Here’s my longer sermon notes from this afternoon’s Metro Christian Centre service (dated 18th September 2022), kicking off our new series ENCOUNTERS.
You can also catch up with this via MCC’s YouTube channel (just give us time to get the video uploaded 😉)
DAZZLED
We’re starting a series called, Encounters, this morning. We’re going to spend some time in the Gospels, focussing on a handful of the stories where people interact with Jesus, and Jesus interacts with them.
As we look at these passages, I want us to understand that we are seeing God on display, theology embodied. These encounters make declarations about God.
In the words of the late Frederick Buechner, ‘Jesus is the Word made flesh, the truth narrated in bone and bowel, space and time.’[i]
The intent is not that we dryly study God, or jump to life application. Instead, to borrow something Victor Hugo wrote in Lés Misérables, I want us to be dazzled by God.[ii]
There’s nothing wrong with study. But to be dazzled means that we can admit that we don’t grasp it all. We can be confused and have questions, whilst, at the same time, still being drawn in wonder towards God.
To echo the words of the disciples, when Jesus silenced a raging storm, a healthy part of our Christian faith should be the perplexed, dazzled, awe-inspired question of ‘Who is this man?’[iii] Curiosity is an act of worship.
We’re going to read six verses this morning, in Mark 1:40-45.
As a way of a brief bit of context: Mark’s gospel is a fast-paced, energetic non-stop roller coaster of events. One of Mark’s favourite words is and. You won’t notice it in the English, because the translators have smoothed it out. But in the original language, Mark is starting more-or-less every sentence with the ‘and this’ and ‘and then that’… and … and … and … and … and …
Mark’s like a sugar-overloaded schoolchild excitedly telling you about the best day ever!
This is not to say that Mark has no point to make; he’s not ranting all over the place without a purpose.
Like the other gospel writers, Mark is communicating something about Jesus to his audience, and that guides him to place the stories about Jesus (like the one we’re going read about a man with leprosy) where they are.
Because of the points they wish to make, Matthew places this story after the Sermon on the Mount (Mt. 8:1-4), whereas Luke places it after a showdown at a synagogue in Nazareth and before the Sermon on the Plain (Lk. 5:12-16).[iv]
Mark places this story right near the start of his Gospel. Jesus was baptized. And then tempted. And then Jesus started to announce the Kingdom of God. And then he called Simon, and James, and John. And then he was in a synagogue and did something amazing. And then he’s just been to Simon’s mother-in-law’s house and healed her of a fever. And then loads of people showed up. And he healed crowds of people, and cast demons out of people. And then Jesus said he had to go to other places. And now, Jesus is travelling around the region of Galilee and this man comes and falls at his feet.
Mark is places the story here because one of the themes he wants his audience to ask is ‘who is this man?’ Jesus performs a powerful miracle here that has only happened once before, by a prophet called Elisha.[v] So is he a prophet? And then, in the stories that follow, he does things only the Priests and Temple are authorised to do? And then, Jesus interprets and applies the law like he’s Moses, like he’s the authority behind it? And, then, like in Mark 5, he calms a storm, and does other extraordinary things no one has ever done!
‘Who is this man?’ is a question that erupts out of every scene in Mark’s gospel.
Yet, the answer forms the bookends of the gospel. In the beginning, at Jesus’ baptism, we hear a Divine voice declare, ‘This is my beloved Son…’ (Mk. 1:11). At the end of this gospel, as Jesus is dying on the cross, the answer spills, ironically, out of the lips of a Roman soldier, ‘Truly, this was the Son of God.’ (Mk. 15:39)[vi]
Anyway, let’s read …
READ: MARK 1:40-45
CUBICLES AND CATEGORIES
I’ve just started learning how to swim. I could already drift with style, in various poses, from one end of a swimming pool to the other. But, I could never do that breathing thing properly. And, I’m told, the breathing thing is really important. I’ll admit, I’m finding it hard.
Breathing isn’t the only struggle, though. I’d forgotten how much I disliked the difficult process of getting clean and dry afterwards.
It’s not just that it’s nigh impossible to get dry—it’s that humid that every time you dry yourself, you’re wet again. My big problem is the floor of the cubical.
I’m no germaphobe—I happily apply the five-second rule if I drop food on most floors (I’ll even go to a full minute in the case of chocolate, or forget the limit entirely, as long as it’s my chocolate). However, the floor of a swimming pool, changing-room cubicle looks dirtier than the grassy surface outside—you know, the place with all the dirt!
So, I end up getting dry in a weird way: I get as dry as I can with the towel, and then the towel goes on the floor. I wipe my feet on one half of the towel, like it’s a door mat, and then I dry them on the other half of the towel. You can be certain that once that towel goes on the floor, it’s not touching me again, no matter how wet I am!
There’s even been times, when the floor has been so dirty, that I’ve squatted on the cubicle bench.
I dropped some chocolate on the cubical floor, yesterday—it’s still there!
It’s unclean! And, maybe it’s just me, but there is this psychology of disgust, a ‘yuck’ factor, that says if I touch it, I’ll be unclean, too, because dirty things make clean things dirty.
I’m saying this, because when we read this story then, rightly, our minds go back to the rules in Leviticus about ‘clean’ and ‘unclean’ things, and those rules form an important background to this story. When we read of categories as ‘clean’ and ‘unclean’ we can wrongly assume that they are talking about a ‘yuck factor’. They’re not. I’m not going to do a study, here, but they are more complicated and nuanced than that.
Having said that, Israel did have rules involving hygiene. They were not as advanced as we are today, with our medical understanding of disease and infection, but these rules, like hand washing, and burying your personal waste outside the camp, and even quarantine of infectious people, where way ahead of their day.
In Leviticus 13 and 14, we have rules about inspecting and isolating contagious skin conditions outside of the camp. The word in the Hebrew (and in the Greek of Mark 1), is often translated leprosy, but it covers a range of skin infections and only just what we would call Hansen’s disease, today.
These quarantine rules were ultimately about compassionate community—about the prevention of spreading sickness and remembering the humanity of others. The rules were not about us forgetting the inherent goodness and humanity of the people who were infected.
They were not about encouraging a psychology of disgust.
For example, there was no rule saying you could not touch anyone with a skin disease. No rule saying you could not visit them, eat with them, and talk with them. Sure, you may have to do some ceremonial cleaning and bathing afterwards, but there was nothing stopping you touch them!
Actually, the priests are explicitly instructed to touch them—it’s part of the inspection process!
There was also no rule saying that those with leprosy couldn’t visit and move around in the non-quarantine camp. After all, the rules in Leviticus 13 say a person with leprosy should announce ‘Unclean!’ as they move around—as a way of signalling, ‘I’m infectious’ (a modern equivalent would be me saying to someone, ‘don’t get close, I have a cold’). An ‘unclean’ person who had to stay outside the camp with others who are also ‘unclean’ would not need such a rule.
Again, the rules were not about us forgetting the humanity of the person who was afflicted.
The problem is not the rules, the problem is with our psychology of disgust, because it’s not long before we wrongly associate the disease and the person as one and the same.
It reminds of school, when one kid would have head lice, and we would wrongly treat them as if they were one giant nit.
AFFLICTED
Rules can warp, human hearts can harden, rules guiding compassionate care can corrupt and distort into alienation and stigma, and instead of being loved, people are wrongly shunned, feared, and looked upon with disgust.
It’s not just that we weirdly fear them because we think touching them will make us “dirty”. We go further than this, by thinking that even associating with them makes us dirty.
People are not their afflictions. The individual in this story is not a leper; he’s a man with leprosy. And I like the way the gospel writers present him, because they don’t write about him in a objectifying way. This man has agency—he takes action. He uses his desire, his voice and his body, in a wonderful bodily performance, to get right in front of Jesus.[vii] He is a human person.
And yet, in the eyes of his community, he’s a disease, untouchable—‘unclean’, like my cubical floor. His physical state produces revulsion in them.[viii] In Luke’s account of this story, we’re told his leprosy is an ‘advanced case’. So, we could rightly presume that he hasn’t been touched for years. He’s revolting to them
He sees the same people day after day, and they see him. But there is no connection.
To borrow the words of Charles Dickens, his life is the loneliest of lives: a life of solitude among a familiar crowd.[ix] He lives in a world without touch.
None of us are made for that kind of life. One of our greatest needs is human contact, to be touched (appropriately) by other people. In the words of Pastor A. J. Soboda, ‘when we aren’t touched, we die a slow death.’[x]
Touch is a God created need. Biologically speaking, the biggest organ in our body is the sensory organ for touch—we call it skin. Tellingly, this disease afflicts this man’s skin, making it insensitive, and the community mimic the insensitivity of his condition by being desensitised to the man.
We’ll look at this ‘social mimicking’ again, in another story, in a couple of weeks.
It’s telling, that his first words to Jesus are, ‘If you are willing…’. He has come to Jesus because he has heard about what he is able to do. He may not know who Jesus is, but he recognises that God’s power is with Jesus. So, when he says these words, has he come to believe, because people are so unwilling to deal with him and so insensitive towards him, that God is, too?
GOD TOUCHES
I don’t know what this man expected when he fell face down before Jesus and says, ‘If you want to, you can make me clean.’ (Lk. 5:12), but he wasn’t expecting what happened next.
‘Moved with compassion, Jesus touched him.’[xi]
This touch dazzles me. It probably dazzled this man even more! Jesus is not squeamish. There’s no disgust or revulsion in this touch. There is no confusion in Jesus’ view between the man and the disease. Even before he says the words ‘I want to’, Jesus touch says I see you, I know you.
There’s so much sensitivity, love, grace and mercy conveyed in this one touch.
In contrast to our world—where dirty things make clean things dirty, sickness infects health, and death infects life—Jesus’ touch infects this man with life. ‘In the gospel story, dirty things are made clean by a holy God’.[xii]
As an aside, please note, that by healing this man, Jesus isn’t just restoring this man’s body, but also restoring his place in the community.[xiii]
To point out the obvious, Jesus did not need to touch this man—he could have just spoken. Jesus wanted to.[xiv]
And he seems to make a habit of this! In Mark’s gospel alone:
Mark 1:31 – Jesus takes hold of the hand of Simon’s mother-in-law.
Mark 5:41 – Jesus takes hold of a dead girl’s hand.
Mark 7:31-36 – Jesus places his fingers in a deaf man’s ears, and his spittle-covered fingers on the same man’s mute tongue.
Mark 8:22-25 – His lays his hands on a man’s blind eyes (and again, his spit is involved)
Mark 9:25-27 – He takes the hand of motionless boy.
Mark 10:13 – Parents are bringing their kids to Jesus, for him to place his hands on their heads and bless them. And he has to rebuke his disciples because they try to stop it.
And then there are the times when Jesus is touched: A lady, considered ‘unclean’ due to a health predicament, comes and touches the dirty hem of Jesus’ robe; Another lady, considered ‘dirty’ by her community for other reasons, comes and washes Jesus dirty feet.
There is so much to say about these touches.
But, again and again, Jesus touches people, people he doesn’t need to—dead people, unclean people, sick people, unwanted people, and they touch him, and divine life and dignity keeps getting transmitted here, there and everywhere.
What is this all about? What is Mark, and the other gospel writers telling us. Well, you could put it this way, as one person said it, ‘The Gospel is a story about God in a body touching other bodies.’[xv]
I like that—it’s true. But I think we can go further than that. So, as minister and psychologist, Ed Welch said, ‘This is the Gospel: God touches us.’[xvi]
God has always had this approach. The story of humanity is God embracing earth and breathing his life into it.
To echo the creation story, God has always been delighted to lovingly handle what we won’t and breathe divine life into it.
SPAT AT
By the time we get to the end of Mark’s gospel, things have taken a turn, and it is like Jesus has become ‘a leper’, the pariah.
He’s rejected. He’s bullied. He’s spat at, and insulted. He’s taken outside of the city and executed in a dehumanising fashion that was purposely designed to illicit disgust and revulsion in anyone who would look upon him.
Jesus is afflicted by human hate and exclusion and filth.
All this touches him, it’s laid upon him.
And yet, in this moment, God incarnate takes all this upon himself, God takes up the dirt of our humanity, embraces it, and, in the resurrection, infects a dying world with life.
This is the Gospel: God touches us.
NO I IN GOSPEL
Sometimes, we get the gospel backwards, and we can present it backwards to others. We can wrongly think it’s about us touching God, finding God spiritually, or us grasping God intellectually. But it’s God who touches us, and infects us with life.
For those who are already stumbling after Jesus, learning to follow him, let us never forget this.
None of us is here because we are perfect, or because we have figured it all out, and we are not pretending to be perfect, either. We call ourselves Christian because of God’s touch, and all we have done is recognised our need of that touch. We’re here, simply because we’re are dazzled by Jesus!
We may not believe that God does want to touch us! Maybe we think that God has no desire to have anything to do with us. Maybe we think God looks at us, and deals with us, the way that I deal with the changing room floor at the swimming pool.
Maybe we think that way because that’s what others have told us?
But it’s not true. There is no one God does not want to touch. There’s no one that God doesn’t want to share his life, grace and mercy with.
The question is not God’s willingness. God wants to, and God has done so through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.
The questions are:
Will we let God touch us?
And, will we touch others with the same sensitive, compassionate, merciful way?
‘You can spot people who don’t know Jesus very well because the world they see is always so ugly. Even if they use all sorts of religious language, don’t be misled – people who get touched by Jesus don’t ignore the hurt and pain in the world, and yet they see so much beauty in it.’
Jonathan Martin, Prototype
[i] Frederick Buechner, Secrets in the the Dark (HarperOne, 2006), p. 135
[ii] In his opening chapters of Lés Misérables, Victor Hugo describes his character, Bishop Charles-François Bienvenu, as someone ‘[who] did not study God; he was dazzled by him.’
[iii] Mark 4:35-41
[iv] In Matthew, this story occurs as part of 10 miracles stories after Jesus has delivered the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 8:1-4). It’s an echo of the Exodus story: were there were ten marvellous signs that led Israel out of bondage in Egypt and towards a mountain experience with God, and the formation of the nation of Israel. Jesus, however, reverses this: he brings God’s Kingdom manifesto and then performs ten marvellous wonders to inaugurate it. Matthew is making a point. What do you think it is?
In Luke, this story occurs in chapter 5:12-16, before the Sermon of the Plain, but after Jesus makes some bold and controversial claims in a synagogue—claims that reference the healing of leper called Naaman by a prophet called Elisha (a story you can read about in 2 Kings 5). Again, Luke is making a point by placing the story there; what do you think it is?
[v] As previously said, you can read the story of the healing of Naaman in 2 Kings 5. Interestingly, Jesus miraculous feeding of the five thousand (Mk. 6:30) and four thousand (Mk. 8:1) are also amplified ‘echoes’ of on another miracle of Elisha’s, recorded in the verses preceding the healing of Naaman (2 Kings 4:42-44). Perhaps it is more true, Christologically speaking, to state that Elisha’s miracle was a diminished echo (a shadow, a foreshadowing) of what would come in Jesus.
[vi] Even the evil, unclean spirits, that Jesus casts out of people throughout this narrative, know it, and he commands them to be silent about it (e.g. Mk. 1:23-25, 34). I suppose, we could sum up Mark’s ‘apocalyptic’ question this way: God acknowledges it, the evil spirits acknowledge it, and even a gentile acknowledges it, but will God’s people Israel acknowledge the unveiling of Jesus as the Holy One (Mk. 1:24), the Son of God?
[vii] If you want to read more about this man’s ‘bodily performance’, then I would highly recommend Louise J. Lawrence, Sense and Stigma: Depictions of Sensory-Disabled Characters, Chp 4: The Stench of Untouchability; Stinking Humiliation; The Sensory Tactics of the Leper.
[viii] Amy-Jill Levine, Ben Witherington III, The Gospel of Luke, New Cambridge Bible Commentary
[ix] Dickens uses this description to speak of Stephen Blackpool’s living exile in Hard Times, Book 2, IV, Men and Brothers.
[x] A. J. Swoboda, The Dusty Ones
[xi] Or is it ‘moved with anger’, as some other ancient manuscripts state? And if so, what is Jesus angry about? Like many, I don’t think he is angry at the man approaching him. More likely, Jesus was angry at the man’s predicament and the social structures that mimicked his condition.
[xii] A. J. Swoboda, The Dusty Ones
[xiii] As an important aside, Jesus’ miracles are not him showing off, or performance pieces for our entertainment, as if they just furnish us (and the Gospel writers) with spectacular stories: they communicate the heartbeat, challenge and promise of God’s Kingdom. It’s also vital to remember that Jesus was not merely curing people (medically) through his miracles, but equally (dare I say, primarily?) healing them socially, by providing solutions to the problems that resulted from illness, like alienation, marginalisation, poverty, and communal shame. By announcing that the man was clean, and sending him to the Temple authorities, Jesus was restoring this man’s place within community.
[xiv] The Roman Centurion asking Jesus to heal his servant immediately follows Matthew’s account. In this instance, Jesus just speaks, from a great distance, and someone is healed. This story follows for a number of thematic reasons in Matthew, but maybe Matthew uses it also to highlight the importance of Jesus touching this leprosy-afflicted man.
[xv] Jonathan Martin, Prototype (Tyndale, 2013), p. 143
[xvi] Ed Welch, Shame Interuppted, p. 135
TRISTAN SHERWIN 
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