This is from a couple of months ago.
Texts: 1 Kings 17.8-24; Ps 147; Gal 1.11-24; Lk 7.11-17
There are two main themes in our texts today. The first we can trace as a historical progression. Elijah helps a gentile as something of an exception. Jesus helps the outsiders – ‘the widow, the unclean, the Gentile, those of the lowest status’[1] – in a more programmatic fashion. Paul is appointed, directly by the exalted Jesus, to take the message of God’s acceptance to the gentiles. Given the demographic of our church I think we can safely say we’ve assimilated this message. In fact, the problem for the church for a long time has been how to relate to Israel rather than how to include the gentiles. You won’t be surprised to know I do not have the solution to that problem this morning. So let’s focus instead on the second theme.
This is a much more ironic theme for the season of ordinary time: that of miracles. Ordinary time is the season away from the feasts and highlights of salvation history, when we focus on how to follow Christ in the mundane texture of life. Not many miracles there. Yet this morning we have several stories of religious fireworks, even more if we set the stories in context. In 1 Kings 17.1-7 Elijah is miraculously fed and prophesies, correctly, that there will be a drought. Then our story follows: he is told by God he’ll meet a widow and he does; he prophesies that her food will last and it does; he raises her son from the dead. The Lukan story is even more impressive. In the story before ours Jesus heals someone from a distance without even seeing him, then he raises this corpse from the dead with a word. In the background of Paul’s claims about the origins of his gospel are the stories of him meeting the ascended Christ on the road to Damascus, a meeting so dramatic he literally fell on the floor. Is the lectionary deliberately designed to make us feel inadequate about our religious experience? Let’s not be too hasty.
These miracle stories are first of all designed to tell us something about God. They tell us that God, unlike the idols, is alive: God acts, God responds, God intervenes in people’s lives. They tell us that God is compassionate. This is part of the hinge of Luke’s story: Jesus’ compassion mirrors God’s. Miracles also serve to verify a prophet as true, and so to give authority to his or her messages, pronouncements, judgements and instructions. Luke is trying to tell us, amongst other things, that Jesus is a greater prophet than even Elijah. Where Elijah has to pray three times, Jesus simply speaks a word. He seems to perform the role that God performs in the Elijah story. With Jesus, the miracles were signs pointing to the truth of his proclamation of the kingdom of God and the character of the God who would rule such a kingdom. That’s why so many, if not all, of Jesus’ miracles restored people to their community as much as they did anything else. I think it’s fair to say that, ‘Together with the proclamation of the gospel, the healing of the sick is Jesus’ most important testimony to the dawning kingdom of God.’[2]
In Matthew 10.8 Jesus tells his disciples, ‘heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out demons: you have received freely so give freely.’ And sends them off to do it. This became an important, some would say essential, part of the church’s work. The early church recognised this by having an office of exorcist along with deacons and priests and bishops. The church still has a liturgy of exorcism, as well as liturgies for healing and anointing with oil, partly based on James 5 (which interestingly mentions the story of Elijah and the rain).
So now comes the hard part. The challenge for us is neither to disbelieve in miracles, ignore them, close ourselves off from them on the one hand, and on the other hand not to chase after them and ignore the wider context of the kingdom of god to which they point as signs. Miracles are frequently attested throughout history in all kinds of religions, so I think Enlightenment scepticism, though understandable, is misplaced. But miracles are also signs of the restoration of the people of God and of the opening up of God’s people to all. The challenge is both to follow the church in taking seriously Jesus’ commission to his disciples to ‘heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out demons,’ and to pursue justice and mercy.
It is useful at this point to pay attention to a tension in our tradition. On the one hand, and again James 5 makes the connection, it seems that in the church’s experience throughout history, it is the extremely righteous or holy person, the saint, whose prayers are effective, who are the conduit for miracles. In the gospels there are stories of the disciples failing to cast out demons that seem to be attributed to a failure in righteousness. Or we could think of demons crying out in the presence of Jesus but not in the presence of others. Or read Acts 19 in which some demons say to the exorcists, ‘we know Jesus and Paul but not you,’ and the beat them up. There is a similar story from the early days of Christian monasticism. Abba Zeno began to pray for a demon to leave a person. ‘The demon began to cry out, ‘Perhaps, Abba Zeno, you think I am going away because of you, look, down there Abba Longinus is praying, and challenging me and it is for fear of his prayers that I go away, for to you I would not even have given an answer.’[3] And there are many similar stories throughout church history.
On the other hand, there is also in the church’s experience ample testimony to new or ordinary believers performing miracles. In Matthew 10.8 when Jesus sends out the disciples with their rather tricky job description there is no indication that they had achieved some remote level of sanctity. Just recently Deirdre told us the story of a man who was converted in an Indian village and immediately went around praying for people’s healing and seeing it happen. The modern charismatic movement and Pentecostal churches provide many similar stories.
What, then, should we conclude? Today’s texts make us aware of God’s freedom, our inability to pin God down. They challenge us to accept that freedom and also God’s power. They challenge us to work with God and be open to whatever God may want to do, and that must include working to create the kingdom to which miracles are designed to point us. Yet evil continues to happen. In the ordinary experience of life, for many people all over the world, ourselves included, very often God seems absent and impotent, hidden and passive. Perhaps, then, we read these stories near the beginning of ordinary time to remind us that God is also present, alive, compassionate and powerful. It is to living out this contradiction, rather than trying to collapse it, that we turn our faces for the rest of the Christian year.
[1] Joel Green’s commentary on Luke.
[2] Jürgen Moltmann, The Spirit of Life, 188.
[3] Sayings of the Desert Fathers, Longinus, §4, 123.
Recent Comments