Chapter 7 - The Untouchables

The human touch

 In 1987 Princess Diana was photographed holding hands with an AIDS patient.  This stunned the world.  It was shocking.  How could someone do this?  In 1987, people were scared of AIDS, some believing that it could be transmitted by casual contact.  And here, not just anyone, but Princess Diana, possibly the next Queen, was holding the hand of a man with AIDS.

 She said, “HIV does not make people dangerous to know, so you can shake their hands and give them a hug.  Heaven knows they need it.”

 The world was changed that day.  Attitudes to the disease changed.  Awareness was raised.  But I suspect the biggest change happened in that man.  For the first time in a while, he might have felt accepted, loved, special.  In a culture of fear, suspicion, even hate, of people like him, with AIDS, for someone to reach out to him in compassion like this must have been life-changing.  Especially when that someone was Princess Diana.

 In the Indian Hindu caste system, there’s a group of people known as Untouchables, they’re at the bottom of the social ladder, and they have little or no chance of climbing higher.  They have generally only ever been given the jobs that are considered beneath everyone else – in the days before sanitation, it was their job to clean up people’s mess…  Mother Teresa of Calcutta saw the untouchables as human beings, when many saw them as less than animals.  As she worked among the slums, the poorest of India’s poor, she touched the untouchables, serving them as she would anyone else.

U can’t touch this

 In Jesus’ day, lepers were the untouchables.  But it stems from the Old Testament, from the Levitical laws.  In Leviticus chapters 13 and 14, there are detailed regulations, describing varieties and symptoms of leprosy, and there’s the protocol for how to deal with it.  Of course, the word leprosy in the Bible doesn’t equate to what we know as leprosy – Hansen’s disease – but it was an umbrella term for various skin conditions, like psoriasis, dermatitis, eczema… These were considered ‘defiling’ skin diseases, which made people unclean to take part in worship.  But the fear was that they might be contagious, and disqualify others from worship too.  Let’s remember, this was in the days before doctors and medicine as we know it.

 So the risk had to be managed.  They couldn’t have it spreading through the camp.  The symptomatic individual would be assessed by the priest.  If it is thought to be a defiling skin disease, they’re excluded or isolated for seven days, and then reassessed.  It seems to me, reading Leviticus, that the hope was for the individual to be reintegrated, and that’s the direction that the legislation heads in.  That wouldn’t always be possible, but I believe that the aim was not primarily to cast people out of the community, the camp, but to protect the camp, the purity and safety of the community – hopefully with as little exclusion as possible.

Out of touch

 Yet, it seems that by the time of Jesus, in an age where certain groups were obsessive about ritual purity, that exclusion became the norm for people with such skin conditions.  And it seems that they were put out of the way, and forgotten about.

 They were very much untouchable.  They were unable to lead normal lives in Jewish society.  They were unemployed and unemployable.  They were excluded from normal family life and on the margins of communities.  If you’ve seen the film Ben Hur, you’ll get a picture of leper colonies, sort of ‘ghettoes’ outside of towns or villages.  The story of the ten lepers in Luke 17 paints a similar picture: how else would Jesus be confronted by ten lepers at once as he enters a village?

 The lepers were put out of sight and out of touch.

Clean

 And then Jesus comes along.  There’s a story in Luke chapter 5, the first leper cleansing reported in the gospels.  It’s found in Matthew, Mark and Luke.  But they each draw out slightly different points, so we’re mainly concentrating on Luke’s version.

 The first thing I want to think about is that the leper says to Jesus, “If you are willing, you can make me clean…”

 I think this is really telling.  First of all, he believes that Jesus can make him clean.  Maybe he’s heard about what Jesus has been doing throughout Galilee, all the miraculous healings…  But as a leper, he’s probably out of the loop, and might not know any of that stuff.  Maybe he just sees that there’s something about Jesus.  Or maybe he thinks that Jesus is a rabbi, and perhaps a rabbi’s word is enough.  After all, the guy doesn’t ask to be healed.  He asks to be made clean.  And I wonder if there’s a difference?  In Leviticus, the priest didn’t heal, he wasn’t expected to.  He was only expected to declare the leper clean or otherwise.  In actual fact, the Greek term used here in Luke, is the same one that the Greek translators of the Old Testament used in Leviticus.  And so perhaps this leper is asking Jesus to say he’s ok.  To tell him, it’s fine, you’re not excluded anymore.  Come back… 

Touched by the hand of God

 Perhaps we’ll never know about that.  But what is really interesting is that Jesus goes far beyond what this leper might have expected.  It makes me think of Paul’s prayer in Ephesians 3, about the God who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine…

 Jesus gives him physical healing, and much, much more, as we’ll see.  So if the leper had only been looking for ritual purity, to be declared clean and able to come back to society, he gets more than that.  He’s healed.  In many ways.

What is also really interesting is that the leper says, “If you are willing…”

 Why does he say this?  It suggests to me that he assumes Jesus might not be willing to help him.  And I think this assumption is probably based on his experience, that no one else has been willing.  People just wouldn’t stop.  He’s an untouchable.

  But Jesus stops.  At this point, I’m going to mention a little detail from Mark’s version of this story: it says there that Jesus was moved with pity, or even anger.  I’ve often wondered about this anger thing.  Is Jesus angry at being pestered?  I don’t think so.  I wonder if he’s angry at the assumption that he might not be willing.  I wonder if He’s saying, “Of course I’m willing, why would you even ask?”  Maybe his anger is at a world in which someone has to ask this, a world in which someone is untouchable…

 To return to Luke’s account, the most amazing part of the story is that Jesus stretches out his hand and touches the man, and says, “I am willing.  Be clean.”  And immediately the leprosy is gone.

 This is amazing because in Luke’s gospel, this is the third detailed report of a healing or cleansing miracle.  And yet, in the previous two, Jesus didn’t touch the people who were healed.  He simply said the word, and they were made well.  Because His word is enough.  He’s the God who created the Universe by His word.  He only needs to say it and it happens.  Jesus didn’t need to touch the leper to heal him of his leprosy.  That happens when Jesus gives the word.  But the real transformation probably happened when Jesus touched him.  This is an untouchable.  And Jesus touches him.  This might be the first human touch the man has had for a long time.  For the first time in a long time, he is human.

 In a sense, it probably didn’t matter whether Jesus healed the man of his leprosy or not.  What mattered most is that he touched him.  And in doing that, he not only said to the man, you’re human, you’re part of society – he also said it to everyone else.  Because for Jesus, there are no untouchables.  While the man still had leprosy, Jesus touched him.

 Jesus sees that the leper can change his spots.  Jesus sees that this man is a person, and should be included.  In Jesus’ day that meant he needed to be healed.  But sometimes, it’s everyone else that needs to be healed – changed, challenged, to see past the spots.  Leprosy is only skin deep.  And whatever people’s leprosy might be, Jesus will touch them.  Whatever it is that society thinks makes people untouchable, for Jesus, there are no untouchables.

 There’s a word that is used a lot today: stigma.  The word actually comes from Latin, it means a brand, like the one used on cattle, to mark them.  When someone is stigmatised, they are branded, given a mark.  That’s the key point here: they are given a mark.  It’s put on them by others.  Cows don’t brand themselves.  And people are stigmatised by society, by others.

 Maybe we can think of some untouchables.  Who do we think we can’t go near?  Who do we think is at the bottom of the barrel?  Who are the most excluded from society?  Maybe we need to follow Jesus, and touch them.  In touching, embracing those that no one else will, we can share the love and message of Jesus.

Chapter 6 - To the family of Jesus all God's children may belong

In the family

 I love The Salvation Army.  I grew up in it, it was like my extended family from birth to adulthood.  But what I have found about The Salvation Army is that you very often bump into people outside of it who know someone who is or has been in it.  They say that you’re never more than six feet away from a rat.  It seems that you’re never very far away from a Salvationist, ex-Salvationist, or someone who knows one.

 What I’ve also found is that a large proportion of Salvationists marry other Salvationists.  And so we have a situation where lots of Salvationists know lots of other Salvationists.  It’s a small world in The Salvation Army, and an even smaller gene pool, I like to say.

 So, joking aside, The Salvation Army is – or at least, can be, at its best – one big happy family.  And you might be surprised at who is related to whom, and how, within the family.

 Families can surprise us, by their size, their complexity, and their members.  Have you ever found yourself amazed that two particular people are related?  Have you ever seen one of those documentaries, such as “Fifteen kids and counting”?  If we think that’s a lot, let’s think about rats again for a moment.  A rat can have up to ten or twelve babies in a litter.  And then, a few months later, maybe, they can do it all again.  The greeting cards industry would be much more lucrative in the animal kingdom, I imagine.

A day in the life…

 In Mark chapter 3, we see a day in the life of Jesus.  First of all, this might be the Sabbath, and Jesus may have just healed on the Sabbath – in the synagogue, no less… So a bit of early drama.  Then, maybe the same day, maybe not, he goes off to the lake with the disciples – that’ll be lake Galilee – and he’s followed by huge crowds from Galilee – and beyond, actually.  They come because they’ve heard about what he’s been doing, the healings and so on.  They want to press right in against him, so they can touch him and be healed, whether it’s blindness, demon-possession, or whatever ailment it may be, they all want a piece of Jesus.  These people are limping through life, for some reason or other, and they want to be whole, free, well…

 So Jesus manages to get away from the crowd for a bit, and goes up a mountainside, and he calls out the names of the twelve men he chooses and appoints as his disciples – his students – and apostles – those he will send… We’ll come back to these guys later.

 Then Jesus goes home.  And still he doesn’t get a minute, because the crowd comes together again, “so that they could not even eat…”  No time or room to even eat.  That’s busy.  And so Jesus’ family, hearing about this, go to try and stop this, because people are saying he’s nuts, or as other versions suggest, the family themselves were saying he’s nuts…

 And then we come to the scribes.  These guys are often seen as like pantomime villains in the gospels.  That might be a bit unfair, because they think they’re doing the right thing.  They’re called scribes because they made copies of the scriptures, they wrote them out.  They loved the Hebrew bible, they learned it, they wrote it, they wanted to make sure that others could learn it and live by it like they did.  They’re kind of like police, because, like the Pharisees, they want to make sure that people obey the Law.  But they’re not like the police, in that they didn’t have any real power.

 So they crash this party, to check what’s going on.  And when they see Jesus casting out demons, they conclude that he’s doing this by a demon.  And Jesus pulls them up on this.

 In an earlier chapter, we thought about assumptions.  Well, here the scribes are making assumptions.  They are so arrogant, so presumptuous, that they think the Holy Spirit must be an unclean spirit, because He’s not doing what they expect.  ‘How can this be a God thing?’ they say, ‘because God didn’t tell us He was going to do this…’  And Jesus lets them know that they’re not as close to God as they might think…

All God’s children

 And this is brilliantly juxtaposed with the little bit about the family.  When Jesus’ mother and brothers try to get in the house to see Jesus, someone passes the message to Jesus: “Your mother and your brothers and sisters are outside, asking for you”.  And Jesus says, “Who are my mother and my brothers?” And he looks at the people around him, and says, “Here are my mother and my brothers!  Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother…”

 Who are they?  Well, who’s in the crowd?  First of all, this is the same crowd, or a similar one, as the one from earlier: the sick, the poor, the broken, the excluded, among others.

 So Jesus looks at this crowd and says these guys are my mother and brothers and sisters…

 I used to think this was really harsh on Jesus’ mother and siblings.  How can he say that these people, and not his own relatives, are his family?  But that’s just it – he doesn’t.  At no point here does Jesus actually disown his family.  He doesn’t say, “They’re not my family, these are!”  He just says, “These are my family…”  Although Jesus maybe does have cause to fall out with his family, if they did call him nuts – he doesn’t.  He’s not having a cheap shot to get back at them.

 I think what he’s doing is telling a kind of parable.  He’s using an illustration.  Someone has said to him, Jesus, you’re family are outside.  And Jesus says, wait: my family is here.  You’re all my family.  They are too, but for me, family goes far beyond flesh and blood, or law.  He’s not excluding anyone, but he’s including everyone… As John Gowans has put it in one of my favourite songs, “To the family of Jesus, all God’s children may belong”…

 Jesus looks at that crowd, and he says, ‘You’re all God’s children.  That makes us family…’ That’s an interesting idea.  That the poor and sick and broken, the lost, already are God’s children.  So maybe it’s not just when people decide to follow Jesus that they become God’s children…

Will

 But some will point out, rightly, that Jesus adds the qualification: “Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother…”  They may also note that Matthew’s account of this story has Jesus referring specifically to his disciples, not just the crowds…  To be part of Jesus’ family means doing the will of God.

 So what’s that?  What does that look like?  For the scribes, this meant following the hundreds of rules laid out in the Law.  And we could tie ourselves in knots trying to work out God’s will.  But maybe this will help:  Micah 6 verse 8 says, “He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”

 In a nutshell, you could say that’s God’s will.  That’s what he wants from people.  Do justice, love kindness, walk humbly with God.  Briefly, let’s explore that.  Justice, that’s about doing the right thing, being fair, honest and so on, in all our dealings.  To love kindness means to love being kind, to commit to being kind and generous to people in the same way we commit to anything or anyone we love.  And to walk humbly with God… that’s the thing.  That’s what it’s really about.

 To walk humbly with God means, first of all, we walk with God: we follow Him, we live with Him and for Him.  But to do this humbly means we recognise who he is and who we are.  We recognise that He is God, the Creator, Preserver and Governor of all things.  And we’re not.  We’re sinful, we don’t have a leg to stand on before Him – but He invites us to come anyway.  Come as we are.

 Jesus said in Matthew 11:28, “Come to me all you who are weary and carrying heavy burdens…”  Come as you are.  Whoever you are, don’t worry about it.  Come, and walk humbly with your God.

 There’s some surprises in Jesus’ family, all right.  In fact, Jesus tells some scribes and religious types, in Matthew 21, that “the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you…”  Harsh, but true.  Because these people who are messed up know that they’re messed up, and they come humbly to God, as they are.

 To go back to those disciples, the 12, they’re actually a bit surprising themselves.  If we think of the in-groups and out-groups, as the scribes might see it, the 12 includes some classic ‘outies’.  There’s a tax collector (Matthew).  There’s at least 4 ‘uneducated’ fishermen (they’re called uneducated in Acts 4:13).  There’s even a potential terrorist (Simon the Zealot).  At the end of the day, it’s not about what we are.  It’s about whose we are, and who He is.

 So the invitation to us all is: Come.  And walk humbly with your God, alongside all these other surprising people…  Look at your brothers and sisters in the family of Jesus.

Chapter 5 - He ain't heavy...

The Return of the King

 In some versions of the Robin Hood legend, Robin, the outlaw who has been stealing from the rich to give to the poor, is pardoned at the return of the king, Richard the Lionheart, who had been fighting in the Third Crusade.  Robin is deemed ‘righteous’ in the end, because he stood up for the cause of the poor, he defended the people of Richard’s land in the face of an unjust usurper, the King’s brother John.  Robin Hood is vindicated, even though his means were not altogether lawful.

 That story faintly echoes one told by Jesus.  Jesus concludes his final discourse of Matthew’s account with a story about future judgement of the nations.  He paints a picture of the king, the Son of Man, returning to carry out this judgement, separating people as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.  The righteous, the sheep, go to his right, the unrighteous goats, on his left.

 To the righteous, he says, “Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world.  For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me…” (Matthew 25:34ff).  They answer, ‘When?  When did we do any of that?’

 “The King will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me’” (Matthew 25:40).

 And to those on the left, it’s the opposite.  They are cursed, and are sent to “the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels…” (v. 41).  Why?  Because they did none of the above.

Goats in sheep’s clothing

    Living in the UK, the image of separating sheep and goats used here by Jesus might be lost on us.  After all, sheep and goats look quite different.  Sheep have a slightly plump, woolly appearance; goats are rather scrawny, with horns.  If you put a sheep and a goat side by side, it would be easy to tell them apart.

 Unless the sheep and the goat are Palestinian.  And Jesus is telling this story in Palestine.  For his listeners, sheep and goats would look quite alike.   The indigenous sheep of Palestine is the Awassi variety, which has floppy ears and a long face, not unlike a goat.  So the shepherd’s task in separating them is not as straightforward as we might imagine.  Of course, one would still expect the shepherd to be able to spot the difference.

 But to the untrained eye, the sheep and the goats may be indistinguishable from one another, and goats could infiltrate the flock and pass themselves off as sheep.  This image, of course, adds a sinister edge to goats which probably does not exist, but it is purely illustrative.  The similarity could conceivably result in goats in sheep’s clothing.

 And this point is worth some attention.  Jesus is talking of the difference between the righteous and the unrighteous: the former are represented by the sheep, the latter by the goats.  The term Jesus uses, translated as righteous, is dikaios, which means just or equitable, in character or act. I’d suggest it might be both: character and act.  The righteous are people who do the right thing because of who they are.  They are just.  They are God’s kind of people.

 It is, of course, possible to do the right things without being just.  The unrighteous are identified in Jesus’ story by their failure to do the right things, to act justly or compassionately.  They question when they failed to serve Jesus.  And Jesus points out that if they didn’t do it for the least, they didn’t do it for him.

 This exemplifies the point that it is possible to do the right things without being ‘right’.  This is legalism.  The unrighteous could well include Pharisees and scribes, who may have carried out their religious duties to the letter, but with no change in their character.  For many such people, Torah was reduced to small print, a rulebook on divine etiquette.  It became little more than a manual on how to win divine favour.  It was hoops to jump through.  Look at the story of the Good Samaritan.  The expert in the law asks Jesus, “Who is my neighbour?”  He knows he has to love his neighbour, but he wants to know the definition, the parameters.  Who, and how, when and how often?  He doesn’t get it.  It’s not a thing to do.  It’s a way of life.  Jesus tells the story, and the punchline, in short, is: Look around.  Who’s your neighbour?  Whoever is nearby and needs help.  You need to cultivate a loving disposition.  Neighbourliness is not just about geography, it’s about generosity.  In fact, Jesus turns the whole question on its head, by asking the lawyer, “Which one of the characters in the story was a neighbour to the wounded man?”  We define the neighbour: am I a neighbour, or not?

 Torah, the law, was designed as instruction, as an illustration of how life as God’s children should look.  The legalistic starting point is wrong: Torah was given because God already favoured the people; they were already chosen, his children.  Torah was the example of the kind of life which flows from the heart of God’s children.

 Such a heart does the right thing – not always, but more and more, because it moves in the flow of its Father’s grace.

Acting the goat

 When I was young, my mother would sometimes tell me to stop ‘acting the goat’…  I never understood where this expression came from, so recently I looked it up.  I think it comes from the idea that the devil is a goat.  In Christianity, the devil came to be associated with the Greek god Pan, who was half-man, half-goat in form.

 So the goat, even in Jesus’ own day, was possibly seen as evil, associated with the devil, or Pan.  These unrighteous in Jesus’ story here might be seen as children of the devil as much as the righteous are children of God…  Who knows?  It’s pretty challenging stuff.

Kind

 What is also challenging is that, in explaining the actions of the righteous, Jesus says, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me” (Matthew 25:40).  But this is not a completely new idea.  As in other cases, Jesus is interpreting and illustrating kingdom life as presented in the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament.  In particular, this has resonance in the Proverb: “Whoever is kind to the poor lends to the LORD, and will be repaid in full” (Proverbs 19:17).

 This proverb, from ancient scribal wisdom, would be well-known for Jesus’ hearers.  The Hebrew Bible frequently presents God’s special concern for the poor.  Social justice was a major part of Torah and of the Jewish religion.

 But this verse seems to go beyond that.  Here, scribal wisdom somehow identifies God with the poor, directly: it is as though kindness to the poor is kindness to God, and is counted by God as such.

 And this is exactly what Jesus says.  Any kindness to the poor is kindness to him.  Because Jesus identifies with the poor.  Jesus is on the side of the little people.  The late, great Rob Lacey captures this brilliantly in his paraphrase of Matthew 25:31-46.  When it comes to the reply of the goats, the unrighteous, Lacey puts it like this: “‘We wouldn’t be like that to you! With someone like you we’d be thoughtful, sensitive, inclusive, generous, caring.  With someone like you we’d never make you feel forgotten.’” Jesus replies, “I’ll say, ‘Truth is, the lowest of the low issomeone like me…’”

He’s my brother

   Jesus goes beyond even simply identifying himself with or taking the side of the poor, the hungry, the lonely, the naked, the sick, the prisoner; in answering the righteous, he says, “I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me” (Matthew 25:40).  Jesus does not see himself so much as an advocate for the little people, perhaps as their local politician, or their lawyer; he calls them his brothers, and a brother has a much stronger tie.  They are connected, their welfare is of mutual concern, there is a sense of interdependence.  Brothers belong to one another.  The local MP may change, a lawyer takes on a case, and then the next, but a brother is always a brother.

 Particularly instructive at this point is the story of Cain and Abel, found in Genesis chapter 4.  Cain is the first son of Adam and Eve, and Abel is the second.  Cain works the soil, Abel keeps flocks.  When Cain brings an offering to God, we are told it is “some of the fruits of the soil…” (Genesis 4:3).  Abel, on the other hand, brings “fat portions from some of the firstborn of his flock” (Genesis 4:4).  God looks on Abel’s offering with favour – and there are various interpretations of why this is – but is not so pleased with Cain’s.  Cain’s resultant anger prompts him to set Abel up and kill him.

 When God asks Cain where Abel is, Cain replies: “I don’t know… Am I my brother’s keeper?” (Genesis 4:9).

 Cain’s flippant response gives rise, ultimately, to Jesus’ point with this story.  God’s revelation to his people through the pages and the unfolding story of the Hebrew Bible sounds a resounding ‘yes’ to Cain’s question.  Cain ishis brother’s keeper.  Cain had a responsibility to care for his brother, but neglected this; such neglect had fatal consequences.

 God outlines two ways for people to relate to one another: to take seriously their responsibility to care for each other, or to abdicate this responsibility.  The first way promotes life; the second, death.  When one brother chooses not to care, he may as well wish his brother dead, as he is choosing to try to end the relationship of brotherhood.  In Cain’s case, this was quite literal.  In most cases, it is not literal, but nonetheless real.

 Jesus is reminding his listeners that God expects brotherly love.  And all those who would wish to claim brotherhood to Jesus must accept this brotherly responsibility for Jesus’ brothers.

 The Hollies capture so much of Jesus’ thought here in their song He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother.  The lyrics illustrate the sense of companionship on a journey, of mutual responsibility, of concern for one another’s welfare, and the recognition that “carrying” one another is not burdensome, but liberating for all involved.

Chapter 4 - Beautiful Feet

Guess who’s coming to dinner

 There was an American film, released in 1967, Guess who’s coming to dinner… It starred Spencer Tracey and Katharine Hepburn as the parents of a girl who brings home her new fiancé, a black doctor, played by Sidney Poitier, for a dinner party.  The Poitier character’s parents also come, not realising that his fiancée is white.  The whole thing deals with issues of race and the assumptions made by the various parties.  It was controversial at the time, because inter-racial marriage was still illegal in 17 American states…

 Luke’s gospel has some good insights into the kinds of people Jesus mixed with, and those with whom he expresses solidarity.  And in Luke chapter 7, we find this story about a dinner party.

 Jesus has been invited by a Pharisee named Simon, to have dinner at his house.  And so, at this dinner party, they’re probably sitting round a low table, reclining, with their feet behind them.  Much like we might sit round a picnic blanket.  This was the custom.

 Luke says that “a woman in the city, who was a sinner, having learned that [Jesus] was eating in the Pharisee’s house, brought an alabaster jar of ointment…” (Luke 7:37) I think calling her a sinner is Luke’s way of saying she was a prostitute.  What is interesting to me is that she knows, or even cares to know, that Jesus is here.  Anyway, she bursts in on this scene with her alabaster jar of perfume – probably an essential item for a prostitute in Palestine.  And she stands, or maybe kneels, behind Jesus, at his feet, weeping.  And she washes his feet with her tears and dries them with her hair.  She kisses them, and anoints them with her ointment.

Assumptions

 This commotion prompts mutterings of disapproval from Simon, the Pharisee host – and maybe others there too.  Simon says to himself, “If this man were a prophet, he would have known who and what kind of woman this is who is touching him – that she is a sinner…” (Luke 7:39).

 This line gives away a lot of assumptions that Simon has.  First, he assumes that Jesus is thought to be a prophet, but is sceptical about this.  Second, he assumes that Jesus doesn’t know who or what kind of woman she is.  And third, he assumes that Jesus would be bothered…

 Of course, as Simon sees it, Jesus should be bothered.  This is a sinful woman – for people like Simon, that puts her in two of the worst categories.  Good Jews like Jesus should steer well clear of people like this.  Simon probably invited Jesus because he was a visiting rabbi – in verse 40 he calls him “teacher”, which is rabbi – and this usually merited dinner invitations.  So as a rabbi, Jesus shouldn’t be mixing with the local riff-raff.

 Simon assumed that this sinful woman was not in the in-crowd.  She’s not good enough to sit at the table with Jesus, at the top table of the religious… She’s not blessed, like Simon, in God’s good books… She’s not good enough to touch what God has and what God is doing…

 Well, they say you should never assume…

Kisses

 We could spend a long time looking at this whole incident, thinking about God’s grace, and forgiveness in Jesus, and much more.  But there’s one thing I’d like us to think about: she kissed his feet.  The woman washes Jesus’ feet with her tears, and dries them with her hair, and then she kisses them.

 I wonder if, in fact, this woman who is supposed to be on the outside of God’s stuff, looking in, from a distance – I wonder if, in actual fact, she understands it all better than Simon and those like him.  Maybe this poor, outcast, sinful woman sees what’s really going on here.  Maybe she kisses Jesus’ feet because they’re beautiful…

 Centuries before this episode, God’s people in exile, in Babylon, were comforted by these words of the prophet Isaiah, chapter 52:7 

“How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of the messenger who announces peace, who brings good news, who announces salvation, who says to Zion, ‘Your God reigns.’”

 Those exiles were longing to see the feet of the one who was going to tell them it was all over.  There was peace, salvation, it’s good news!  They were desperate to see this messenger, who would tell them and prove that their God did indeed reign.  Because it looked like he didn’t.  It looked like God wasn’t on their side, or in control.  They needed to hear this message, and to see the feet, the beautiful feet, on the mountains of the one bringing this good news…

Sign language

 In the Old Testament, some of the prophets were commanded to perform, or to go and witness, ‘sign-acts’: these were symbolic actions that were used to make a point – like Jeremiah going to the potter’s house and watching the potter at work.  This was a symbol of God being able to mould His people Israel, so that when they went wrong, like the clay on the wheel, he could re-shape them…

 Well, I wonder if this incident here is kind of a sign-act.  I wonder if this outcast, sinful woman, is somehow drawing attention to this passage from Isaiah.  Maybe she knew that line, about the beautiful feet, and wanted to come and acknowledge that Jesus is the one who comes announcing peace, who brings salvation, and good news, who says to Zion, “Your God reigns…”  Maybe she didn’t know that line from Isaiah, but she certainly knows that Jesus fulfils it.

 Jesus started his public life with the proclamation that “the kingdom of God has come near (or, is at hand)” (Mark 1:15).  In other words, Jesus announced, “Your God reigns…”  To all those who worshipped or trusted in the God of Israel, Jesus made clear in his words and his deeds, that their God reigns, his kingdom was at hand – reach out, you can touch it, you can see and hear and feel what God is doing… That’s what Jesus is about.

 And so this woman recognises, perhaps for the first time, that her God reigns.  She’s included in what God is doing.  She is welcome.  She’s invited.  Jesus has shown her that she can be a part of God’s kingdom, even though she’s a mess.

 The passage in Isaiah goes on to say, in verse 9: “Break forth into singing, you ruins of Jerusalem; for the LORD has comforted his people, he has redeemed Jerusalem…”  Those words originally referred to very literal ruins of Jerusalem – Jerusalem had been flattened by the Babylonians.  And there were two lots of outcasts in the whole piece – there were the exiles, who were taken away to Babylon, and there were the not-good-enoughs, who were left behind in the rubble.  They were seen as not worth taking, or not threatening…  All these people wanted comfort, they wanted God to put things right.  They wanted salvation.  And God was going to do it.

 And here, this woman is a ruin of Jerusalem.  She’s a not-good-enough.  She’s an outcast.  She’s been cast into the rubble, left there.  She’s been degraded.  Just an aside, thatI don’t think anyone ever wants to be a prostitute – they usually end up there through bad circumstances and bad choices.

 But no longer is this woman an outcast.  No longer is she a ruin.  Because Jesus comes announcing peace, bringing good news, announcing salvation, saying to Zion – to her – “Your God reigns!”  The God she knew was there, but wasn’t allowed to believe was on her side.  The God she always wanted to believe in, but never felt good enough.  The God she had hoped would one day reach out to her and lift her and save her from the mess she was in…  Her God reigns.  That’s what Jesus came to show and to tell.

 That’s good news, isn’t it?  That’s the gospel.  If the gospel isn’t good news for everyone, it isn’t good news.  The heart of that good news is that 

Our God reigns.

Your God reigns.

Their God reigns.

God reigns.

 Let’s kneel before this God, to whom we come in Jesus, and worship him, and have our assumptions challenged, and be restored…

Chapter 3 - Symbols of God's Presence

Same difference?

 When we read the Gospels in the New Testament, we may ask ourselves why we have four versions of the same story, in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John?  And why do they have slight differences in things like the order of events, the wording of what is said, or even in things that are included and things that are left out?

 Well, there are a number of reasons for all of this.  One of the things I like, though, is that each of the four writers has different interests and different ways of thinking about Jesus and his story.  Mark’s Gospel, although the shortest, has a number of little details in his stories.  Like, when Jesus fed 5000 people (or more), all four tell that story, but it’s only Mark who gives the detail that the grass was green.  Sounds obvious to us, but grass isn’t always green in Palestine.  It’s only green at certain times, so it helps us to know when the story took place – spring, near Passover.

Carried by four of them

 So we have this story, in Mark 2:1-12, about Jesus healing a paralysed man.  I love this story.  It’s powerful, and there’s so much in it.  Every time I read or hear this story, I find something new about it.

 Matthew, Mark and Luke all record this story.  It’s famous for the friends carrying the man.  But it’s only in Mark’s gospel that we find out that there are four of them.  And when I read that again, I had this image of four men carrying this man, probably one at each corner.  And I also had another image.

 I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a picture of the ark of the covenant being carried.  This box, with sculpted cherubim, usually looking a bit like eagles, on top; it’s usually golden, and carried by Jewish priests.  And they carry it on long poles.  And there’s always four of them.

 The ark was very important in the Jewish faith.  In the time of Jesus, it was kept in the temple at Jerusalem, behind a big curtain, in the Most Holy Place.  It contained some Jewish artefacts, particularly the tablets of the ten commandments, and the top of it was called the mercy seat.  This was where God said he would sit and meet with his people.

 So the ark became the symbol of God’s presence.  In their past, the people of Israel would march into battle with it…

 Carried by four of them, the tradition goes.

 And here is a paralysed man, carried by four of them…

 It really struck me.  I don’t suppose that Mark made up this detail, but I’m so glad he mentioned it, because now, when I read this, I think of the ark, that symbol of God’s presence.  Perhaps this man, carried by four of them, is also a symbol of God’s presence.  God really spoke to me about this.

He came down

 Look at some other details in the story.  The man is lowered, down through the roof.  Obviously, that was a novel solution to the problem of how to get through the crowds to Jesus.  But looking at this another way, might this not also symbolise God’s presence among us?  In a man, who comes down to us… Like Jesus.  We sing about it.  The chorus, “He came right down to me, He came right down to me, To condescend to be my friend, He came right down to me…”  Again, at Christmas, “He came down to earth from heaven, Who is God and Lord of all…”

 God’s presence comes down to us.

 John’s Gospel starts with this wonderful prologue, and he talks about the Word, which was with God and was God, in the beginning.  The fullest revelation of God.  And the Word became flesh and lived among us.  Came down.

 As John Gowans wrote, “I believe that God the Father can be seen in God the Son…”  If we want to see God, we look at Jesus.  We see the Father in the Son.

Son

 But there’s more in this story.  Look at what Jesus says to the man: “Son…”  He calls him son.  This is the only person that Jesus calls son in our bibles.  So, first of all, that shows the compassion of Jesus, he recognises this man as a man, a human, someone like himself, family…  Jesus does the same thing when he tells a story of the return of the king (Matthew 25:31-46), and the people will be separated out, like sheep being separated from goats.  The righteous sheep are the ones who cared for the least of Jesus’ brothers…

 Jesus identifies himself with the poor, the lost, the lonely, the excluded, the sick…

 And so, Jesus, the Son, sees himself in this man, whom he also calls, “son.”

 The apostle Paul, writing to the Colossian church, tells them about Jesus:

“He has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him.  He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together.  He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything.  For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.” (Colossians 1:13-20) 

 In the Son, we see God.  He is a symbol of God’s presence.  And I want to suggest that this paralysed man is also a symbol of God’s presence.  Just as the ark, carried by four of them, symbolised God’s presence, so did this man, carried by four of them.  This man, a son, like Jesus the Son, displays the image of God.  Maybe not as perfectly as Jesus, but he displays the image of God, because he was made in that image.

No ordinary people

 So, when we meet someone who is ‘less fortunate than ourselves’, let’s see God in them.  When we serve someone, let’s not do it from above, condescending, out of pity, looking down on them.  Instead, let’s do it out of humility, looking up, in reverence for the God who is present in them.

 Mother Teresa used to talk of serving Jesus in distressing disguise when she worked among the very sick and poor of the Calcutta slums.  Jesus in distressing disguise.

 CS Lewis, that great Christian thinker and writer, said in his book The Weight of Glory, that,

“There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whomwe joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendours. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously - no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption.”

 In each person you meet, there is a reflection of God.  We can discover God’s presence, God’s image, in everyone.  If we really believe this, how will it change us?  What if we see Jesus in everyone we meet?

 There’s a Celtic prayer that says, 

“May the Christ who walks on wounded feet

​walk with you on the road. 

May the Christ who serves with wounded hands

stretch out your hands to serve.

May the Christ who loves with a wounded heart

open your hearts to love.

May you see the face of Christ in everyone you meet,

 And may everyone you meet see the face of Christ in you.”

 Imagine seeing the face of Christ in everyone we meet.  Imagine seeing the Son, the image of the invisible God, in the other, no matter who that other may be.  I pray that God will give us eyes and hearts to see like He does.