Why Jesus

Sermon

We’re going to start with a simple question this morning. Why did Jesus come to earth? On second thought, not so simple a question!

To answer the question, “Why did Jesus come?” has involved forests’ worth of paper, oceans’ worth of ink, countless hours in study and debate, and a few million theologians, Biblical scholars, preachers, people of faith, and, most likely, people not of faith.

If we were playing Family Feud, and the Neel family was going up against the Hubbard-Groves family, we might learn that the top six reasons why people surveyed believe Jesus came to earth are:
– To save us from our sins
– To burst the bonds of death
– To create the capital-C Church
– To suffer in our place
– To take God’s punishment so we don’t have to
– To turn water into wine

And if you were to look to today’s scripture lesson to provide an answer to the question, “Why did Jesus come to earth?” you would not find it easily. This is a story about what was probably a pretty normal day for Jesus—hanging with his disciples, doing some healing, casting out demons, watering his roots by going off alone and praying, and then doing some more healing. Not a lot of grand theological statements, just some stories about a day in the life of the Lord.

We like to make meaning from stories, of course. Eve ate a piece of fruit that she was told not to eat, and from that we have derived a thought that women should suffer in childbirth, that women are generally weaker when it comes to temptation, that every human that came after Adam and Eve has been tainted with the mark of original sin, and that ever since, God has looked for ways to punish us.

I’m not sure that’s really what the writer of this story intended us to take from it. Maybe he was just talking about the earliest experience of the human interacting with the divine. We’ll never know.

We do that with art, too—apply meaning to a painting that the artist may never have intended. When I studied the Impressionists in college, the course was taught by a Marxist who saw every painting as a comment on class. Is that what Monet and Manet and all those folks meant? Maybe?

Our brain likes to fill in the blanks when something appears to be missing. So when we read a story like this one from Mark’s gospel, we start to fill in the blanks to help us understand how these ten verses fit into the big story of God and humanity. But sometimes that story you read is just a story. And I think this is a story about the nature of healing. And then I go a little further and think maybe that’s really why Jesus came to earth—to heal.

The gospel writers use a few different words we translate as “heal.” One is therapeuo, the verb used in this story, from which we get our word therapy. Another word we translate as “heal” is sozo, which can also be translated as “save,” which then begs the question, did Jesus come to save us or to heal us and is there really any difference?

Speaking of interesting Greek words, there’s diakono, the verb that means “to serve,” from which we get our word deacon. More than one woman I know, upon hearing this story, gets a little miffed that Peter’s mother-in-law (and for the sake of the sermon, let’s call her Bernice), that Bernice has been sick, and Jesus makes her well, and the first thing she does is serve all those men. Holy Patriarchy!

But does this change your perspective on that? In Mark’s gospel, the only people who serve, using this verb, are angels, women, and Jesus. In other words, serving is holy work, entrusted not to all but only to some.

Now Bernice is an interesting character in all of this. What we can surmise is that she lived with her daughter and her son-in-law, so she was likely a widow who had no sons to live with. Her daughter married a hometown boy, Simon Peter, so it’s likely that Bernice had known Peter since he was a kid. And it’s possible that she was not all that happy when Peter dropped his nets to follow Jesus, making no income that day, leaving her daughter and her without a man at home.

At any rate, Bernice is sick with fever, which was understood to be an unnatural force that entered a person’s body. Jesus calls that fever out of her, then extends his hand to help Bernice rise out of bed. That verb “rise”? It’s also the verb used later in the gospel to describe Jesus’ resurrection. So from all of that, I might say that the reason Bernice is so eager to serve is because she has tasted resurrection, new life, healing and saving.

I think it’s safe to say that Jesus came to earth to heal, to heal not only us but all of creation, to restore all creation to its original factory settings (as it were). So Jesus will heal so many people, of fever, of leprosy, of demons, and he will heal them of their isolation as they return to their communities.

He will heal people of ways of thinking about God that have become warped over the centuries, telling them that God does not wish to condemn them but loves them. He will tell them that a person is born blind or deaf not as punishment for their parents’ sin but simply because sometimes people are born blind or deaf, and they need to be helped and not cast out.

He will tell them that even creation responds to God’s presence in the world, that stones cry out at injustice, that God adorns the lilies even more beautifully than Solomon adorned his temple. Jesus will tell the people what the prophets told them, that God need not be worshipped only in some sacred temple with incense and burnt offerings, but the most sincere form of worship is a contrite heart and the desire to do better.

Jesus came to heal, and yet—he didn’t heal everyone. For the dozens he healed that afternoon in Capernaum, there were likely hundreds more who got there too late, who didn’t make it, who went home still broken. So what are we to do?

We carry on his work of healing. Because there’s still a need for that.

When someone I love is sick, especially if they’re sick with something awful, I so often desperately wish I had the hands of a healer, that I could touch them gently on the head or take their hand and lift away the sickness. But I was not given that gift. Few of us are. That is not an excuse not to be about the work of healing.

We need healing for the earth. I was sorry to miss this morning’s adult-education speaker, but all of are aware of the disastrous effects of climate change. Our storms are getting more violent. Extreme temperatures, both hot and cold, are becoming common occurrences. With climate change comes climate refugees. We need to heal the earth, and to do that, we need to stop hurting her. But it’s hard to reduce our plastic consumption and driving a car is so very convenient. It’s hard to lobby not only our own government but the government of other nations to get them to commit to better ecological practices. I am grateful to those who are called to be healers of the earth.

We need healing from our violent responses. Sure, the easiest way to defeat an enemy is to bomb the heck out of them. But what about the non-combatants? What about the destroyed buildings that used to be hospitals or schools or homes? What about a commitment to deploying every single diplomatic possibility before deciding that death is easier than negotiation? We need healing from war, especially the conflict in Gaza and especially the conflict in Ukraine.

We need healing from the ways we harm each other. We need to call out racist jokes, and sexist stereotypes, and anything that hints at homophobia. We need to heal from name-calling and exclusion and hatred. We need to take more deep breaths.

More than that, in order to take up the work of healing that Jesus began, we need to pay attention, to listen, to respond in action and not just thought.

Think for a moment about something in your life that needs healing. It might be a relationship. It might be an illness. It might be a conflict at work. It might be an issue our elected officials are wrangling over. How can you enter in and offer confession or forgiveness or illumination or a third way? How can you write a letter to express what you desire? How can you pray about it?

Healing is like a two-sided coin for us. We are both in need of healing and called to heal others. Henri Nouwen called that being the Wounded Healer and noted that compassion is the key to be both the healed and the healer. As he wrote, “Who can save a child from a burning house without taking the risk of being hurt by the flames? Who can listen to a story of loneliness and despair without taking the risk of experiencing similar pains in his own heart and even losing his precious peace of mind? In short: Who can take away suffering without entering it?”

These stories about Jesus become precious to us because we often find ourselves in them. I have been sick with a migraine and been made well, not by the hands of a healer but by rest, and a cool, dark room, and sumatriptan, and my sweet family, and a good sick-leave policy. You have experienced that sort of thing too. Being sick helps us to be compassionate when someone else is sick and needs us.

Likewise, a person going through a divorce doesn’t really want to talk with the person who’s been joyfully married for sixty years, but someone else who’s been through it. A veteran receives the most care from a fellow veteran.

Which brings us back to Jesus. Why did he come to earth? Maybe it had something to do with wanting to know what it was like to be human, to be limited by skin and muscle and bone, to experience hunger and thirst and loneliness, to feel abandoned, to dance at a wedding, to sing the psalms, to hold and be held.

And so God put on flesh and became like us, we are that loved. And so in response to God’s compassion, in response to healing, we rise, healed to heal others, to serve, to love.