him. When they found him, they said to him, “Everyone is searching for you.” He answered, “Let us go on to the neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do.” And he went throughout Galilee, proclaiming the message in their synagogues and casting out demons.

Embracing the Other

Today’s text takes us into a Galilean village and into the surrounding countryside. We can almost imagine the settings as if someone were videotaping them for us. First, we leave the synagogue, probably in the morning and head for the home of Peter and Andrew. There’s more here than we imagine, but it has something to do with tensions and discomfort. And then as evening comes, when Jesus and his disciples are about to leave the house, people are flocking to him. The expectations are great, and the tension is extreme. He moves among them until morning and then heads for the neighboring towns to continue his ministry there.

What are these tensions? For thousands of years, humans have struggled to explain the reason for illness, both mental and physical. Societies define what it means to be normal, acceptable, free. When people don’t fit the definitions, they are branded as outsiders, abnormal, problematic. In Jesus’ world, if your illness, whether mental or physical, was disruptive, you were expected to live outside the community in colonies. Leper colonies have existed in parts of the world until our own time, but distancing oneself from community was problematic. Using the spiritual language of that day, the seriously ill were condemned to isolation from the community. They were to live apart from God and his people. They were to live among the crazy people and the diseased, all those who no longer belonged to God, but to Satan, the devil, the prince of darkness, the one who sustained them in their madness.

A new book has just come out with that very title: Madness, written by Antonia Hylton. It’s a riveting story about an insane asylum in Maryland with the underlying racist judgement that these inmates were required to do hard manual labor because they were Black. However, in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, a suburb of Milwaukee, where I live, there was also in the late 1800s an asylum where thousands of residents had to perform hard physical labor. This was expected, not because they were Black, but because it was a common therapeutic theory of the time—that authorities should isolate problem people from the community and that hard labor would probably invigorate and refocus them. This was at least the theory of Dr. Fisk Holbrook Day in 1876.

Jesus seems to have had another theory. He mingled a lot among crowds of people, often in marginal, isolated spots to which they had been relegated. They were together as the sick the lame, the blind, the mentally ill, but they were isolated from the community. The term “despised and rejected” which biblical literature has applied to the Messiah was the terminology that belonged to the very people that Jesus had come to embrace. The religious laws forbade that people who were unclean should interact with those who had been elevated to a higher plane.  The outcasts knew their place. However, when Jesus came, he mingled. He touched. He embraced. He affirmed. He blessed. And with that virtue, healing often came—healing that restored them to their homes, the temple, the community.

It’s interesting to me that in our modern societies we have played with these concepts of acceptance and rejection, of good and evil, of angelic and demonic. When I was a child, our local Lutheran congregation collected newspapers and magazines in a parish garage and on Saturday rolled them out so they could be sold to a florist for the purpose of wrapping plants for buyers. My friends and I invaded the parish garage when no one was around and found comic books that we could read until we’d satiated ourselves with stories of good and evil. It’s still fascinating to me that the superheroes in such comics always had a counterpart from the kingdom of darkness. Superman had Lex Luther (funny to us in the Lutheran parish garage), Batman had the Joker, Captain America had Red Skull and Spider Man had Norman Osborn. You can google 50 of these rivalries in comic literature to prove that at the very heart of our modern Western tradition, we have always known about this tension between good and evil. However, we also enjoyed the ways in which the superhero attacked the power of evil, tricking him and destroying him.

Jesus’ approach with those who represented evil in the form of illness was not to destroy them or isolate them, but to walk among and embrace them, so much so that the religious authorities were shocked and offended by his empathy. It’s interesting to use that word because practitioners of neuroscience which have come to believe that evil is not real, prefer instead to speak of degrees of empathy. A killer who walks among students at a school and shoots one after another may not be evil but may have zero degree of empathy for other human beings.

Quite apart from what theories we embrace or the terminology we use to explain the theories, we have come a long way from the days when we assumed that a red-suited character with a pitchfork was preventing our love for our fellow man. Even if we have come to spiritualize the power that turns us away from one another in anger or disgust, I think it’s legitimate to recognize    that power as real. St. Paul’s wonderful insight is real to us: “The good that I would, I don’t do, and the evil that I don’t want to do, I do. How wretched that makes me feel.” (Rom. 17:25)                  We can argue about the nature of the “evil” that seeks to suppress us or turn us against those whom we love. But the remarkable thing we see in our text and in our lives is that Jesus does not reject those who are distraught or physically or mentally deranged. He walks among them, talks with them, comforts them and embraces them. Some of them are healed physically, some mentally, and some spiritually.

I ask myself what this means to me personally. I am one who is troubled by people who are severely crippled or mentally deranged. I tend to want to move out of their sphere of influence. Some years ago, a friend drove into a parking-lot in Addis Ababa and as soon as we left the car desperate people who had been afflicted by polio, crawled across the gravel to beg from us. In my home congregation there is a mentally challenged man who sits with his mother and makes troublesome noises as his version of participation in the liturgy. I wonder what Jesus would do in these situations. I struggle to understand how I might become more like him, more committed to believing that healing of all kinds begins with assuring that everyone belongs in community.

Jesus’ call to us in these two passages about healing. We read about Peter’s mother-in-law and some who were permitted to come out only at night. It is not just a story about individual healings or about how Jesus singled out some and not others. It is a larger call to rethink how we practice healing in communities, how we can learn to accept fellow humans rather than reject them.  It is a call to learn how we ourselves are healed when we restore others to the fellowship of loving people. It is a call to embrace the other.

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David Zersen, D.Min, Ed.D., FRHistS                                                                                              President Emeritus, Concordia University Texas                                                                                zersendj@gmail.com                                                                                                                              414 727 3890