BaptistWay Bible Series for December 30: Jesus and hopeless situations

Posted: 12/21/07

BaptistWay Bible Series for December 30

Jesus and hopeless situations

• Mark 4:35-5:43

By Andrew Daugherty

Christ Church, Rockwall

During a political campaign season, presidential candidates running for elected office are examined under the microscope of the American public. Amidst the many storms of scrutiny, they must respond to questions raised about their personal and professional lives. While their public records are visible for all to see, their private worlds are exposed through both facts and rumors that wash up on the shores of newspaper headlines and tabloid magazines. When it finally comes to who gets elected, we can hope it is a person who possesses those rare qualities of experience, character and self-knowledge; one who is not so whipped by the shifting winds of popularity that they do or say whatever it takes to deny public failure or prevent personal humiliation.

One New York Times columnist recently wrote the American presidency is a bacterium. David Brooks comments: “It finds the open wounds in the people who hold it. It infects them, and the resulting scandals infect the presidency and the country. The person with the fewest wounds usually does best in the White House and is best for the country.”

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What the presidency does to a politician is what life can do to a person. Life can be a bacterium that finds the wounds of a person or even helps create the conditions that make those wounds possible. Situations and circumstances make people vulnerable to fear and physical and psychic illnesses and even death. At one time or another and to one degree or another, life presents itself as an experience of suffering.

It can be claimed that Jesus is for all times the leader of the free world (the whole world he came to set free). Yet, like his followers, even Jesus would not be able to boast about being the person with the fewest wounds.

While there were political dimensions to his ministry, Jesus never was purely a political personality. He never seemed to care about his public personae as much as a savvy politician does. He cared so little about his public reputation, he ate and drank openly with sinners and risked religious ridicule by violating ritual purity laws such as touching the woman who had been hemorrhaging for 12 years.

The people’s desperate times called for Jesus’ dramatic gestures of healing and renewal. In the episodes of this passage, Jesus tends mercifully to the “walking wounded” of his time. It is a tender foreshadowing of a time when Jesus would have no one to tend his wounds.

Mark’s Gospel again portrays the power of Jesus to respond to the troubles and crises of the people he encountered. As these miracle stories show, Jesus created peace out of chaos, ordering the storm to stand still. He restored the sanity and peace of the mentally disturbed man by banishing the spirit that had possessed him. He healed the woman who had suffered hemorrhaging 12 years. He revived the life a 12-year-old girl, who everyone else believed to be dead.

Just as Mark before had disclosed the kingdom of God through the stories Jesus told, he now discloses the identity of Jesus as Christ through the acts Jesus performs. These miracles accompany Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom of God. While his message about the kingdom of God was his primary mission, the miracles provided signs the message he came proclaiming was indeed the truth and power of God.

This is where the contemporary reader must ask an important question about these miracle stories. Rather than interpret these stories in “scientific” categories, it may be more faithful to Mark’s Gospel to interpret these stories in “religious” categories.

If Jesus is to be a living reality that makes a difference in the hopeless experiences of our lives, the question is not, “Did Jesus perform these miracles” The more enduring question becomes: “What do these miracle stories mean for our lives today?” If there is enduring truth to be told, then the calming of the storm is not an occasional event that happened only once upon a time. It must be a living experience with the Spirit of Christ that can happen for us today.

Consider two stories from this passage. Mark’s first storm story helps us understand that riding in the eye of a hurricane is more than just a boat ride on a stormy day. For some of us, storm stories don’t have anything to do with the weather. Scientifically, Doppler radars and 7-day forecasts may tell us to bring an umbrella to work, evacuate a city or take cover. But they don’t provide much help when the biopsy test results come back positive or our marital relationship is on the rocks or when the storms we feel are inside of us rather than around us. To say Jesus calmed this storm on the Sea of Galilee doesn’t give us much comfort until we come to know that Jesus has the power to calm the storms of our lives.

Mark’s second story about the demoniac deserves considerable attention with regard to the men in charge of the pigs that were driven in to the sea. The meaning of this miracle story affects us in the way Christ tends to affect change in the status quo. Obviously a man was healed in this story, yet the owners of the pigs had a different perspective, because their herd had been destroyed. This meant economic loss to them.

How are we like the owners and keepers of the pigs? What are the ways in which we don’t want to be disturbed? Maybe we don’t want our comforts, our money, our beliefs or our relationships to be different or disturbed by Christ’s call to us. Maybe our fear makes us cling to life as we know it rather than life as God wants it to be.

Whatever it is, this story makes a claim on our lives that goes beyond us making a claim about the scientific aspects of this miracle story. The words Jesus spoke to the wind and the waves are the same ones he spoke to the demon-possessed man in Mark 1:25. Perhaps they are words we need him to speak to us, too: “Peace! Be still!” (4:39).