Sermon on the Sixth Sunday After Trinity - Fr Sam Rossiter-Peters

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May be given to me to speak in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

Amen. Please do be seated.

There are many things that I read the Scriptures for.

Comfort, wisdom and insight into the ever-developing relationship between humanity and God.

One thing I tend to not look for however are gaths 7 00:00:55,020 --> 00:00:59,520 But on our gospel reading Saint Mark gives a throw away line which is such a understatement that I can help but smile every time I read it 8 00:00:59,600 --> 00:01:09,220 Because it does sound like a joke 9 00:01:05,620 --> 00:01:09,040 And he could do no deed of power 10 00:01:09,120 --> 00:01:12,840 that expect that he laid his hands on a few sick people

and cured them

Medicine has come quite a way since the first century,

but even the best doctor in the world

can heal a patient with a touch.

And I should know, I'm married to the best doctor in the world.

Jesus touching a few sick people

and making them well should, by any standard,

count as a great deed of power.

Surely, the gospels are full of accounts of Jesus touching people who are sick.

Disabled, even dead and making them well.

But unlike in this strange account from Saint Mark,

those deeds were praised as multi-acts of God,

and Jesus was hailed as the Messiah because of them.

But in Nazareth's hometown,

those same deeds touching a few sick people and making them well

are dismissed by Saint Mark with a casual aside,

as if Jesus is handing out a scrap of bread,

not miraculously touching people and healing them with a word.

Why did Saint Mark suddenly adopt a tone of such benign indifference

that even a young person in the depths of their teenage-on-wee

would feel that he was rather understating things?

Well, to understand this, we need to look at the context,

not just of the chapter, but of the gospel as a whole.

In biblical studies, there's a principle known as the Messianic Secret.

In Saint Mark's gospel, in nearly every account of a miracle

which Jesus performed,

he told the person not to tell anyone else

after they received their miracle.

Of course, they never paid any attention whatsoever.

We're told repeatedly that as soon as Jesus healed a person

and asked them to keep quiet about it,

that healed person ran out and shouted the news to everyone.

But the request for the secret was always made.

For years, theologians have debated

why Jesus would ask people not to mention the things that he did for them.

After all, if you had the power

to heal a person with a touch,

or in fact to heal with a word from a distance

which Jesus did on multiple occasions,

wouldn't you want people to know?

Imagine someone could do that today.

Imagine here in Saint John the Baptist

someone could heal any kind of infirmity with a single word.

The cues would be out of the door.

They'd be down the street, they'd be all the way to the tube station.

There would be camera crews and newspaper articles

and a podcast and social media up the wazoo.

And we know this

because even in a world without social media,

or the internet, or newspapers,

or frankly access to the written word for most people,

Jesus was still a sensation.

We're given account of how he was so popular

that people crowded him in houses

so much so that if you wanted to get access,

you had to take the roof off.

By word of mouth, Jesus managed to gather 5,000 men,

plus women and children, to listen to him speak.

And, I'll hasten to add, they stayed for days.

Not just the 10 minutes I'm going to make you listen to me.

Given that Jesus was already that famous,

given that he was doing things that no one else could do,

why on earth did he insist on people keeping it quiet?

Well, some theologians have speculated

that it was in fact one of the earliest examples

of reverse psychology.

If I say to all of you, don't think of a pink elephant,

I know exactly what you're all going to be thinking of.

So maybe Jesus was asking people to keep quiet

because in a roundabout reverse sort of way,

it would make him more famous.

After all, who doesn't want to do the very thing we're told not to do?

But I'm not convinced.

Aside from this being somewhat more devious

than Jesus' character implies, it would be pointless.

Jesus had more than enough going for him to be famous.

He didn't have to play games with people

for it to be interesting that he could heal any infirmity

by a touch or a word.

So why the secret?

Because miracles were never the point.

Jesus had such compassion for those that he healed,

but Jesus did not come as a healer.

Whilst there were probably hundreds of people

who had their physical lives transformed

by Jesus' touch or word,

if he had wanted to come as a healer,

then that's all he would have done.

He would have given up on the preaching,

on the teaching, on the disputing with Pharisees,

and he would have been a whole lot more effective as a healer

without wasting all of that time

and all of the other business that fills the gospels.

If he'd come as a healer,

then he'd just set up shop in Jerusalem

and let people come to him.

And instead of hundreds, it had been thousands.

Almost every miraculous healing that Jesus performed

followed a similar formula,

and this tells us what the point was.

First, Jesus would ask a person what they wanted.

Always seems like a stupid question

to ask a person who's sick,

what is it that you want,

but Jesus always made the point of asking

so that a person could demonstrate their faith.

Or else, he was approached in such a deliberate

and faith-filled way

that the faith of the person was already evident.

Then, once a person had made their request

or a request had been made on their behalf

and they'd received their healing,

Jesus would say,

your faith has made you well.

Jesus didn't say those words

because faith is a prerequisite of healing.

When Jesus healed a little girl who had died

and brought her back to life

and gave her back to her parents,

she couldn't have had any faith in him.

He said those words,

you have been made well

because being made well

meant something more than being physically well.

The miracles were intended to inspire faith,

specifically faith in Jesus as the Messiah.

People came to Jesus with a hope

that he was who they thought he might be

and a desire to see

if he really could do the things that they'd heard.

That faith probably never more than a spark

was found into flame,

not just for them,

but for the people around them by the miracles.

And then the real healing happened.

The person got their physical change, absolutely,

but more importantly,

they and the people around them

understood who Jesus is,

the Son of God.

And most of them went away

so full of worship

that they couldn't keep it to themselves

even though Jesus asked them to.

And so their faith made them well,

not temporarily, not physically,

but into eternity.

Jesus asked for secrecy

because he didn't want people coming to him

for the wrong reasons.

We're told in the Gospel

that because people went away

and did spread the news about what he'd done,

eventually Jesus' faith spread so much

that he couldn't go into towns or villages

in order to meet with people.

If Jesus had gone into a town or village,

he would have been mobbed by the people

who asked for healing day and night.

And so eventually he had to stay outside the towns

in order to do the job that he'd come for.

And of course, it's understandable,

it's understandable

that if Jesus went into towns and villages,

he was mobbed by people desperate for healing,

after all, who doesn't want relief from suffering,

for them or for their loved ones.

But Jesus knew

that if he spent all of his time

tending to physical needs,

he would never be able to do the thing

he actually came to do,

teach and enable humanity

to come back to eternal loving relationship

with God the Holy Trinity.

Now I know that that is a tough lesson to swallow,

even 2,000 years on.

Personally, I find it really hard to square

the belief that Jesus didn't come back to heal,

in fact that Jesus didn't heal everyone he could

with my belief

that Jesus loves and values everyone equally.

But we only need look at the account of Jesus

at the pool of Bethsaida to know that this was so.

At the pool of Bethsaida,

we know that there were scores of people

hanging around outside of a pool

because there was a myth

that when the water stirred,

if you could get into the water, you would be healed.

We now know that the water stirred

because of the change in the water table,

but the myth was that water nymphs

would stir up the water

and if you managed to get into the water at the right time,

then the nymphs would have pity on you

and heal you with your infirmity.

We told that Jesus went to this pool of Bethsaida

and he met with someone

who had been unable to walk his entire life.

He'd spent years at the pool

and when Jesus asked him what he was doing here,

the man explained that there's no one here to help me

get in the waters when the waters are changed.

It's a lovely account

because Jesus touches the man,

heals him, tells him to get up and walk

to take his mat home.

But look beyond that man.

The pool of Bethsaida had scores of people around it,

just like him.

Did Jesus heal all of them?

Well, if he did,

we're certainly not told about it

and I assume that we would be.

The truth is that throughout his ministry,

Jesus disappointed people.

He disappointed St John the Baptist,

who from his jail cell

sent disciples to ask if Jesus really was the Messiah,

presumably because nothing was being done

to free him from Herod.

We know that there were many people

who expected Jesus to be a military leader,

leading the people in glorious revolution

against the Romans.

It never happened.

We know that Judas was disillusioned

with Jesus' ministry.

We know that scores of disciples

left Jesus after difficult pieces of teaching,

such as in John 7,

unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man

and drink his blood,

you have no life in you.

And we're told many left because of this teaching.

Jesus wasn't.

He isn't the person

that so many people want him to be,

because their goals and his don't align.

And to be clear,

their goals are not unworthy.

Freedom from tyranny,

the right to self-determination,

healing from sickness.

These are all good things to want,

but they're not what Jesus came to do.

As human beings,

we are so good at setting our sights

on what we believe is best for us.

We know what we want,

and we know how to get it.

And often, the goals that we set for ourselves

are perfectly lovely,

and we bring those goals in prayer to God,

as we should.

We lay out the roadmap from here to there,

and we tell God in my new detail

all of the bullet points that he has to meet

in order for us to achieve

what we believe is right for us.

But the truth is

that even if we want something good,

it is not always the right thing for us.

When I was 21,

I was certain that God wanted me to go

into theological academia.

But more importantly,

it was my dream.

And there wasn't anything wrong

with wanting that for myself.

But it wasn't my path.

Instead, I was brought down a path

that I swore I would never walk,

sometimes with joy,

often in difficulty to the priesthood.

Now, of course,

over a decade later, I rejoice.

I have the honour of being able to serve this community,

of serving you.

I have so much joy in my life,

which would never have been

if my prayers for funding

for study in America had been answered.

But at the time,

when my funding failed,

it felt like God was rejecting me.

There will be people in this room

who have asked for things

and received the answers that they hoped for.

God does do that.

And there will be people

who have asked for things

and waited for longer than I did

after the door has shut on their hopes,

who still don't understand

what on earth God is playing at.

Trusting and following Jesus

is not an easy path.

It wasn't for the people

who grew up with him in Nazareth,

who said,

How dare this upstart

from our small town have such wisdom?

How dare he pretend to preach to us?

It wasn't easy for them.

It isn't easy for us.

Jesus sent his disciples

on their first journey

to spread the gospel

with nothing but the clothes on their back.

And he did that because he knew

that learning to trust

takes time and effort.

It is a marathon, not a sprint.

We have very little idea

how those trips went,

but I imagine that they were filled

with all kinds of hardship

and moments where the disciples wanted to give up.

Moments when they said,

Why on earth didn't he let us bring

a bag of coins with us

so that we could pay for some food on the journey?

But in Luke 22 verse 35

Luke 22:35

Jesus asked,

When I sent you out

without a purse, bag or sandals,

did you lack anything?

They said, No, not a thing.

We are always looking

for the miracle which will fix everything.

The quick road

which answers our heart's desire.

Sometimes Jesus answers that hope.

Sometimes the healing comes immediately.

But there are also plenty of times

when the road that he has for us

doesn't go in the direction that we expect.

Maybe it even takes us

in a direction we don't want to go.

Whether we get our desired answer

or something totally different,

we are called to remember

this difficult lesson.

The miracle isn't the point.

Trusting is the point.

Trust in the one who is leading.

Let go of the things

which you don't need for this journey.

The things which are getting in your way.

Trust even when it's hard to trust.

Hope even when it's hard to hope.

Have joy even when it's hard to be joyful.

And know that at the end

when you reach your destination

you will be able to say

I didn't lack anything.

Amen.