Mark 1:29-45

07/27/11 Mark 1:29-45 GUMC Youth

Last week, we took a break from Mark to talk about some big picture issues about what it means to be a Christian. We took a look at the Nicene Creed and broke it down so we could see some really concrete things that it teaches us that we should listen to and learn from. However, we are back tonight to the Gospel according to Mark and we are finishing up the first chapter. Have you ever spent this much time on just one chapter in the Bible? It's a great way to take time and see how the story builds up and see how themes develop. By the time we are done, if you come most of the time, you are going to know the gospel of Mark better than you ever thought you would. Even though I've spent quite a bit of time in Mark, even I will learn a lot through this journey because I have never spent as much time and energy thinking about it as we are going to here.

Once again for the third time in a row, we have three stories in our passage for tonight, three different things that may or may not seem like they are all that connected with each other, but, once again, they actually are deeply related and are very important. Let's take them in order, because it is fascinating what we see in them.

First, we have Jesus healing Simon Peter's mother. Simon Peter, by the way is the guy that people are talking about when they just talk about "Peter" in the Bible, or "St. Peter." He ends up being something of a representative for the disciples and was one of the most important leaders in the first generation of Christians. One of the things we will see about him throughout the course of the gospel of Mark is that Peter can also be a complete bonehead. He often will say and do things that make us want to hit our head against the wall. At one point, Peter will get his name changed from Simon. However, at the beginning, he is still called Simon, but you need to know that Simon and Peter are the same person.

So, last time we were looking at Mark, we saw Jesus preaching in the Synagogue and casting out an unclean spirit, who yelled at him, calling Jesus the "Holy One of God." We need to remember that, when Jesus sees demons and unclean spirits, they immediately recognize him for who he is. This is important because, when most people meet him, they don't understand at all who he is. There is one moment when Peter says that Jesus is the Messiah, or Christ, but when we look carefully, we realize that Peter has absolutely no idea what it really means to be the Messiah or Christ. We will spend more time later on what is known as the "Messianic Secret," but I just want to point out here that the demons know who Jesus really is, and his disciples don't yet get it.

After Jesus gets rid of this unclean spirit, they leave the Synagogue and go to Simon's house, where his mother is sick. Jesus simply takes her by the hand and lifts her out of bed and, at a moment's notice, the fever is gone and she gets up to serve them, that is, she gets lunch ready for them, which is what a mother-in-law in 1st century Israel would normally have done. Jesus took this woman who was so sick, she could not function like she was expected to, like she expected herself to, and healed her in a moment.

This miraculous healing was not just a one time thing. We see in our passage that, when the sun went down, all kinds of people were bringing their sick or demon-possessed people to Jesus to be healed. There was such a crowd that we read that, "The whole city had gathered at the door. And he healed many who were ill with various diseases, and cast out many demons." Listen to this at the end of this story. "And he was not permitting the demons to speak, because they knew who he was." Imagine that! Jesus would not allow the demons to speak. Why? Because they knew him. What would they say if they spoke? Well, according to the unclean spirit in the last passage, he would say something like, "What business do we have with each other, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are - the Holy One of God!" It seems that Jesus does not want these demons to tell everyone who he is. This is something of a puzzling thing, and we will come back to this because it is a theme that comes up over and over again in Mark, in fact, it comes up more strongly in Mark than in any of the other three Gospels.

The next story is what I really want to focus on. This is what we read, "In the early morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house, and went away to a secluded place, and was praying there. Simon and his companions searched for him; they found him, and said to him, 'Everyone is looking for you." Let's stop there for a moment, because here we have, for the first time in Mark, a crowd forming who is following Jesus. Mark has not yet used the word for "crowd" yet, but he will, even at the very beginning of chapter 2, but the crowd is going to be mentioned so often that it almost becomes a character in its own right.

So Jesus, early on in his ministry, starts being followed by a crowd of people. Now, today, this sounds like a pretty good thing. After all, when you think about churches that are successful, you think about churches that have so many people on a Sunday morning that you could say that there is a whole crowd there to worship. When we think about preachers and teachers who are successful, we tend to think of people who have written books that have sold a lot of copies, or people who have lots of hits on their YouTube page, or things like that. The bigger the crowd, the more successful you are. To say there is a crowd following Jesus could mean something like this: "Wow, look at all the people who are following Jesus and going wherever he goes to listen to him and be healed by him. There sure is a crowd of people, that's amazing."

However, that isn't the only way we use the word "crowd," is it? Sometimes, a crowd isn't a good thing. What if you are at an amusement park and there is a crowd? It doesn't mean that you will have any more fun at the park, it just means that you will have to stand in line for longer. Sometimes a crowd isn't a good thing at all. When we are surrounded by people, and the people are more of a hindrance than a help to what we're trying to do, we will say that we feel "crowded." At this point, looking just at this passage, we can't tell for sure which of these two ways we are to take the crowd. But let me give you a hint, its the second way, the way where a crowd is a bad thing. If you don't believe me, if you are convinced that the crowd following Jesus should be seen as a good thing, stay with me as we move through Mark, and we will see if you still disagree with me by the end.

Alright, so Simon and the other disciples, and there are probably only four of them at this time, come and find Jesus because a crowd of people have gathered to listen to him and be healed by him. As you can imagine, if you live in a world that does not have very good access to medicine, and the medicine you do have access to isn't very good, you can imagine that people would react pretty positively to finding out that there is a man who heals people miraculously in town. You could imagine that this is pretty big news. Now your friends and family members who have been sick for a long time can be healed. We will read later about a woman who was sick for twelve years and doctors couldn't help her, so she was just sick all the time and Jesus heals her.

But when Jesus is told, "Everyone is looking for you," he responds, saying, "Let us go somewhere else to the towns nearby, so that I may preach there also; for that is what I came for." This is absolutely amazing to me. After all, Jesus is told that he has a huge crowd of people, all of whom have come to be healed by him, and what does he do? He leaves! If we look at this in terms of how we usually look at leadership, it seems that Jesus is making a terrible decision. After all, why would you as a leader, if you are surrounded by people who want to listen to you, who want to follow what you have to say, want to walk away and go somewhere else? After all, you know that there are people who will follow you where you are, but you don't know if people will follow you somewhere else. If you know already that you can have an influence on a group of people in one place, and you don't know for sure that you can have the same kind of impact somewhere else, why go? It seems that if you wanted to make a difference, whatever you might do, you certainly don't leave the people you are impacting and go somewhere else. And yet this is precisely what Jesus does.

Now, why does he do this? I said just a moment ago that, if he were hoping to set out on a campaign of healing miracles, it would be silly to leave so many people who needed miraculous healing. But what if that wasn't his goal in the first place? What if Jesus wanted to do something far greater than just heal people of their disease? This might sound odd to us, because we have been so conditioned to think of the miracles of Jesus as being the most important things that he did. As exciting as the miracles might be to us, they did not seem to be the most important thing to Jesus. He said, "Let us go somewhere else to the towns nearby, so that I may preach there also; for that is what I came for." For Jesus, preaching is more important than healing, though we see him doing both.

We need to understand this. It means that, according to Jesus, if someone remains physically sick and broken, but understands his message, they are far better off than if they are healed bodily, but do not understand his message. This idea, of being physically handicapped in some way being better than not knowing Jesus, might be hard to grasp, especially if you are involved in some kind of sports. However, more and more, I would have to say that I would rather give up things like arms and legs than give up what I have come to know in Christ.

What we should take from this is a change in how we prioritize things. If you see Jesus walking away from people who are in need of healing, who have gathered to be healed by this great man, all so he can preach in other towns, and it makes perfect sense to you, then the challenge is not that great. However, if Jesus' behavior strikes us as odd, as something that we question, the Gospel invites us to rethink things from a different point of view. It invites us to think that, though the body is important for we only have embodied souls, it is not the only thing that we need to take seriously, that it is more important to know the truth, in both our minds and hearts, than it is to be able even to walk. If we would rather have a perfectly working body than follow Jesus, it means that we still have not quite understood how important Jesus really is.

That's the real meat of the passage and, if you don't understand anything else, make sure you ponder that seriously, not just at youth group, but at other times in your life as well. When we listen to the Bible and take it seriously, we might just find that the things we used to think were pretty important, aren't nearly as important as we thought, and there are other things that we never thought were important that turn out to be really important.

The last story in our passage is about a man with leprosy. Jesus doesn't go up to him and offer to heal him, the leper comes to Jesus and begs him to make him clean. We need to understand how serious this is. In ancient Israel, if you were unclean, and you were unclean if you were a leper, you had to stay outside of the camp, you could not touch anyone, or even get near to anyone. If someone got too close, you had to yell "Unclean!" so they would know you are unclean. For someone like this to actually walk up to Jesus, a Rabbi, would be unbelievably socially inappropriate. However, Jesus does not reject him for this. In fact, he does not reject him at all. His response is, "I am willing; be cleansed." Even when Jesus says that preaching is his main purpose, not healing, and even when he is willing to walk away from a community of physically sick people to preach the good news to new people, he does not simply abandon people who come to him in need. Even though healing is secondary, it is not unimportant.

But notice what Jesus says to the man after he heals him. "See that you say nothing to anyone; but go, show yourself to the priest and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded, as a testimony to them." Jesus heals this man, then asks him to keep quiet about it. Again, this question as to why Jesus wants people to hold back from telling everyone about him will come up again and again, and we will spend plenty of time on it; but the point now is that, in spite of the fact that Jesus healed this man and was worthy to be followed to the end, the man simply can't do what he was told to do. He wanted so desperately, to share with everyone he met that he had been healed from a disease that, at the time, people thought was uncurable, that he could not keep quiet, even though he was specifically told to. We read, "But he went out and began to proclaim it freely and to spread the news around, to such an extent that Jesus could no longer publicly enter a city, but stayed out in unpopulated areas; and they were coming to him from everywhere."

The question that we need to ask ourselves is, Have we been touched by the power of Christ in such a way that we cannot help ourselves but spread the good news? Have we been convinced that it is more important to know Jesus Christ than anything else, so we feel a deep desire to share it with others? These are the kinds of questions we should ask. And if the answer is "no, we don't," don't give up there. God knows that we are not able to just get ourselves excited and force ourselves to be faithful; in fact, if we try to do so, we will burn ourselves out faster than we ever thought we could. Instead, if we find that we are not as passionate as we know we should be, go to God in prayer. Pray that God would transform you, that God would fill you with a mighty passion for him and for others. For it is only when God equips us and sends us that we can go and be successful. And God will do these things if we ask. So, let us take a few moments and pray that God would renew our strength and would meet us here, that we might be empowered to truly be faithful disciples. Let us pray.

AMEN