6 Pentecost cycle b proper 8 July 1, 2018
Wisdom of Solomon 1:13-15; 2:23-24 Psalm 30
2 Corinthians 8:7-15 Mark 5:21-43
I've just come from the burial of my youngest brother and
just a couple years ago, we buried another younger sister, proving that order
of leaving this world does not follow the order of entering this world.
And it is hard to understand purpose and meaning in the timing of how and when
people leave this world. But it is experienced by us as great loss and
even more impactful, if a person doesn't seem to reach the average death
age. When one does not reach one's probable age of death, we cannot help
but think that it is probably unfair. We struggle with death because we
cherish our lives and the lives of other. It has always been so even to
point of declaring that death cannot be God's will. We've read the
startling words from the Book of the Wisdom of Solomon: God did not make death,
and he does not delight in the death of the living. For he created all
things so that they might exist;
Forever it seems as though death is so wrong, but it has
become so common that in our lives we have had to learn to adjust to the fact
that death happens to all, it happens to friends, foes, family and it will
happen to us. If God did not make death, how did it become so normal to
human experience?
In the story of the Garden of Eden, there existed a Tree of
Life in the middle of the garden, meaning that God wanted to eventually train
Adam and Eve to be able to eat of the tree of life and live forever, but
instead, they ate of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil
and we are told that sin, sickness, disharmony and death entered the world.
Obviously, this living forever is rather fantastical since if everyone lived for ever on this earth, there would be a greater population problem. When the biblical texts were being generated people were not concerned about over population; just survival for as many people as long as they could.
The Bible is a book about healing sin, healing sickness and
healing death. It is about salvation from sin, sickness and death.
What does the Hebrew Scripture portion of the biblical tradition provide us for
salvation from sin? We are given the law to correct and learn right
behaviors for living. If we have learned how to sin, we can repent, we
can change our future behaviors and learn how to do right things. We can
correct human behaviors. This is how we realize salvation in our
lives. The Law is given to us to show us right behaviors and to teach us
a disciplined way of living.
What does the biblical tradition provide for in terms of salvation from
sickness? We know every sickness does not end up cured. We know
that the very aging process of life presents us with seeming states of sickness
when compared with earlier states of more youthful health. I do not think
the Bible gives any final answers as so why some people get sick and others do
not. The Bible is full of discussion about people who have to deal with
sickness, just as we have to deal with sickness and aging in our own lives.
The Bible is a book about healing death. How is death healed in the Bible?
In much of the Hebrew Scripture portion of the Bible, it appears death is not
seen as being healed. Death is seen as healing of the aging process by
ending it. Death is seen as healed by what each person leaves as their
legacy within the world. Your death is healed by the seeds of the fruit
of your life which contribute to the future good of the world in your children
and in the legacy of your mentoring influential deeds given to other people.
And now I would like to turn to Jesus and sin, sickness and death. What
did Jesus add to this world regarding sin, sickness and death?
Consider the social context of sin, sickness and death in the time of Jesus. The practitioners of the Religious law had become practiced in a purity code based upon the abhorrence of sin, sickness and death.
In the time of Jesus, a sinner was one who did not observe the laws as overseen
by the religious leaders of the community. So Jesus found that there were
more sinners than religiously observant people. Jesus hung out with
sinners. According to religious leaders, He was not supposed to.
Throngs of people followed him and most of them had the designation of being
"unclean" sinners and you were supposed to shun such sinners.
Sinners were supposed to be quarantined from those who kept the precepts of the
law. Jesus welcomed, ate with, drank with, interacted with the designated
sinners of his time. Their lives were sick, and he was a physician of
souls who showed how they could be healed. But they were first healed
because they were welcomed by Jesus. Jesus declared to them: Your sins
are forgiven; therefore, you are made clean and acceptable by God. God
loves you. You can be better, relative only to yourself, not according to
what the official religious people tell you. My being better today than
yesterday is different from what being better today than yesterday means for
you. Jesus fully accepted this individual approach to repentance and
holiness and he said, "I do not condemn, I forgive, now follow me."
How did Jesus regard sickness in his time? In the time of Jesus, sickness marked a person's life and made a person dangerous to the community. Sickness had to be classified and when a person was classified as sick, he or she was shunned or quarantined from the community. What did Jesus do? He violated the quarantine rules regarding the sick. He went to the sick and the sick came to him. He interacted, he touched, and he brought the people into the community. He taught his disciples to be those who did not shun the sick but bring them into the community. The woman with the "issue" or hemorrhaging of blood would have been a shunned woman. She knew it but she had the faith to believe that her pre-existing condition should not hinder an encounter with Jesus the Physician who was a walking clinician. Jesus of Nazareth told the people of his time that sickness was not a punishment of God and it should not be punished by the practice of quarantine with no access to caring people. We should not allow ourselves to victimize people who have the tragedy of illness. The church is called to be a community of prayer and care for those who experience the kinds of maladies that can come to any of us at any time.
Finally, what about death and Jesus? Death in the
time of Jesus was also a profoundly shunned state of being? What do I
mean? A corpse or a carcass was considered to be so "ritually
impure" that one had to avoid contact with a dead body. Yes, people
did have to have obligatory contact with the dead; but then they had to undergo
ritual purification to re-enter the community after their defilement in their
contact with the dead. The shunning of the dead meant that death had
great power over all who lived.
What did Jesus do? He ran to the dead. He
called death a mere sleep. He touched the dead. He raised the
dead. The significance of Jesus for death, is that he cured death.
He made it acceptable as an event in one's life in God's plan for one's
life. Jesus made death but a gateway to the assurance of a future
personal continuity beyond a lifeless body.
The Gospel writers gave us the witness of Jesus as
healing our sin and making us into those who are getting healthy. They
gave us the witness of Jesus overcoming the quarantine of the sick and
establishing his followers as those who would not shun the sick, rather they
would pray for the sick and care for them. They would touch the
sick. Why? When we are sick, we do not want to be shunned for our
unchosen condition.
Finally, Jesus healed death by relativizing it. He
limited it to a single event in the string of one's life. He declared
that death is not the end of one's life. It is a gateway to a different
life. He exemplified the resurrection life by reappearing and in so doing
he showed this world that death is and will be healed. He gave us the
life of the Holy Spirit as a foretaste of the meaning of eternal life.
Even as we mourn the profound loss of concurrent accessibility to the life of
our loved ones; we can have a profound hope in the personal continuity of our
loved ones and of our own eventual personal continuity.
And so about sin, sickness and death, please confess with me, "Jesus is my salvation." Amen
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