The Bad, The Good, And The Ugly
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, February 12, 2012
Mark 1:40-45
I can honestly say that I haven't been corrected more than I have been this past week by members of the congregation. It is fine to correct me once in a while, I need it, but this week you corrected me quite frequently. The subject of the criticism was the title of my sermon this morning. A number of you who are extremely insightful and erudite and thoughtful made mention of the fact that my sermon title is wrong: that the movie on which you think this is being based is called The Good and the Bad and the Ugly, and that I somehow, in my demented self, have changed the words around to “The Bad, the Good, and the Ugly!” So, you have set me straight.
While I did like that movie that was made in 1966 when I was about eight years old, and in those days like “shooty” movies, and it was a “shooty” movie, and while it starred Clint Eastwood, and I kind of like Clint Eastwood, I think he is cool, and I like one of the lines in the movie in particular that I found really quite intriguing and of theological importance. Tuco says to Blondie: “You know, God is with us because he hates the Yanks”
Blondie responds, “God is not with us because he hates idiots.”
And so, that famous theological line has kept me going, and probably caused me to enter the ministry - something like that! I am hoping I am not a Yank or an idiot either!
There is a sense in which that movie, certainly because of its title perhaps more than its content, entered into the vocabulary of popular culture, and The Good and the Bad and the Ugly became a very well known movie. BUT, I am not talking about the movie this morning! I am simply using the phrase to reflect upon our text from The Gospel of Mark, for it is in The Gospel of Mark that we have this incredible story of what I call “The Bad and The Good and The Ugly.”
As many of you know, over the last few weeks we've been looking at some of the early stories of Jesus' ministry, and particularly those at the height of what was known as “The Galilean Spring,” that time in Jesus' ministry when he was immensely popular. This is the fifth story that Mark tells us about that time in Jesus' ministry, and it is a powerful one.
Clearly, word was out about Jesus, and his amazing deeds. We have already listened to the fact that he healed a man who was troubled of mind in the synagogue, that he healed Simon Peter's mother-in-law in Capernaum, and word around the whole of the Sea of Galilee was starting to get to a fever pitch, and so now, in today's passage from The Gospel of Mark, we have Jesus being encountered by a leper.
The leper was probably seated on the side of the road. Many of them were far away from most of the travellers and not making connection with ordinary people, and probably Jesus was walking by, maybe with his disciples, maybe on his own, Mark doesn't tell us. But the leper reaches out to Jesus. He says, “If you will, if you desire it, make me clean.” That man must have heard something about Jesus that was spinning around Galilee about this incredible healer and this incredible and authoritative teacher.
The leper speaks to Jesus, and he says, “If you are willing...” In other words, he understands that there is a barrier between himself and Jesus. He is quite willing to understand that. He recognizes that Jesus has the will and the power to do what he wants to do, and that he has no right to ask for anything more than that, but he does ask him.
It is in this one incredible encounter that has in many ways epitomized for many the healing ministry of Jesus. In this great moment, we have something universal, we have something about the relationship between Jesus and people that is deeply touching and deeply moving, and even a bit disturbing. It is first of all about the bad. It is about the bad, and by the bad I make reference to the fact that in the day and age of Jesus, leprosy was such a terrible disease that it had social and spiritual implications. If you were a leper then you were a social pariah. If you were a leper, you were deemed to be spiritually unclean and sinful. Going all the way back to The Book of Leviticus, Chapters 13 and 14, Jesus understood that this man he saw on the side of the road was someone who was to be kept at a distance and to be made ritually unclean. The only way that a person with leprosy could be made clean again was that somehow the leprosy was to leave them, and that of course never happened, and then and only then, could they be reinstated within the community of faith.
If Jesus had wanted therefore to be a religious leader, if he had wanted to be a rabbi like all the other rabbis, if he had wanted to be a respected person within the community and within the religious elite, there is no question that he would have had nothing to do with the leper at all. The last thing Jesus would want to do would be to be associated with a man who was ritually unclean. The last thing he would want to do would be involved with someone who was deemed to be sinful. If Jesus wanted to be a religious leader, he would have avoided the leper - pardon the pun - like the plague!
If Jesus had wanted to be a celebrity, if wanted to be like a lot of the other roaming healers and teachers and itinerant leaders that were there in Jesus' age, if he had wanted to be part of a special community of believers like those in the Qumran community, then he would have had nothing to do with the leper, because from the moment he encountered the leper, he would then automatically be excluded from the rest of the community. So, if Jesus wanted to be a religious leader, if Jesus wanted to be a celebrity and to be at the top of the social pole, then Jesus would have nothing to do with the leper. Why, why then did he? And, why were lepers deemed to be so repulsive, so repugnant, that of all the people in the society of the day they were the untouchables, they were the unclean?
William Barclay gives us a definition of what a leper goes through medically and what happens to them. This might sound a little dark, and if you are at all squeamish, switch off the radio for thirty seconds or plug your ears this morning. This is what happens to lepers. The whole appearance of their face is changed. It is changed until the person loses their human appearance and looks, as the ancients said, like a lion. The nodules grow larger and larger, they ulcerate, from them comes a foul discharge. The eyebrows fall out. They eyes become staring. The voice becomes hoarse. The victim wheezes because of the ulceration of the vocal chords. The hands and feet always ulcerate. Slowly, the sufferer becomes a mass of ulcerated growths. The average course of the disease is nine years, and it ends in mental decay, coma and ultimately, death. The sufferer becomes utterly repulsive, both to themselves and to others.
It is a horrible, horrible disease, and because of that, lepers were isolated. They were made to live in colonies. They were deemed to be the untouchables. They were isolated religiously, because as I said before, they were ritually unclean, and therefore they were banished from religious places, religious rites, and religious rituals. It was even believed that the mildew in their homes could in fact contain leprosy, and so their houses were abandoned and no one was allowed to go into them. And, if they owned the houses, they couldn't pass their houses on to somebody else because of the leprosy.
Such was the form of isolation, such was the form of exclusion that when this man says to Jesus, “Will you heal me?”
Jesus' decision was enormous. He was faced with something very bad. But there was something very good that happened. Mark tells us that when Jesus saw this man he said, “I will heal you.” And then Mark tells us, “He had compassion upon him. He had a love for him.” Jesus acted out of that. Jesus wanted to do that. Jesus entered into the sin-sick world of leprosy and took it on. He entered into it knowing the dangers that were there, but he did it: he touched him and he healed him.
The New Testament scholar N. T. Wright suggests that in this healing, along with the others that preceded it, Jesus was in fact inaugurating the sovereign reign of God over the things that destroyed life. In the coming of the Son of God in fact God was entering right there into the very darkest places, the places where people suffered the most. The healing had enormous consequences. It wasn't just the healing of the disease of the leper; it was the restoring of the leper in a full way. For example, it was restoring him back into the community at large. When the man was healed, he was brought back into the covenant people of God. He belonged again. He wasn't forced to the boundaries and the outside. In other words, he was restored to full communion, to use a very Christian term. He was brought back in.
Can you imagine how that leper must have felt? All these years, and we don't know how long, but for all the years that he had this disease the only people with whom he associated were lepers. The only things that he got to look at were faces that he saw intimately in his community and they were as destroyed as his. The only reality that he had was that of death. He wasn't allowed in the marketplace. He wasn't allowed near little children. He wasn't allowed to enter into family relationships. He'd been banished from his own home. He had been banished from the synagogue. He had been driven out. And now, Jesus is restoring him and bringing him back into the community of faith.
Jesus is doing something more: he is restoring his relationship with God. The real plight of the lepers in biblical times was the fact that not only were they excluded from the world around them, they felt they were excluded from the grace of God. The whole idea was that they had done something wrong that caused a rift in their relationship with God, and not only could they not worship God in the synagogue and in the sanctuary, they weren't even worthy of receiving the love of God. So, when Jesus comes to this leper, he is doing something of universal importance. He is revealing the healing power of the sovereign God. He is revealing to him the restoration into a community of faith. He is revealing to him that his broken relationship with God has now ended.
From Jesus' side, this is really troubling. Jesus, the moment he touched him became a leper himself. Maybe he did not contract the illness: he didn't clearly, but he became a leper. The moment you touch that leper you are excluded. The moment you have contact with it you must be ritually cleaned. Your clothes must be burned, and you must have no further association. Jesus was willing to become a leper by healing that leper, and that is what is staggering about this story.
If you are a person in the first century AD and you are reading this story and you know what lepers are like and how they are treated, and you can smell from a distance the community of lepers, and you realize that this Lord, this Jesus, this kind of Messiah was willing to touch this man, all of sudden the story becomes even more powerful. No antibiotics, no Lysol cleaners, no disinfectant, Jesus just touched him, and became one with him.
I have quoted this person before in another context, but one of the most famous missionaries in the nineteenth century was a man called Joseph Damien. He was a missionary in Molokai in Hawaii, and ministered to those who were in a leper colony. The leper colony was large, and had been around for a long, long time. Leprosy in Molokai was very serious. But, called by God to minister to the leper colony, he went every day, worshipped with them, visited with them, and led services with them.
Things were going well, until one day, having a cup of tea in the morning, he spilt some boiling water on his foot, and he couldn't feel it. So then he tried to put some cold on it, and he couldn't feel it. He knew at that very moment what had happened: the nerves in his leg had died. The next Sunday he got up, and as he did every Sunday he welcomed them, and he always said to them, “Good morning fellow believers” but this morning he got up and said, “Good morning fellow lepers.” Damien lived with them until he died. Damien ministered to them, and wouldn't leave them. He gave his life for them in the end.
I think that the story of the healing of the leper is as much about the Cross of Jesus Christ as it is about anything else. I think this was a moment, a glimpse into, a window into the whole ministry of Jesus: that he would be willing to go into a sin-sick world and suffer for it in order to redeem and to restore it. The story of the leper is a story of the Cross and Jesus, going into that situation was really saying, “I am becoming a leper with you. I am willing to be unclean for you. I am willing to bear the sin for you in order that you are restored.”
There is an ugly side to this story, and the ugly part is that Jesus only asked the leper to do two things. The first one was to tell no one about it: in other words, just to keep quiet. The other one was to present himself to a rabbi, and to be ritually reinstated as a clean person so that he could worship God and give tithes and offerings. Just two things! Well, in terms of the second, he was willing to do it. He went back to the Temple and he presented himself as someone who is now ritually clean. We don't know what happened. Mark gives us no indication of how he was received, but that is clearly what he did.
But, the first request, to tell no one, was completely ignored. The leper went everywhere telling everyone about what Jesus had done. You can understand it: he was excited, he was renewed, and he was healed. He wanted the whole world to know what had happened to him, but Jesus wanted it to be kept a secret. He wanted to be under cover precisely because he did not want to be, as I suggested last week, the celebrity, the superstar. He knew that was shallow thinking.
In the time in which he lived, the Messiah was always seen as someone who when they were to be present there would be no misery. Jesus wanted the opposite to be thought of: where there is misery, there is the Messiah. Let me say that again. The culture of the day says that where there is the Messiah, there is no misery; Jesus wanted to suggest that where there is misery, there is the Messiah. In other words, he did not want to start off with the triumphalism of what he is doing. He wanted to start off with his identification with those who were in need, and that need could be spiritual, it could be psychological, it could be personal, it could be social, it could be religious, but Jesus wanted to be identified with someone who would in fact be there.
Now, some have suggested that maybe by asking this particular leper not to say anything, Jesus was using some sort of reverse psychology, knowing that he probably would go and tell someone if he had been instructed not to. There is no sense of that here. The leper got caught up in the emotion, got caught up in the fact that he was clean. After all, when he went back to his friends, how could he possibly explain what had happened? How could he go to the Temple and say what had happened if it wasn't that he was clean? But, the fact that he went and shouted it and made a big noise about it is not what Jesus wanted.
As I read this text, there is one great irony. The irony is this: that the leper started out this story as the one who is isolated, and in the end, the one who becomes isolated is Jesus. He is the one who has to run away from the crowds. We are even told in one of the translations that he had to go, and it is a good translation, “to lonely places” to get away from the crowds. I think sometimes serving God, sometimes following Jesus, actually in itself becomes a lonely thing.
It is hard sometimes to talk about a crucified and a risen Lord. You are swimming against the tide of popular culture by saying such things. It seems so far removed from the way that we look at super stardom and elevate it and glorify it. Isn't it ironic that today of all days what I was saying last week is once again true, that sometimes we build people up and they become great big stars, only to find them fragile and dying? Have we not just seen that this morning with a young woman who had the most incredible voice in Whitney Houston? I mean, we build up a culture of celebrity, and those celebrities often become very lonely and isolated. Jesus didn't want that. He didn't want it. He didn't want to be lonely. He didn't want to be isolated for being a star; he wanted to be available to heal the broken and to restore the broken.
Sometimes, when we get closer to people, loneliness can occur. The great philosopher Schopenhauer once likened the human race to porcupines. He said that human beings are just like porcupines, and I want to quote from him:
The colder it gets outside, the more we huddle together as human beings for warmth. But, the closer we get to one another, the more we hurt one another with our sharp quills. In the lonely night of earth's winter, eventually we begin to drift apart, and wander out on our own, and freeze to death in our loneliness.
Loneliness occurs to a large extent because of the relationships we have with others, because we are banging our heads against each other's sinfulness and brokenness, because we are frightened of one another, and what each can do to the other, and very lonely people are those who feel this kind of wintery touch or difficulty.
Yet, what is needed for humanity to be humanity is the exact opposite: it is community. What Jesus wanted to do was to restore those who are broken and to bring them into that community, to bring them into that relationship with God. One of the great fears that I have today is of the isolation of people: isolation through virtual reality in communications, isolation from worship and from praise and from adoration and a common sense of God, and isolation even of people of faith, who are frightened to expose their faith and their beliefs. People have isolated themselves for fear of the world around them. Jesus didn't want the leper to make a big deal of what he had done. He didn't want to be isolated, and he didn't want the leper to be isolated.
But look what has happened. If we ended the story there, it would be of the bad, the good, and the ugly. But, there is one word that the movie doesn't have. The one word that it doesn't have is the word “hope.” Jesus was willing to receive others who came to him. Jesus continued to move on despite the problems that he had with the leper to other places. The Gospel of Mark is only beginning here; not ending. What Jesus continued to do in his healing of other people he maintained. He kept going because of hope, and it is that which drove him forward.
My friends, none of us by the grace of God are lepers, but all of us are people who have needs, and all of us need the affirmation of God's grace. All of us need the healing touch. May that Jesus, who encountered that leper, encounter us in every part of our lives. Amen.