Spitting Distance: healing in an imperfect world.
Isaiah 35.4-7a , James 2.1-17 , Mark 7.24-37 | The Reverend Canon Kathryn Percival Canon Chancellor and Vice Dean
About now, those who are not worshipping with us or glued to our livestream – please stay tuned – will be able to watch the spectacle of the Paralympics closing ceremony from Tokyo. I have respect for anyone who can play sport, especially at an elite level. But Paralympians in particular show an extraordinary level of mental and physical strength which leaves me full of admiration.
This particular coincidence of Paralympics and worship means that on the morning of this great celebration of the gifts of those who are physically disabled, we have in our readings the theme of healing, from that beautiful passage in Isaiah – ‘The eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped;…the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy’ - to Mark’s account of two healings of Jesus. First, there is the Gentile woman, desperate for her demon-possessed daughter to be made well. And then, there is the deaf-mute man.
Each of these accounts in Mark has huge resonance with our Old Testament passage. We are only given a few verses of chapter 35 of Isaiah, but this passage is not only about those who are in need of physical healing: it is about the liberation of the whole people of God, who will ‘return and come to Zion with singing; everlasting joy shall be on their heads.’ In the healing of the deaf-mute man, Mark uses a highly unusual word to describe the person’s speech – ‘mogilalos’. He is not dumb, but has a speech impediment. And this is the same word which is used in Isaiah to describe the ‘tongue of the speechless’. So here, Mark is explicitly linking his account to the prophecy and seeking to show that Jesus fulfils Isaiah’s foretelling of healing and freedom. And in recounting the healing of a gentile, and the dialogue which Jesus has with the girl’s mother, harsh words and all, Mark shows that salvation happens through the Jewish people, but is for all people. This is the pattern recognised by the woman herself, when she says that the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs, and it is her own seeing which unlocks Jesus’s response – ‘For saying that, you may go – the demon has left your daughter.’
So the big and beautiful picture which these readings give us is that we are all brought to salvation and wholeness through God in Christ.
But, on this Paralympic morning, it would be too easy to stick with the big picture, and to gloss over the fact that healing does not always happen. One of the most moving things about the Paralympics is that these are not, on the face of it, people who have been healed. They are battling against the odds, often in excruciating pain. I imagine all of us will have had the experience of praying for someone who has not got better. And Covid has magnified the situation, not only through the virus itself, but also with its knock-on effects. How many mothers of children with eating disorders or suffering from self-harm or suicidal thoughts have, through endless and helpless lockdowns, longed to hear the words, ‘the demon has left your daughter’.
This exorcism is decisive. The healing of the man is decisive. But life is not decisive. And so these are problematic readings.
Perhaps an important thing to notice when we’re thinking about this question is the complete lack of glibness in Jesus. With him, there is no quick fix, no cheap grace, no magic wand. In Mark’s gospel, he begins by being baptised and being immediately driven into the wilderness, before his ministry to others takes off in earnest. He withdraws from people in order to pray. He is rejected, and his power diminished, by his own home town. Even before he reaches betrayal and crucifixion, he is fully immersed in the mess of the world. And he is realistic about the fact that this mess is, for the time being, the state in which we find ourselves. Pay your taxes, he says; accept that the poor are always with you; prioritise doing good above practising rituals. Share your table with those you find unpalatable; don’t cast aspersions unless you’re blameless yourself. Above all, love painfully. If the world were perfect, love would be perfect, and everything would be easy. But the only way we can love painfully, as Jesus loves, with the nails digging in to us, is in the imperfect world in which we find ourselves. As Jesus puts his fingers into the ears of the man and spits and touches his tongue, he looks up to heaven and, as the original puts it, groans. He groans, not just at the condition of the man, but at the world’s anguish. It’s the same word – stenadzo – that Paul uses in Romans, when he talks about the whole of creation groaning in labour pains as it longs for redemption. That groan expresses the tension between the Kingdom which is yet to come - the salvation which awaits God’s people – and the now in which we live.
The Paralympics in many ways demonstrate to us exactly this truth: in and through the disability and pain of the athletes, something remarkable and wonderful happens. Not so much in the glory of the Games, but in everyday sweat and toil and faith. This too is no magic quick fix. In many ways, it is as secret as the healings we’ve just heard about. But into these lives, bidden or not, Christ whose body was broken for us is pouring his love. And it is through this love, the love which we are called to embody, that we will find glimpses of the Kingdom. Glimpses like the one you are given when you can suddenly hear and speak, or when the demon lives your daughter, or in myriad other situations of more everyday healing. These glimpses don’t mean that everything is fixed. What they do mean is that the world you have glimpsed is real – that the big, beautiful picture of salvation is there all the time. This is the power behind these decisive healings in a provisional world.
James, in his letter, admonishes his readers about their acts of favouritism, hinting that they hold a cosy attitude of deference to the rich, coupled with dismissiveness of the poor. And we, who are materially rich indeed in the world’s terms, need to be always mindful of this temptation. The horrors of the situation in Afghanistan, and the desperate need to help those who have fled, are just one example of the way in which we need to push ourselves beyond our own complacency, and expose our nerve endings to other ways of being, other lives.
But I wonder, too, whether in some parts of our society, this exhortation of James’s needs to be turned on its head. Sometimes, we fail to notice the needs of those who are not poor, or at least not materially poor - including those needs which are, quietly, right here. In this building, on these streets. And perhaps most dangerously of all, in our own hearts. I wonder if our needs, especially the ones we don’t speak about, make Jesus groan. We have all been labouring through these extraordinary times. Many of us will be experiencing physical pain. Others of us are wrestling with demons of addiction or depression or obsession; of self-doubt or God-doubt or despair. And there is a great tyranny in thinking that the person sitting next to you has it all sorted whereas you’re a mess – whilst in fact, the person sitting next to you is probably dealing with messes you don’t know about, and you probably seem to them to have it all sorted.
But the biggest tyranny of all comes from trying to pretend to God that you have it all sorted. One of the striking things about these healings in Mark is that they are pleaded for. Jesus who groans at the world’s pain longs to heal us. But in order for that to happen, we need to let him. He can’t come within spitting distance if we hold him at arm’s length.
As Paul says to the Corinthians, ‘Whenever I am weak, then I am strong’. This strength comes, not from ourselves, but from Christ. And it doesn’t take away pain, but it shows us how to be liberated in and through it. We see this in the runners with blades and the swimmers who surge, against all the odds, through the water. But we need also to see it in ourselves. Then, when we recognise our own weakness, we will hear the extraordinary word of Jesus to the deaf mute man: ‘Ephphatha’ – ‘be opened’ – be free, be loved, be yourself. And in that freedom, we will be liberated to love others – strong and fearless enough to sweat and toil for those glimpses of that everlasting joy to which we all return with singing.
Amen.