Isaiah 35:1-7a
Mark 7:24-37
One of my all-time favorite TV shows is “Call the Midwife” from the BBC. It’s a great show for many reasons. The characters are diverse in their life experiences and have their own arcs of change and development that intersect with one another. The costumes and sets that show the evolution of time, fashion, and technology in London’s East End in the mid-20th century are fun to watch. In any given episode there are multiple plots going on as we follow the midwives in their work and the happenings in the broader community.
What keeps me excited for each new season, though, is that the soul of the show is healing.
The show just released its thirteenth season, and from the beginning, through all of them themidwives know and act as if healing is wholeness. They look after the health of their patients’entire person. They help mothers and babies be as physically healthy as they can be, of course,but the midwives are also always listening for other ways people may be struggling: there aremothers who are on their own and who need companionship, there are families who are houseless or living in deplorable conditions who need advocacy, there are elders who need compassion and a reminder that they are needed in their community. We also get to see the midwives themselves find healing, when painful stories from their past catch up with them, and when heart-wrenching cases cannot find perfect solutions.
Healing and wholeness come from the same root word, and it is almost as if the writer of Mark knew that when putting together today’s reading.
In our first story, Jesus has gone north, into present-day Lebanon, to a place that was mostly Gentile. Even though the text says Jesus was trying to lay low, a woman found him, bows
before him and begs him to heal her suffering daughter. Jesus’ reply to the woman is rude and dismissive – there’s no way around that. He insults the woman as a Gentile, and suggests that she is not deserving of his help.
Even after that, the woman persists, and her retort both exposes the lack of compassion and insult from Jesus and shows that she will not stop seeking the healing she needs for her daughter. In the story, Jesus simply says, “For saying that” she will find her daughter well at home.
What is the healing that was needed here? The woman’s daughter is tormented by an “unclean spirit,” some kind of mental and perhaps physical illness that made her suffer. This needed healing and the girl’s mother was so single-minded that she was willing to approach a teacher from a different religious tradition about whom she had only heard stories.
I wonder how many people the mother had spoken to, how many healers she had already
approached, how many things she had already tried to no avail. I wonder how many people
thought she should just resign herself to the suffering, and if any of them actually said it out loud to her.
I wonder about the times of doubt the mother had: about whether she would ever find anything that would help, about whether or not she could be going about things differently, about whether anyone would ever actually listen to her rather than dismissing her calls for help.
The mother needed healing, too. She needed to be seen and heard and when Jesus refused to do that at first, she stood up to him. She would not let him leave without finding healing, and that time she was successful. Her daughter was healed, yes, but she also received the affirmation she had been missing.
In our second story, some people bring a deaf man with a speech impediment to Jesus for
healing. Instead of responding by voice and healing at a distance, here Jesus does almost the opposite. He takes the man away from the crowd, and touches his ears and his tongue, and asks that they be opened, and they are.
What was the healing needed here? The deaf man was brought to Jesus by others. I’m sure
these people were well-meaning but it makes me wonder how often he was able to
communicate for himself. Did anyone ever slow down enough from their verbal and auditory world to give him a chance to express himself, and be heard? I wonder how often the people he met saw him as a whole person and not just as his disability. I wonder if he felt isolated even though he was surrounded by people. He needed healing, and the healing he got that was most profound probably had nothing to do with his ability to hear or speak. Jesus took him away to a private place, where there were no crowds to watch or look at the man. Jesus touched the man’s face – a very intimate gesture. I wonder if any others took the time to be this tender with the man.
There is certainly healing needed in each of these stories, and the healing that we don’t see first is still needed. What we learn in these two stories is that God is a Healer, and she is a Healer of the wounds that are not the most obvious but are no less serious.
This healing is for us, too. And not only that but we can be healers to others, too. This is truly good news because there is a lot in our world that needs healing. In the two stories we heard today, I would also say that the people as a whole needed healing, too. We could spend a lot more time talking about the healing needed for societies that don’t take women seriously and who are too busy to stop the suffering of children. We could spend even more time, and we will, talking about the ways that our society dismisses the needs of disabled people, keeping them ostracized from the places and activities that would bring them further into community.
What needs healing, and what would make us whole? Those questions can guide us to seek
the healing we need and to become the kinds of healers our world needs. Thanks be to God, amen.
Weybridge Congregational Church 