Jesus the Healer

A sermon delivered in Christ Chapel September 11, 2003, by the Rev. Dr. Michael Floyd, Professor of Old Testament

Mark 7:31-37; Isa 35 4:10; Ps 146:4-9

Jesus put his fingers into the man's ears, and he spat and touched his tongue. Then looking up to heaven, he sighed and said to him "Ephatha," that is, "Be opened." And immediately his ears were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly.

This is Jesus the healer at his crudest -- spit and spells. Popular religiosity revels in such vulgar stories, while sophisticated folk find them pretty embarrassing. Interestingly, this same split was also characteristic of ancient society. In the Greco-Roman world folk healers with their spit and spells, not to mention their amulets and rattles, were highly admired by the masses but disparaged as quacks and frauds by the more educated. As the Christian movement grew to include more members from the upper and privileged classes, there was a tendency to put a more respectable spin on Jesus' reputation as a folk healer, but there was no way to efface such a prominent part of the traditions about him. Even the highest christologies of the New Testament had to reckon with the fact that the Son of God was also a peasant medicine man-spit, spells, and all.

Oddly enough, the most skeptical quests for the historical Jesus have also had to reckon with the same fact. Even from a purely secular historical perspective, precisely because the healing stories were so embarrassing, they have a credible claim to historicity. It is assumed that the gospel writers would have gotten rid of them if they could. The fact that the healing stories couldn't be left out testifies to their genuineness as early traditions regarding Jesus. Other accounts of signs and wonders can perhaps be explained as mythologizing, but the healing stories authentically reflect a real social role that Jesus undoubtedly played. So whether we're fundamentalists or members of the Jesus Seminar, or in some altogether different camp, we're all confronted with the realization that these stories contain some of the best information about Jesus that we have. In both ancient and modern times, sick people have been cared for and sometimes cured by folk healers. And Jesus was one, by all accounts a very good one. The question, of course, is how to interpret this information. What does it mean?

In modern times, we have employed the category of 'miracle' to make sense of such stories. On this approach, each healing is supposedly a unique supernatural event. It all boils down to whether you think such events are possible. If unique supernatural events are possible, each healing story should be taken as a factual account of something that actually happened. If unique supernatural events are not possible, each story should be taken as an incident of superstitious misunderstanding. Even if the sick person did recover, the witnesses were mistaken in attributing it to the healer's spit and spells, because in reality the recovery can be explained in purely natural terms. Surely, as children of the modern world, we're familiar with these kinds of arguments. But I don't want to critique the philosophical presuppositions on which they rest -- as I'm sure you'll be relieved to know. Nor do I want to explore the fact that the category of 'miracle' is foreign to the Bible itself. But I would like to raise your suspicions about the adequacy of this category for understanding the kind of healing story that we have heard here today.

When we approach such accounts as 'miracle stories,' note what kinds of issues get raised and what kinds of issues do not get raised. When we modern readers respond to the healing stories as miracles, we tend to focus on the question of whether faith can give desperately sick people any hope of a spontaneous cure. We tend not to ask, for example, what the implications are for our health care system. The New Testament scholar Hector Avalos has argued that the impact of Jesus and the early Christian movement on the Greco-Roman world was largely due to the innovations that they sparked in that society's health care practices. But modern readers of the New Testament's healing stories, infatuated with miracles, seem to miss that point entirely. We worship Christ who died as a healer, who rose as a healer, who will come again as a healer. And yet our churches have no coherent position on the health care crisis that currently confronts our society and our world. What's wrong with this picture?
As modern readers of the healing stories, we can hardly eradicate our peculiarly modern infatuation with the miraculous, but we can at least suspect that there might be something more to these stories. With that possibility in mind, let's revisit the account in today's gospel. This time approach it by trying to imagine the scene, and by trying to imagine how you might fit within the scene:

I don't know whether or not my response is typical, but since I'm the preacher it's the response you're gonna get. When I try to imagine this incident, I don't find it difficult to picture what's going on in the foreground. There's a crowd, from which the disciples bring forward a man who is deaf and has a speech impediment. Jesus then takes him aside, and with his spit and spells he enables the man to hear again, and to speak clearly. Despite Jesus' attempts to keep this a relatively private matter, the crowd gets word of it and breaks out in expressions of awe and admiration. I can readily imagine myself as one of the crowd, at first curious and then filled with wonder; or as one of the disciples, motivated by compassion for the handicapped man; or even as the deaf mute himself, skeptical about whether this healer is going to be any more effective than all the others, yet still hopeful that he just might be. (I haven't yet reached the point of being able to imagine myself as Jesus, but we won't go into that here without my therapist.) In my imagination I can fill in the foreground in various ways, but I'm at a loss when it comes to the background. If the tableau in my mind's eye were a painting, the scene front and center would be colorful and detailed, but in the background the canvas would just be blank. To complete the scene, I would have to become a bit more creative.

For those of you who share my myopia, there are two resources that can help us fill in the missing background: the larger context in Mark's narrative, and the Old Testament reading. To a remarkable extent, both agree in their portrayal of the background against which divine healing takes place. In both texts, it happens "on the way," along a road. In Mark, Jesus and his disciples are returning from Phoenecia back to Galilee. In Isaiah, the exiles are returning from Babylon back to Zion. In both texts, the road runs through gentile territory. In Mark, the question of the relationship between Jews and gentiles has just been raised in Jesus' encounter with the Syro-Phoenecian woman. In Isaiah, the same question is raised in the description of who all may travel the road to restoration. In both texts, the landscape is being transformed by the creator of heaven and earth, from wilderness to paradise. In Mark, Jesus has come from an impressive demonstration of his power over the waters, as he scares the hell out of the disciples by walking toward them over the sea. And Jesus is headed toward the feeding of the four thousand, where he restores the earth's capacity to provide food for all. In Isaiah, the creator's power over the waters is similarly demonstrated, as springs break forth in the wilderness, and the earth's restored capacity to feed all is similarly demonstrated by the blossoming desert.

When we look at the big picture, we can see that divine healing takes place in a particular context. The healing of the deaf mute in today's gospel is part of a larger process, in which God is restoring the infinite goodness with which the earth was originally blessed. It's not really a supernatural event, but a sign that God is remaking nature and redefining what's natural. It happens to the people of God at a particular juncture in their journey, the juncture at which their destiny, the destiny of the nations, and the destiny of all creation cross paths. It confronts us with the question of whether we realize that our own healing and salvation are inextricably bound up with the healing and salvation of every other person and every other creature. We are either part of the healing and salvation that God intends for all, or we are without any healing and salvation at all, because there is no other kind. Or to put it another way, our healing and salvation depend upon our recognizing and embracing the cosmic fact that the common good is the most real thing in God's whole world.

Does trying to grasp this big picture give you a headache, too? It can boggle the imagination. And yet it's important that we try, because we all have a big picture somewhere in the back of our minds, and it informs the way we live our lives. It forms the backdrop that gives meaning to all that we think and do in the foreground. It is important that we ask ourselves whether our big picture is like the one that lies behind the healing of the deaf mute, because our culture provides us with other big pictures, big pictures that in effect deny the cosmic reality of the common good. According to one very popular version, which pretends to be biblical, some are saved and others are "left behind." This is the false myth that glorifies the geometrically increasing gap between the few obscenely rich and the many obscenely poor. According to another popular version, which makes no pretense of being biblical, the universe is one big market, and the only claim we have on one another is what you can pay me for. This is the false myth that justifies the kind of decision recently made by the people of Alabama not to increase their ridiculously low taxes. This decision will -- among other things -- close all mental health centers for people who can't pay. It's easy for an idolatrous image to take over the back of our minds, if we don't intentionally imagine an alternative big picture. And there's a lot a stake -- nothing less than the health and salvation of us all.

Today's gospel challenges us to consider whether the big picture that informs our lives is real or idolatrous. But what about the people in the foreground of the story, especially the deaf mute himself? Hasn't his very real personal problem gotten lost in all these flights of imagination? Isn't this healing story also about him, as well as whatever larger questions he may represent? Doesn't this story also hold out hope to those who are disabled, that they might be freed from their disability? It would be nice if we could ask the man himself, which of course isn't possible, but I once had a blind person answer me a similar question.

In the years since I have been here at the Seminary, we have had blind students from time to time. In light of this experience, Bill Adams preached a sermon here about Jesus' healing of a blind man, and he wondered out loud how this story would sound to the folks over at the state school for the blind. He observed that we shouldn't make glib comments about this story here, that wouldn't also meet the test of being appropriate over there. Ever since he preached that sermon, I wondered how such stories sound to someone who is blind. I especially wondered whether hearing these stories over and over would create for a blind audience a cycle of raised and then dashed hopes. I finally got to know a blind student well enough to ask her about this, and she told me something that I won't easily forget. She said that of course most blind people are continuously aware of their disability, and would like for their sight to be restored if possible. But when they hear the gospel stories of Jesus healing the blind, this isn't necessarily the first thing they focus on. These stories also raise for blind people the same kinds of larger issues that they raise for everybody else. As she put it, "Perhaps I might like to see again some day, but I would rather for the world to be well." She didn't forget her own needs, not for one minute, but she saw them in relation to the big picture.

This is only one person's perspective, and other disabled persons might feel differently. But in any case, it shows it shows the intimate connection between what's going on in the foreground of today's gospel, and what's going on in the background. Our hope for health and salvation is empty without a passionate commitment to the common good. And we will grow in this commitment if we only let the spit and spells of Jesus the healer haunt and challenge our imagination.

Jesus put his fingers into the man's ears, and he spat and touched his tongue. Then looking up to heaven, he sighed and said to him "Ephatha," that is, "Be opened." And immediately his ears were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly.