5 Epiphany B February 4, 2024
Isaiah 40:21-31 Psalm 147:1-12, 21c
1 Corinthians 9:16-23 Mark 1:29-39
Isaiah 40:21-31 Psalm 147:1-12, 21c
1 Corinthians 9:16-23 Mark 1:29-39
Salvation or holistic health might be seen as viewing health upon a continuum of what we can know about being healthy and the negligible factors, or unknown factors in being healthy. Probability number crunchers say today that 25 percent of longevity is determined by genetic factors. Other factors might be the risk of one's environments and lifestyles, as well as nurture and personal habits of health.
What did physicians in the time of Jesus know? Did they know about viruses, bacteria, and germs? About mental health, did they know about how early trauma could create dissociative disorders when a person can manifest a legion of personalities?
We might look with some skepticism on medical practices of the past, even as we might look with skepticism upon some medical practices of the present. Not everyone subscribes to the healing powers of crystals, except the one who confess that they have had positive results.
The notion of the healing reality of the placebo effect highlights the connection between the mind and the body. In medical anthropology, and historical medical anthropologies, we discover that specific practices of healing exist within the communities which promote and accept those practices. Medicine men, shamans, witch doctors, and others fall within the class of what might be called "folk medicine," and such practitioners of "folk medicine" might regard this designation to be the pejorative designation given by those of modern scientific medicine with a superiority complex. As our world has gotten smaller, we know that ancient medical practices of the East, such as acupuncture, have been brought within an expanding umbrella of what is regarded to be acceptable and valid medical practice.
And still we regard with duck sounds, those who we regard to be practicing medicine for profit and rely upon the ignorance of their client base. We refer to them as "quacks." But with the placebo effect, a patient might say, "I may have been treated by a quack, but it still made me better."
As we approach the "folk medical" practice of Jesus which is listed in the Gospel, we can find a variety of healing practices, and different modes of treatment. The "folk medicine" of Jesus indicates that the physical body was like a building which is inhabited. The living people within a building or a home, are those who maintain the outer structure which is always already dealing with the effects of age and time.
The Judaism of the time of Jesus included a system of public health, because health is social in how it is practiced within community. There was a diagnostic or classification system for optimal and negative states of being, as they related to a person within their community. There was a binary system of designation of things and states of being as clean or unclean, pure and impure. There were rules for how one could make the transition from being unclean and impure into an accepted state. There were recommended states of public quarantine or removal from community contact; there were public validation rites performed by the priests, with rites of ritual purification to allow a person re-entry into a community.
The Gospels narrates bodily conditions of people with physical ailments: blindness, fever, leprosy, lameness, deafness, muteness, and unknown conditions causing death. The Gospels also present people with what might be better called psychological and spiritual conditions, or people with the resulting behaviors due to childhood and life traumas. If we know of PTSD, dissociative disorders, and many other traumatic mental health disorders today which have their root in earlier traumas in the lives of people, we can be sure that people in the time of Jesus, as in all times, had their psychological and spiritual health problems.
As an external condition like the disease with visible skin phenomenon of leprosy was designated as being a state of uncleanness requiring segregation from "clean or healthy" society, so too persons with manifestations of chaotic internal and emotional disorders which left them with uncontrolled behaviors, such persons were said to have "unclean spirits." Having one's internal being declared as impure or unclean would be quite a severe diagnosis to have. People of every era have feared persons with mental health disorders. Their unpredictable behaviors create a public fear which governs the ways in which they have come to be treated. Our history includes the history of prison, asylums, and bedlams to quarantined those designated with "unclean spirits."
How might we attain some insights for ourselves in our reading of this Gospel healing story today?
First, we might regard it to be something like a psychiatric practice of the time of Jesus. The rabbinical literature indicates the practice of exorcism as the religious public health treatment of people who were so troubled by invisible causes, that it had the designation of being an "impure and unclean" state. In the history of health and illness, and even today, there is still a negative perception of persons with the seeming invisible effects of mental health disorders. The Gospels chronicles the negative designations for "sick" people, but also the personal and social treatment technique of Jesus. Rather than shunning contact with such people, he offered both personal and social acceptance to give comfort for such persons and their families who suffered.
The Gospels portrayed Jesus as one who prevailed in his own psychological being. His temptation to face the interior principalities and powers centering around a great inward Accuser is recorded in three Gospels. The Gospel writers understood Jesus to be such a person of internal fortitude that he had a resulting charisma to be a people whisperer. He could heal the inner selves of others because he had prevailed within himself against the internal forces of accusation.
The exorcism stories also highlight a chief vocation of life, namely, the reconstituting our inward lives so that we are acting out in the behaviors of kindness and love. The Psalmist requested of God, "Create within me a new heart, and renew a right spirit within me." Also the prophet wrote, "the heart above all thing is deceitful." Salvation of holistic health is about the recreation, the reconstituting of our inward lives so that the springs of our motives and action can be pure, clean, and righteous. To this regard, John the Baptist, stated that beyond baptism with water, Jesus baptized with the Holy Spirit and with fire. The stories of exorcisms exemplify Jesus as the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit, who can be the cleanness of heart and renewed spirit within us. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes the Risen Christ present within us as our new internal identity.
The Gospel narratives also present a spiritual cosmology. The Risen Christ is the one who is above the principalities and powers of darkness in heavenly places. The exorcism stories within the Gospel indicate salvation as the overcoming of evil with good which results in people being about to express the fruits of the Spirit, being self control, with love, joy, peace, hope, patience, gentleness, and goodness.
Today, we still seek interior health, renewed internal state of being. We seek a comprehensive body, soul, and spiritual health, and we come to Jesus as the one who models this health for us, as he is now known to us as the presence of the Risen Christ.
We also know that the health of Jesus was restoring people to community. We as the church are to be a community of health by welcoming and including people. Health is communal in dimension and all can be in some state of unhealthiness as any given times. This means we need the health of a loving, inclusive, welcoming community to express the full meaning of health as community completeness.
Following Jesus today, let us aspire to be a healthy community, within which we can practice the healing power of the love of Christ. Amen.
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