A Fresh Perspective

The healing stories in our Gospels are never just about physical healing, they always have spiritual and theological meanings. The woman in our story had been plagued by a crippling spirit for eighteen years. It kept her bent over and unable to stand up. Can you see the fairly obvious symbolical and spiritual implications here? A crippling spirit of this kind can diminish our sense of worth and value. We find ourselves spiritually and emotionally and psychologically unable to stand straight and take our rightful place in the realm of God. Jesus calls the woman he heals in our story a “daughter of Abraham.” A daughter of Abraham who has been bound by Satan eighteen long years. Satan here is a symbol for the crippling spirit, the spirit that has kept her from living life in its fullness in God’s kingdom. But she is still a daughter of Abraham. She is still a daughter of God. She is still God’s chosen. God’s beloved. Jesus sees through and beyond the crippling spirit. Can we? A...

Jesus says that the harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few, so ask the Lord of the harvest to send out workers into his harvest. There is much work to do and few workers to do it. But even as we ask the Lord to send out workers, maybe we should give some thought to the work that needs to be done. Answers will differ. Perhaps there was a time in our lives when we could assume that all Christians of a particular stripe would agree on the work to be done. If there was such a time, those days are gone. One of the interesting things modern biblical scholarship has exposed is how much diversity there was even in the early days of the Jesus movement. What does Jesus sent out the the seventy to do? For one thing, he sends them out to heal the sick. One of the primary works of Jesus that the living Christ calls us to do are works of healing. Heal the sick, says Jesus. The word that we often translate as “heal” or “make whole” in the Gospels is the same word we translate as “sa...

In our text today Mark begins a story, then that story is interrupted by another story, a second story, after which Mark returns to complete the first story. This sandwiching technique in telling stories is common in Mark. Mark wants us, his readers, to find common features and themes in the two stories. So as I read the text perhaps you can look for features that are common to both stories. Fred Craddock tells a wonderful story about arriving at a hospital to make a pastoral visit, but in the corridor he sees a woman.   Her head is against the door, and both fists are beside her face, and she is banging on the door: “Let me in, let me in, let me in.”   When he gets over to where she is he could see that it was the chapel door. Fred stops a worker, “This chapel is locked.” The worker says, “We have to keep it locked. There were some kids that trashed it and we had to get all new furniture. We can’t afford to keep doing that, so we have to keep it locked."  Fred says...

When Jesus sets forth his agenda in terms of Isaiah 61 in his synagogue sermon in Nazareth, one of the key aspects of his work is to liberate the oppressed. This story provides a beautiful picture into what that involves. Here is a lost, tortured, battered soul. We are not shown his descent into this state, so we do not know how he became so tortured, so demonized, so broken and lost. He does not know who he is. He is violent, unpredictable, and alone. I suspect that if one could profile all those who have joined terrorist groups over the years one might something similar. He lives among the tombs, which is to say that he lives in the realm of death. That is, he lives in a state of life-diminishment, a state of dehumanization, a state of alienation and oppression. It would be a grave mistake for us to think that this was all his own doing. We do not know the travesties and tragedies he suffered through. We know nothing about his life growing up, what events transpired or e...

One of the more confident claims made by historical Jesus scholars is that Jesus of Nazareth was a healer – he healed people. It is one of the most confident historical claims that can be made about Jesus of Nazareth. But if you asked these same scholars about a particular healing story – whether or not a particular story is historical – they would say maybe or maybe not. The reason they would say that is because they know that the individual healing stories in the Gospels are first and foremost not historical reports, but proclamations of the good news focused on the living Christ and his presence and power in his followers. So they function something like parables, though I’m sure many of them contain memories and echoes of specific healings. In the story or rather stories before us Jesus crosses back into Jewish territory. I say stories rather than story, because we actually have two stories here fused together by Mark in his typical sandwiching style where he starts one story,...