September 2015 – Proper 18

The verses in Isaiah 35:4-7a are part of a longer poem foretelling the highway in the desert that will bring the Exiles back from Babylon to Jerusalem, and they follow immediately on an oracle in chapter 34 telling of God’s vengeance on Edom that will turn it into burning sand and a dry waste. In that context, these three-and-a-half verses portray a remarkable reversal from violence and threat to well-being and promise. They begin with an admonition to be strong and not fear, because God is coming “with vengeance, with terrible recompense.” With the verses on God’s destruction of Edom still ringing in the background, this promise of recompense sounds like more violence, and the coming of God to “save you” like something that can only be purchased with the suffering of someone else. But the next verse turns “recompense” into a positive, into reward for having endured suffering, as blindness turns to sight and deafness to hearing, as “the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy.” The creative transformation of suffering into reward extends even into the natural world, as lands laid waste by war and exile are regenerated: “the burning sand shall become a pool, and the thirsty ground springs of water” when faithful people return to care for the land and its life and resources. Healing in illness and water in the wilderness are hallmarks of God’s presence and transformative power. In this position in the lectionary, these images set up the healing miracles of Jesus that are to follow in the Gospel.

Psalm 146 also helps to set up the Gospel healings. Of special note in the psalm are the verses promising that God “opens the eyes of the blind” and “lifts up those who are bowed down”; the miraculous note of the first, and the more generally uplifting note of the second, prefigure the exorcism and restoration of hearing and speech given by Jesus in the later lesson. But it is also worth noting that the psalm declares God “loves the righteous” and “cares for the stranger”: the Syrophoenician woman and the man of the Decapolis Jesus encounters in the Mark passage are both Gentiles, “strangers” to the covenant, but proven “righteous” by the faith and confidence they put in Jesus. This breadth of the restoring and transforming power of God is underlined by the assertion that, though identifiable as “the God of Jacob,” this God is “the one who made heaven and earth, the seas, and all that is in them”: God’s creating and recreating work is not limited to the people of Jacob alone, or to any solely human community, but extends to all creatures. Human well-being in turn can only make sense within larger contexts of systemic and even cosmic flourishing according to divine aims for zest and peace. This echoes Isaiah’s coupling of human restoration with the salvation of the land, and helps prevent us from taking the Markan miracles as too narrowly anthropocentric.

The material in James 2:1-10 (11-13) 14-17 has been a battleground in the debate between faith and works ever since the time of Martin Luther; and that is unfortunate, because the polemics have often obscured the real point that James is trying to make. Whatever later Protestant and Catholic theology may have made of it, what is at issue in the original passage is the place of the poor in the life of the church, and how faith in God must include active work on behalf of the poor. James upbraids the Christian community for showing partiality among its members, and most particularly for showing deference to the rich and contempt toward the poor. In the worshiping assembly, James says, someone with fine clothes and gold rings is given a seat of honor, while someone in dirty clothes is forced to stand, or to sit in a servant’s position at someone else’s feet. Such behavior belies the assembly’s stated faith in God, inasmuch as it is God and God only who has “chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom.” The assembly wants to be faithful and to keep “the royal law” – “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” – but to show love only by saying “Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill” without also providing food and shelter and the material means of well-being and shalom is nothing more than an empty gesture that does no actual good. Saving relationship with the God who honors the poor can only be found in honoring the poor, just as any relationship with God can only be found in actualizing in human contexts such aims for zest, harmony, peace, and well-being as God gives. In the end, this passage has nothing to do with some sort of binary choice between faith or works, but is a call put faith to work in loving the neighbor as the self.

There are two healing stories set side by side in Mark 7:24-37, and aside from their proximity they seem to have very little in common. In one, Jesus heals at a distance, with nothing more than a statement; in the other, Jesus heals in close contact, with touch and saliva and a word of command. In one, Jesus prefaces the healing with dialogue; in the other, Jesus accepts the patient immediately. In one, Jesus tries to demure from the miracle, even to the point of comparing the woman seeking healing to a dog; in the other, Jesus makes no issue of the deaf man’s background or religious affiliation. In one, the healing takes place in a very private way, with only the woman herself actually seeing her daughter healed; in the other, a whole crowd is witness, and though ordered to tell no one, they nonetheless proclaim it with zeal. In one, the woman’s faith – a faith so strong that she is even willing to banter with Jesus, playing word-games on who is a dog and who is a child and what kind of care and feeding is duly owed to each – makes her a partner with Jesus in unleashing the healing energy; in the other, the deaf man’s faith is not even mentioned, but his being opened to hearing and speech is essentially passive, simply and solely the work of Jesus’ command. Either story by itself would make a fine study in how healing relationship with Jesus may be entered into, how the transformative power of God may make an entry into human experience. A sermon on the first could stress our creative partnership with God in healing, perhaps echoing the James passage. A sermon on the second could emphasize the closeness of Jesus, the physicality of healing work, perhaps in conjunction with the Isaiah theme of healing for the whole land, the whole context, as well as for the individual. Taken together, though, the two healing stories, precisely because of their many differences, invite reflection on how God’s aims for well-being and right-relationship can work through all sorts of contexts, involving all sorts of people, and the path toward healing will never look quite exactly the same for any two people. Or, for that matter, for any two groups, or communities, or congregations, or nations. The endless inventiveness of God in finding ways to accomplish God’s aims is also part of the good news in this Gospel.