The Way of Health and Wholeness
by the Rev. Canon Sue Sommer, Canon Pastor and Subdean
A friend of mine texted me late last week with the news that they finally have an offer on their house. He asked for my prayers. I assured him that I would not only pray but light a candle before a shrine of Blessed St. Joseph – patron saint of home sales – if he thought it would help. He texted back, “Yes please, and throw in a couple of Tebows while you’re at it.”
Now it’s a testimony to the power of cultural icons that even a football ignoramus like me knew immediately what he meant. And in doing a little Googling thereafter, I discovered that Tim Tebow – while playing for the University of Florida Gators – inscribed a citation from today’s Old Testament reading (Isaiah 40:30-31) in his eye-black: the part about running and not growing faint.
Well, whether we love or loathe the Broncos quarterback, we can probably agree that Isaiah was not addressing this lyrical passage to well-fed, highly paid, talented athletes. He was writing to people who had lost everything. The people of Judea had been conquered by the Babylonians. They’d lost their land, their temple, and for all they knew, they’d lost their God too. Nothing remained but a boatload of confusion and despair.
The Exile was a watershed moment in the life of the Jewish people five centuries before Christ. And as is often the case with watershed moments, rich meaning-making began to emerge, both during the Exile and immediately thereafter. Several strands of thinking agreed that sin was involved in the calamity, but the two most prominent strands of thought sharply disagreed about the way forward. The way of righteousness saw that sin as disobedience to the Law of Moses. They advocated strict adherence to the Law of Moses. By contrast, the Way of Purity saw that sin as failure to worship God correctly in the sacrificial cult of the temple. They advocated rebuilding the temple in Jerusalem and adhering to rigorous ritual practices.
And then there was a third way of thinking. We hear it in our passage from Isaiah this morning. This strand of thought began to see God differently. God was more than a tribal chieftain with authority over one group of people in one small piece of world geography. God, instead, was seen as mightier than all of the Gentile gods, a God who could neither be confined nor defined by either covenantal law or ritual practice. In Isaiah’s own words, The Lord is an everlasting God, the creator of the ends of the earth…his understanding is unsearchable. The suffering experienced during the Exile, to this way of thinking, is barely a blip in the vast, majestic, unfathomable history of God’s care for creation. The way forward for this strand of thought is through faith – faith that God is very much in charge of salvation history, even though we humans may not always be able to see evidence of God’s hand at work in the world at any given moment.
In the five centuries between the return from Exile and Jesus of Nazareth bursting upon the scene, the first two strands of thinking – the way of righteousness and the way of purity — flourished in Israel. The third way, the way of Deutero-Isaiah, as this portion of Isaiah is known, remained a minority voice. And yet it is the strand of thinking that seems to find expression in Jesus – at least the Jesus we find in Mark’s gospel. Last week we heard of the dramatic exorcism of the man who entered the synagogue with an unclean spirit. Today’s lesson picks up where last week’s left off: it is still the Sabbath and Jesus heals Peter’s mother-in-law. The way of righteousness forbade labor of any sort on the Sabbath including healing. The way of purity rigorously forbade those who were ritually pure from contact with those who were sick or possessed with unclean spirits.
And yet Jesus healed the sick and cast out demons with impunity. Mark tells us that he not only proclaimed the good news of God’s salvation, he was the very embodiment of God’s salvation in the world. That which separated, that which oppressed, that which opposed God’s desire for wholeness in creation was cast out by the mighty power of God in Jesus Christ.
It isn’t that the Torah or the Purity Codes had become worthless. They were very worthy processes for mediating the experience of God. Both systems safeguarded the spiritual well-being of the community. Unfortunately, the safeguards also excluded a good portion of the community. Precious few resources are going to be allocated to healing and restoring when the system is designed to keep the sick and the troublesome at arm’s length.
We have our own version of the Way of Righteousness. We have our own version of the Way of Purity. Whenever the Church looks only within itself for credence and authority to support all of its own biases, we see it. Whenever its leadership or its members believe that they have the full and complete picture of God’s revealed truth, we see it. Whenever religious communities become self-satisfied enclaves of exclusion, or where right thinking is the acknowledged pathway to salvation, we see it. Our own versions of the way of righteousness or purity beguile us because they are clear, they are predictable, they are unambiguous.
And yet Jesus shows us another way. Chaos and ambiguity are not things to be avoided; dis-ease or darkness are not conditions that point to the absence of God. They point merely to ministry that awaits. That God is revealed when persons or systems are healed and restored. That God is infinitely greater than the sum of our religious beliefs. That when religious systems create roadblocks, however unintended, to health and wholeness, health and wholeness must hold the trump card. That the same transcendent God who spun the universe into being is also infinitely connected to creation, and works tirelessly to bring to fulfillment all which God intended.
And we are reminded, as the Body of Christ in this world with our own fair share of carefully guarded religious systems, that we, too, are called to a ministry of restoration and of healing. In fact, the Catechism in our beloved Book of Common Prayer spells it out. The mission of the church is to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ. There is work to be done. Ministry awaits.
