6th Sunday in Ordinary Time - Cycle B 20-21

Leviticus 13:1-2, 44-46 | 1 Corinthians 10:31—11:1 | Mark 1:40-45

Oh God, who teach us that you abide in hearts that are just and true, grant that we may be so fashioned by your grace as to become a dwelling pleasing to you.  Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen. 

One of the big themes in Mark’s gospel is Jesus as the healer.  He can heal our diseases, can heal us from the power of demons, and what’s interesting about that notion of these two elements that Jesus came to free us from, there’s something about them that we need to understand.  They both have a very powerful impact on the human spirit, and that’s simply this: that there can be a feeling inside of us that something is working against us, some power that’s evil, something that’s causing us to be sick and not being able to function as we should.  And there are voices in our head that keep giving us all this misinformation that either we’re no good or that life is unfair or that somehow we’re going to be destroyed.  So I want you to help me enter into this experience of what it is to live in the life as God has called us to live with two forces that are working on us, one evil and one powerfully good, and let’s look at their motives, what they want.

The whole tradition of evil comes from an image of those who oppose the plan of God where he would become intimately engaged in the life of human beings.  They felt it was beneath God that he would enter into them, dwell with them, empower them, and so they decided that they would reject his plan and work against it.  And so if you understand the role of evil in the world, and it is a power in the world, you have to understand what it’s trying to do.  And what it wants to do more than anything else is summed up by one word: separation.  Evil wants to separate you from your authentic self, separate you from God, and separate you from your neighbor, your brothers and sisters.  When you look at the impact of evil and what it does, particularly the evil that is engaged in, let’s say, the demon’s voice — I don't know if you have the sense that I do, but at times you can feel that there’s a voice in your head that’s just saying things to you that are destructive to your unity with yourself and others.  It’ll tell you you’re no good.  It’ll tell you you’re better than everybody else.  It’ll tell you that your disease is going to kill you; it’s going to destroy you.  There’s this voice that is absolutely not us, and I think it’s so important to believe that.  There’s a voice out there that is determined to separate us from the love of God and the presence — the power of the presence of God in our life. 

Then you look at what is goodness.  What is God looking for, for us?  What is his intention?  Well, if evil is for separation, then we can easily see that God’s gift of grace and his presence in our life, what he wants us to enter into fully is a life of union, communion, first with him.  Notice the opening prayer that said, “Please make us a worthy dwelling for you, God.”  God dwelling in us is so essential.  We have him inside of us, just as Jesus did but not in exactly the same way.  Jesus was God, and he could use the power of God in any way he wanted, but he didn’t use it other than he was so drawn to healing people and forgiving them of their sin and wanting them to be whole that he found himself doing more and more for people, almost to the detriment — well, not almost, but to the detriment of his ministry.    To heal the leper in the gospel today was to put him in a position of being the wonder worker, and he didn’t want people to look to him to be the one who took away all their diseases and silenced all their demon voices.  He can do that.  He has power over that, but that isn’t the plan.  The plan of God is not that you and I live without that demon voice and without the struggle in life to live and to have that which works against it, mostly disease.  When you look at the nature of the healing power of God manifest in Jesus, what is it that he did most especially?  He would drive out demons, silence that voice inside of them, or at least free them from following the advice of that voice, and also, most of his healings were about physical ability to be who you’re called to be.  He would fix your eyes if they were blind, open your ears if they were deaf, let your legs work if they couldn’t get you to where you needed to be.  Your hands that were withered would be strong, and you could do your work.  It wasn’t a long list of diseases, though he did heal diseases like leprosy.  But the real healing — you could always see the intention in his healing is to make us whole, to make us capable of being the people we need to be in this world, and that is people who serve one another who are connected to one another, who feel responsible to one another, who have compassion and empathy.  That’s the work of divinity inside of you, and it’s interesting.  When you watch Jesus in this tension between using divinity to fix everything around him so that there was no pain versus what he really was trying to do is something different than that.  He didn’t want to become just the miracle worker, because he obviously said, “I’m not here just to do that.  What I’m really here to do is to preach, to teach.”  And what does he want to preach and teach?  That you and I are called into this life with two forces working with us, one divinity, one demons, and he’s not saying, “If you believe in me and if you allow me to dwell in you, you will absolutely have total power over this other power, and you will get rid of it.  You will get rid of all disease.  You’ll get rid of all negative thoughts.”  But that’s not the goal.  The goal is not to get rid of evil but to somehow learn that there’s a reason for it being here, and what that reason is, is essential to your being able to deal with it in a healthy way. 

So we don’t ask God to use the power of his presence in us to alleviate all the suffering that we ever encounter.  What’s the best way to describe that suffering?  Well, my sense is, if you’re listening too much to the voice of the demon and if you are responding to the human condition of disease, which is part of being a human, because sometimes disease is nothing other than human beings having to cope with the natural evolution of a human body where, toward the end of your life, like me in my 80s, it’s not a disease, but you find your body not being able to function as well as it did before.  Are we supposed to say, “Okay, God.  You’re living in me.  Fix me so that I feel like a 20 year old”?  That kind of resistance to reality is not what God intends us to use his power for but rather to do something else more mysterious: how to work with divinity and the weakness of human nature and the demon voice.  How do we work with those together?  It goes something like this: You have to believe that God has the power to stop something that would destroy you.  And so when you see Jesus working miracles, it means that God is working miracles for you, in a sense, by his presence inside of you so that anything that would happen to you that would overcome you, that would destroy you, that would you put you into a depression that was impossible to get out of, all those things, you have power over that.  He’s not going to let anything destroy you.  So if he allows evil, if he allows you to struggle, it has to be because there’s some value in that struggle. 

It’s so interesting that the way that Jesus ultimately saved the world.  Yes, he was a miracle worker, but he didn’t rely upon miracles to get him out of the place he was.  He learned that there was a reason for the suffering that he had to endure, and it was to teach us that, if we give in to the demon, to evil, meaning if we do not try to destroy it and don’t allow it to destroy our well-being and our peace, we have to integrate it somehow into a process where it’s there for us.  Could it be that disease is there for us?  Could it be that suffering is there for us?  Absolutely, otherwise it doesn’t make any sense.    God promises a kingdom where we’ll be filled with a kind of sense of self-worth and self-love, and we’ll be able to share that kind of presence of a whole human being with the people around us.  We’re here to serve one another, but the demon voice, if we give in to it, if we just take it as it shouldn’t be there, if we take it as not an exercise that helps us to develop the skill to overcome it, then we’ve missed out on the whole process.  The work of life here is not to be comfortable and to have everything the way we would like it to be.  No, it’s to learn how to evolve and develop, and you can’t develop without pain and suffering or struggling with the other voice.  You have to embrace that, suffer that, actually forgive God for it.

I thought about that once, and it just seemed so strange to me.  Can you forgive God for the way he created the world that he put us in?  But in a sense, people could be angry, saying, “All this pain and suffering, where are you, God?  You’ve given me all this.  It does nothing but destroy me,” when God is looking at us and saying, “No, no.  I’ve given you just the right amount right now in this moment, what you’re dealing with, so you can develop the skill that I want you to have, because I don’t want to be the God that comes into you and takes care of everything for you, and then you remain this sort of weak human being.”  No, he wants us to be strong, wise, powerful against this voice, not because God does it for us but because God empowers us to do it with him.  We’re doing it.  We have the capacity to stand up to these negative forces and laugh at them.  That drives them crazy.  So when you look at it, you can tell if you’re giving in to evil too much, because some of the ways in which it shows up, there’s kind of side effects to listening too much to the negative voice or reading all the suffering in the world as if it’s punishment from God.  You can see and feel in that sense that these — you have these feelings inside, and they’re excessive fear and excessive anger and excessive shame.  What is fear based in?  It’s that you really believe that there’s something out there that could happen that’s going to destroy you, and so you live in anxiety all the time.  And shame is that terrible way in which we constantly hear this voice that tells us we’re no good or that we’re the best and just throws us off and gives us this kind of, I don't know, inability to find the balance of who we really are.  Shame keeps us from accepting our humanity as a gift.  We look at it as some kind of broken mess that can’t be fixed, and anger is just that thing that says that nothing’s right.  “This is not the way it’s supposed to be.  I shouldn’t have to suffer.  I get angry.  I want somebody to pay for it.”  All those things, those are all signs that we’re getting into a disposition where the work that needs to be done is going to be given to us by God so that we start developing a skill to overcome those.  That’s what we’re here for. 

There’s so many paradoxes.  We’re here to enjoy and to embrace this world that God has given us.  We’re supposed to be filled with joy and some kind of inner peace, and we sometimes equate that with a life without suffering and without disease and without any voice trying to convince us we’re so much less than we really are.  But those voices stay there, because that’s exactly what we have to deal with in order to grow and to mature to become the compassionate servant people we are.  The most amazing thing about Jesus as a reflection of God, different than God the Father — notice that God the Father is God the Son, but God the Son came at a time when we could realize that this God of ours is not as distant as we thought, not as demanding as we thought, but he’s a partner that wants to develop us into whole, strong, loving human beings. 

And back to that image of separate, the image of being separated from your true self, then separated from each other, then separated from God, all of that is so clearly the way in which evil works, and if you can look at this first reading in the gospel, it’s all about leprosy.  The thing that’s so fascinating about that image, especially now today, lepers were quarantined.  They had to cry out, “Unclean.”  They had to wear masks.  We know what that feels like, to be isolated and separated. That’s the goal of evil.  Leprosy reveals the power of evil overpowering someone, and Jesus comes into that world of the leper and just said, “I can heal this.  I can take this away for you.”  And I love the question the leper poses to Jesus.  “Is this what you want?  Do you really want to free me from the effect of this disease?”  And Jesus said, “Yes, of course I do.”  The thing that’s in that image of leprosy is, when one is dealing with imperfection and brokenness, that they either are told they don’t belong or they feel they don’t belong, and they’re isolated and separated.  That’s evil at its best, and here’s Jesus saying, “Yes, I can take that away.  I can do that, but don’t tell everyone that I did this, because I just want you to not get in the way of my preaching.”  You think about it, and you say, “Well, Jesus, you took a chance.  Why did you heal them that way?”  Well, I love this idea that Jesus had to deal with his demon.  He had to deal with whether he was going to play God or be God all the time and not really present what he came to present.  He came to present a human being with all the weakness and frailty of a human being filled with divinity.  And if he turned out to be just the miracle worker, he would imply that’s who we’re supposed to be if we have God dwelling is us, and we’re not miracle workers in that sense.  The miracle work that we do is to overcome all the negative, destructive power of evil and to use it for our own goal of development and evolution of consciousness.  That drives evil crazy, because that’s why God allowed him to be here, her to be here, whatever.  It’s to make us whole. 

 Father, on the cross you manifested something that’s easily beyond our understanding when you gave into evil and didn’t try to destroy it but seemingly allowed it to destroy you. But it couldn’t destroy you, and when you dealt with that incredible disappointment of a ministry that ended too soon, when you gave into the plan of God, when you realized it was something that you had to do because that was what you were called to do, you did it. And then there was this explosion of your presence in the world. You became so powerful, so effective in what you were teaching, because you experienced it. So bless us with that experience that you had in giving into evil so we can understand it, so we can grow because of it. And we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.