Mark 1:29-39
February 5, 2012
It
was one of those yell at the radio moments.
It was a few years ago, and I was listening to NPR – a station that
should have known better, if you ask me – and they were reporting on Miley Cyrus,
also known as Hannah Montana, also known as a hero of teenage girls at that
time. Of course, she was just the next
in an unending stream. The pattern is so
predictable: a child actor or singer blasts
onto the scene, they seem to have it all together – they aren’t affected by all
the stardom, they’re “down to earth,” and children and parents alike are so
excited because here’s a wholesome figure that kids can look up to.
And
Miley fit the bill perfectly. She was
wildly popular as both an actress and singer.
And she said all the right things to the kids. She happily proclaimed herself as a Southern
Baptist Christian. And the fantasy was
that because kids were so in awe of her, what she said held sway. And because she was one of the good ones,
this would have a positive effect on the kids.
When she says she doesn’t drink, then kids might think it’s cool to not
drink. When she says she doesn’t have
sex, maybe the teenage kids who idolize her won’t have sex. And so forth.
But
time and time again, these people disappoint everyone. NPR reported that Cyrus posed for some
photographs that many thought inappropriate for her age – and I suspect they
were. But here’s the piece that made me
so angry: parents, TV producers, kids, and the media got mad at the fallen
hero! Cyrus should have known better,
they said. She was a role model and so
she had a responsibility. She let the
public down. She let the kids down. People got mad at Miley Cyrus, instead of
questioning the whole hero worshiping enterprise itself. What in the world did they expect?
We
love to worship heroes. People all over
the United States will sit in front of the TV tonight rooting for their
heroes. We become so invested in
them. And of course they disappoint us.
They disappoint us. Hero worship
is not an effective strategy for building character in kids or in adults. But, it seems to be a fairly universal, human
instinct. Hero worship was certainly
alive and well in Jesus’ day – and we get a taste of it here.
Just
to set the scene for our passage: Jesus
is having an extraordinary day: It
started out in the morning with him teaching in the synagogue – wowing people
with his “new authority,” as they called it.
In the middle of his teaching, he was interrupted by a very disturbed
man, and Jesus stopped to cast out a legion of demons from him, and in the
process not only impressed the congregation, but the demons themselves.
He
and the disciples left the synagogue and went straight to Simon and Andrew’s
house where he healed Simon’s mother-in-law of a crippling fever. By evening, people were flocking to Jesus to
such a degree that the author of the gospel felt it necessary to use hyperbole: At sundown on that busy day, the author tells
us, the town brought all who were
sick or possessed with demons to Jesus; every single one. But that’s not where it ended. Finally, before bedtime, we hear that the whole city was gathered around the
door.
The
whole city! That must have been a pretty
heady moment for Jesus. This was the
most impressive church start-up ever.
It’s every pastor’s dream. First,
to have the power to really help people, and second to draw in a whole city in
just one day! No one would ever walk
away from that. But Jesus did. He walked away – literally.
Here
he was: helping people, affecting
people, drawing people in. Surely, we
tell ourselves, that’s what Jesus was about.
That’s why we think he was so special…why it is we worship and adore him. He was the only son of God – the one capable
of healing our every woe. We need Jesus,
we say all the time, to be well…to be whole…to be saved. In fact, throughout history much of Christianity
has been hoards of people metaphorically flocking to Jesus’ door because of
what he could do for us.
But
in this story Jesus leaves. Walks
away…from the people, from the healing, and for a moment from the
disciples. And it was upsetting to folks. I love verse 36. Jesus snuck out of the house in the wee hours
of the morning to go off by himself to pray.
The disciples, the text says, “hunted” for him. This word, hunted, appears only once in our
bible. Some versions of the bible
mistakenly and misleadingly translate this word as “followed”. They say that the disciples followed Jesus –
as if they were following him as disciples.
They weren’t. There’s another
greek word for “follow” – the word Jesus uses when he says, “follow me.” There was nothing disciple-ish about this. They were hunting him down.
Jesus
had become a local hero…almost instantly, according to the gospel of Mark. But Jesus, it seems, was not comfortable with
hero worship. In fact, I think it
frustrated him – maybe at times angered him.
Notice he didn’t just walk away from the hoards of people for a moment
to collect himself and rejuvenate, and go back and continue his star-studded
ministry. Even after the disciples found
him, and informed him that everyone was looking for him – hunting for him –
Jesus says, “we’re outta here.” We have
other places to go, other people to see.
The
problem was, the message was getting lost, because all people focused on was
the person…Jesus. Hero worship has all
sorts of problems. In this case, seeing
Jesus as the hero was allowing people to believe that he alone was capable of
addressing the needs of the most vulnerable people in society. Instead of Jesus coming to proclaim the
kingdom of God at hand, they had decided he
was the king of their current kingdom, and it was him alone who could make
lives better.
To
be clear, I don’t think that Jesus was frustrated with those who needed
healing. I really believe this. Notice, in all the gospels including this
one, Jesus did heal people when they came to him. It’s true he left the mob scene – including many
who needed healing – and he wouldn’t ever be able to cure every sick person in
the known world during his lifetime, but he was time and time again moved with
compassion for those who were hurting.
Instead, I think he was frustrated with the fact that there were so many
who needed healing…that it was a world with so much brokenness, pain,
oppression, poverty, and callousness. And
he was frustrated that the religious people, who should have known better,
weren’t responding in the obvious compassionate way: reaching out to those who
were hurting and doing what they could to help.
The
gospel of Mark tells us that Jesus came proclaiming that the kingdom of God was
had hand and that people should repent and believe the good news. He was pointing people to a possibility – a
new reality, an alternative world where those who were hurting are met by the
community with compassion and healing.
He was inviting people to turn from the old kingdom and be a part of
this new one…participate in this new one.
“It’s not about me,” he said, “it’s about the realm of God in our
midst. Let’s make it happen!”
Recently
a you tube video about Jesus and religion went viral. I must have seen it posted on facebook 20 times.
It was a video of a man named Jefferson Bethke
doing a rap about how Jesus is better than religion. Now, I should begin by saying I have
sympathies with this video, and it clearly spoke to many, many people. This is because
there are many times the institution obscures the message of Jesus. There are many instances when religion is a barrier to God’s work, rather than a
purveyor of it. But, when you listen to his
words, he turns everything around to make Jesus the hero and religion and church
the villain.
“Jesus
came to abolish religion,” Bethke says. “Religion
is the infection, Jesus is the cure.”
To
be fair to Bethke, when he said “religion,” he had a particular vision of what religion
is – and it is the worst of what religion is. He was criticizing religion for not being the manifestation
of the Realm of God, which I think we would all agree is many times the case. But he seems to argue that the answer is to get
rid of religion and send everyone to Jesus alone. And this is appealing to a lot of people. This makes it about you and your personal relationship
to Jesus – your salvation, your cure. It
makes Jesus a hero – and we love heroes.
But
the danger is that without religion, when Jesus alone is the point of Christianity,
we might forget that we are healed for a purpose. Like Simon’s mother-in-law, who after Jesus healed
her gets up to minister to others, we are healed to continue Jesus’ ministry. We are cured to become the church that manifests
God’s realm so that others might be healed.
It
wasn’t that Jesus thought people shouldn’t be healed. It was that he thought he shouldn’t be the
only one doing it! He was going far and
wide to spread the word that the kingdom of God was at hand, and people had to
decide whether to jump in and join in the ministry of God, or sit back and see what
Jesus could do for them. Jesus wasn’t a
gate keeper. You didn’t have to worship him
in order to “get it.” He wasn’t a hero –
at least not in the gospel of Mark. He was
the sign post pointing the way.
When
it became too much about him; when people missed the point and worshipped him –
making him special – Jesus moved on. It’s
not about me…it’s about making God’s realm real by healing the broken, extending
compassion, ministering to others…in short, being the church God created us to be.
Amen.
