No Permit to Speak
Mark 1:29-39

February 9, 2003

It was one of those things you hear and that’s all you can remember out of the rest of what should have been a memorable event. 1983 was the 500th year of the birth of Martin Luther.

During that year I heard perhaps the best living scholar on Martin Luther, Heiko Oberman, talk about the unique contributions and innovations of Luther. Lutheran or not, we stand here still speaking, if not his language, at least his vocabulary.

Oberman said that Luther was the first medieval person to realize that the Devil does not bother tempting bad, immoral people - they are already his! - but the Devil goes after the saints and other good folk with a vengeance. The perception of that day, and perhaps still ours as well, is that bad, sin-full people are the ones tortured and tempted by the Devil. Good Christians are above all this furor and sail blissfully through the travails of this life.

Young Martin thought this was the way it was supposed to work, yet try as he might to be righteous and holy and Christian, he was still afflicted with doubts - No, afflicted with certainties - that he was damned and lost, that God hated him.

Then he got the point, justified by faith and all that. But even more he knew it worked the other way around - the righteous were the ones continually tempted and afflicted by evil, precisely because they were good and knew the real difference. The demons knew them by name.

Three short vignettes are run by us today. A day in the life right at the very beginning of the ministry of Jesus. No big happenings, but not really an average day either.

Jesus had called his disciples, and went to Capernaum on the sabbath. Capernaum appears to have become his home town, a little livelier place than Nazareth. He exorcises the demon out of a man in the synagogue, a feat which surprises and amazes everyone there. He goes home with his new disciples to Simon and Andrew’s house, where Simon’s mother-in-law is sick with a fever. Jesus goes up to the mother-in-law, raises her up by the hand out of bed, and the fever breaks. She begins to serve them at once, for which the feminists have never forgiven Jesus.

Forget about the feminists for the moment: I bet a bunch of you are saying to yourself - if Peter had a mother-in-law, doesn’t that mean he had a wife? This could be nasty and intriguing at the same time. There is no mention of Simon Peter’s wife, especially once the wandering ministry of Jesus is fully under way. Peter is the rock upon whom the church was built and the first bishop or pope of Rome. What does that mean for Catholic clerical celibacy and the prohibition of divorce if See of Peter was first inhabited by someone who divorced or abandoned his wife? The Bible can be a lot of fun and mischief.

But this was the sabbath: did Jesus “heal” her, or just help her out of bed? In serving them was she too violating the sabbath prohibitions against work? No conflict here, though later on Jesus will be challenged by the religious leaders about the timeliness of his healing. Healing does not obey a timetable or schedule, and that is common sense.

Yet somebody was paying attention to the time for Mark records that action did not resume until evening at sundown, Saturday night, when the sabbath would have concluded and work would again be permitted.

The whole city seemed to cram around the door, sick people and demon-possessed. Trapped in his healing, he stayed the course until all were gone. He wouldn’t let the demons speak, lest they believed they had something worth saying and had authority.

No word about when Jesus went to bed, but it could not have been early, and then he got up in the deep dark and went to a deserted place to pray. You think he would have slept in, but he had trouble sleeping. Exhausted as much mentally and spiritually as physically, he had to get away to get things in perspective, to pray for the endurance and the patience to continue. And they hunted him down and were in a panic, “Everybody is looking for you. Everybody wants you to help them!”

Is doing too much good not good for you? Jesus knows that when people experience too much good, they no longer see healing and good as a gift, but as an inalienable right. When that happens evil has begun to speak loudly.

There are no crystal clear lessons and proverbs we can wrench out of this day in the life of Jesus. Instead, the stories demonstrate the very human persistence one must have to keep being Christian.

To be a Christian at a given moment is a simple task, though often it requires a monumental effort of spirit and body. At a given moment, nevertheless, you and I can do almost anything. It’s the next moment that’s the rub: the next moment when someone wants more, and you have exceedingly less. It is brutally hard work to be kind and helpful and healing in a continuous pattern.

You can be too good and find your motives and interests changing, and not for the good. I took a turn filling in the graveyard shift in our church’s 24 hour telephone ministry. About 5:00 am, a woman called. Her situation was full of pathos and heart-wrenching, and she talked for well over an hour. I couldn’t seem to help her, and I was getting awfully tired. I realized that I was no longer trying to help her; I was trying to get her off the phone. I later found out she had called most of the other phone workers. In one month she made about 300 calls - a “chronic caller” was the term we had to invent for her. Evil may not have been given permission to speak, but there was little good being said.

You and I are not able to keep on being good under our own power and by our own will. Not that you can give up trying with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. But you need a little grace to have “wings like eagles” and all those rhapsodic images Isaiah gives us.

And you need to give yourself a little grace, O thou perfectionists in our midst, realizing that even while you try your hardest to be good and faithful - and often fall miserably short - Jesus ran out of energy and grace and ran away to the next town. A parable for an annual meeting in a church that keeps on trying to be good and faithful.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan