Monday, July 11, 2011

The Heart Of the Matter (Sort Of)

Mark 1:29-45
The full range of Jesus’ humanity is on display in the gospels. He is enraged at those who do business in the temple. He weeps at the death of a friend. He is amazed at the faith—or lack of it—of those around him. He wishes fervently to avoid a painful death. In our reading from Mark for today we also find Jesus moved to pity by the plight of a leper. What makes this account all the more humanizing of Jesus is that the word used for Jesus’ emotion has to do with one’s bowels or, if you’d prefer, guts. “A leper came to (Jesus) begging him,” Mark tells us, “and kneeling he said to him, ‘If you choose, you can make me clean.’ Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, ‘I do choose. Be made clean!’” (Mark 1:40-41).

Personally I haven’t often thought about Jesus having intestines. It just never figures into my Christology. According to Mark, though, Jesus experienced a yearning in the pit of his stomach. Incidentally, Luke uses this same expression in describing the feelings of the good Samaritan and the prodigal’s father, so this is not a concept reserved for the Son of God. Nor is it a feeling we generate for ourselves. It is one that springs upon us, from somewhere in the depths of our being as it were. But something must have happened in the centuries since Jesus healed the leper, something to change the notion of pity as associated with the digestive track. Today we are more accustomed to expressions like, “I hate your guts,” or “the thought of it turns my stomach,” or “you make me sick.” All too often pity and compassion are seen as weaknesses, uninvited intruders who distort our efforts at clear thinking and dispassion. How do we tie the gospel understanding of compassion (and Jesus’ response to it) together with the contemporary meaning and make sense of it?

We start with Jesus, who any number of times could have said, “Enough! I can only do so much!” And though he found it necessary to seek solitude for prayer and meditation, Jesus never lost the capacity to care, to be moved by the circumstances of others. Maybe what makes Jesus truly human is that he was truly humane, was truly vulnerable to those around him in ways that we far too often are not. While we might have said to the leper, “Yuck! Get away from me,” Jesus felt the needs of the man so intensely that he was compelled to act, his true humanity drawing on his divine identity to create a miracle. Jesus, then, has worked to correct our understanding or who we are as humans. And though he was healing the leper, maybe it is really to us that he says, “Be made clean!”

Prayer: God of creation, restore in us the true human-ness that you intended so that we might live as your people with vulnerability to those around us. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

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