Christchurch Parish News, October 2015
A short reflection on Mark 7.31-37
On their 1991 album, Achtung Baby, there is a lyric by U2 that goes: ‘They say a secret is something you tell one other person’. Is that so? How about you? Do you find secrets easy to keep when someone takes you into their confidence? Or do you find yourself bursting to tell the next person you meet, like a champagne cork ready to pop?
Perhaps it depends on what type of secret it is and how long you’ve got to keep it for. What if it’s good news? Say your friend has just found out her daughter’s pregnant after a very long and frustrating period of trying, but has sworn you to secrecy until the all clear’s given after 12 weeks. Do you come home and just carry on as normal? And if someone asks you why you’re looking so happy and has something happened, do you play it straight down the middle and not give any clue away? It’s hard, isn’t it? After all, there’s so much bad news in life, when something good happens, having to keep quiet about it, even if only for a short period, can be hard to do.
Imagine, too, that you had been faithfully praying for you friend’s daughter to fall pregnant and had accompanied your friend through all the ups and downs and crushing disappointments. The good news you’ve been told is then also answered prayer. Given that so often prayer isn’t answered in quite the way we expect, nor in the time frame we would like, that something so good has happened in answer to prayer makes it even more difficult to keep your lips sealed.
This is along the lines of the curious position some people find themselves after the events Mark relays in his account of the gospel, towards the end of chapter seven. Mark doesn’t say who exactly these people are, just that they bring a deaf man who had a speech impediment to Jesus in the hope that he would be healed. They beg him to lay his hand on him. And what follows is rather odd. Not that Jesus heals the man. By this stage of Mark’s gospel account, we expect Jesus to and so he does, immediately. It’s what happens after which is strange. Jesus orders the people (whether he’s addressing the people who brought the previously deaf man to him or whether it’s the crowd is not entirely clear) to tell no one. No ifs and buts. No one.
Even if the people who had brought the man Jesus proceeded to heal were just his neighbours or work colleagues, that would still have been a tall order. But if they were his buddies, imagine keeping something like that secret. That’s the last thing they would want to do. They would want to tell everyone what had happened. And that’s exactly what they did. ‘The more Jesus ordered them, the more zealously they proclaimed it’. And from their perspective, why not? Wouldn’t you? Unlike in the example, I just gave above, there’s no obvious good reason why they should keep quiet. Besides, it would have been pretty obvious to all and sundry once these people had returned home that their friend could now hear and was suddenly able to speak without difficulty.
Given all that, why did Jesus order them to tell no one? It’s actually not the only place in Mark’s account where Jesus tells people to keep quiet and not tell others what has happened or what they have seen. But at the same time, Jesus is doing the most amazing things. He’s healing the blind, the lame and the sick. He’s feeding 5000 here, 4000 there, (it would have been many more as women and children weren’t included in those tallies). It’s not exactly the behaviour of someone who wants to keep things under wraps.
Was it that he was using reverse psychology? You know the trick: whatever you do next, don’t think of pink elephants. Now close your eyes. OK? Chances are that you’ve got a bunch of pink elephants trundling around your mind’s eye. So by telling people not to tell anyone what had happened, maybe Jesus was actually trying to prompt them to do the exact opposite. Possibly…
An alternative explanation, put forward by the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, in his short book entitled Meeting God in Mark, goes something like this. Jesus’ primary focus was not healing people. Of course, he did heal people. As Williams puts it, he couldn’t help himself (even when he finds it difficult in his hometown, on account on the lack of belief he encounters there, and is unable to do any great deed of power, he’s nonetheless able to cure a few sick people when he lays his hands on them). His healing power flows out of him quite naturally. But he doesn’t want people getting all excited about these healings. It’s as if there’s a concern that if he becomes known primarily as a healer, then people won’t be able to come to understand who he truly is and what he has to do in order fulfil his mission.
This was especially true with the healing of a man who was deaf and had a speech impediment. When Mark writes, ‘immediately his ears were opened and his tongue was released’, he deliberately echoes some key verses from the prophet Isaiah which foretell of the healing that would come when God brought the Israelites out of exile in Babylon back to the promised land. It is an act of healing which embodies exactly the kind of thing that the Jews of the time would have hoped for if, as Jesus had been proclaiming, the Kingdom of God was at hand (and remember that Kingdom can also be translated as ‘Reign’ as in ‘the Reign of God’). The God of Israel was doing a new thing, and was at long last assuming his rightful place. If the Kingdom of God was at hand, it meant that God was King and those who thought themselves to be rulers and kings no longer wielded the ultimate power they thought they did.
That’s the key thing to understand. In the mind of most of Jesus’ hearers, including most likely those who had brought the deaf man to Jesus for healing, this new act of God’s reign, which Jesus had been proclaiming, would have involved the political overthrow of the occupying Roman forces and all those who were enjoying political privilege (and wealth) on the back of it. There had, after all, been many would-be messiahs over the previous three decades, who tried to lead a challenge to Rome’s might but who were brutally crushed, along with many of their followers, by the Roman army. But this is what they were looking forward to. This is what the messiah would do…
Jesus, however, understood his calling differently. If we jump ahead a chapter or so, we see this when he asks his disciples, ‘Who do you say that I am?’ Peter answers him, ‘You are the Messiah’. Again, for very much the same reason of wanting to avoid misunderstanding and misconception as to the nature of his task, Jesus instructs the disciples not to tell anyone about him. Then, immediately, he begins to teach them ‘that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again’. This is an entirely different understanding of what being the messiah, the anointed one of Israel, entails. Gone is the military leader who overthrows the forces of the occupying army. Instead, echoing a different theme that we also find in Isaiah, Jesus’ understanding is that the path he must follow is one quite contrary to everyone’s expectations, a way that first necessitates suffering and death.
Hence an act of healing, which echoes the verses from Isaiah that speak of the dramatic action of the God of Israel in bringing the Israelites back from Babylon to Jerusalem (Isaiah 35), could so easily send the crowd in the wrong direction. They’d all get really excited and expect another, equally dramatic intervention by God, be it political or military, which brings an end to the rule of foreign superpowers in their land (they’d had 500 years of this, remember – the Romans were only the most recent occupying power). But that way of violent uprising against the Romans was neither the way Jesus was advocating nor pursuing. The healings continued to happen, yes. It’s not as if Jesus was going to turn round to the deaf man’s friends and say, ‘Sorry, chaps. No can do. If I heal him, it might confuse you as to what I’m about and I’ve got to keep on message’. No, of course not. But the healings, whilst they inevitably caught people’s attention and got everyone very excited, were never intended to be the focus. They were just a natural consequence of the in-breaking of the kingdom of God in the person of Jesus. Rather, something much greater with cosmic ramifications was afoot whereby Jesus was about to deal with all that was opposed to God’s good intention for creation, defeating death in the process and thereby enabling the new creation to begin, of which Jesus, himself, in his resurrection was the first fruits. All of which is hard enough for us to get our heads around some 2000 years after the event, let alone for those who were there in the months beforehand.
So it raises some interesting questions for us. Especially when it comes to our praying for our friends and loved ones to be healed. It is right and proper that we do, and when we pray, we can close our eyes and imagine taking our sick friend to Jesus to lay his hands on them. Oftentimes the person is not immediately healed in ways we can discern. Sometimes not even after many years of devout prayers. But when he or she is healed, what is our reaction to be? Joy and delight, of course. That is only as it should be. And naturally we would want to tell all and sundry; given that Jesus is risen, there’s no press embargo to be observed on these matters! But when we do, I would suggest that we then take a step further and we allow such healings to lift our eyes up in praise and wonder as we marvel at the broader story of redemption and new creation, the story into which we have been invited by God the Father to enter and play our part. Jesus’ resurrection is the foretaste of the resurrection to come. Our friend’s healing is a foretaste of the healing of all creation that lies ahead. So when we tell others, we would do well to put things in this broader context, because it’s the one that ultimately matters and gives all our yearnings for healing more than a temporary, limited significance. For after all, our friend who has been healed will, like us, still nonetheless one day die. Likewise, living our lives aware of this majestic story which enfolds us will also give us comfort when our prayers for healing are not seemingly answered, for we know that in the end they will be in ways beyond our imagination. For, as the deaf man’s friends said, Jesus ‘has done everything well’.