Magic in the Desert, A Spring That Speaks

Mr. Jude Aaron Harmon, Seminarian

"A leper came to Jesus begging him, and kneeling he said to him, 'If you choose, you can make me clean.' Moved with pity, Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, 'I do choose. Be made clean!' Immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean." Gospel according to Mark 1: 40-42

This Word of Life, this good news, emerging as it does from the same Gospel that opens with a cry in the wilderness, greets my scorched ears this morning like the sound of an oasis spring floating through the dry desert air with the promise of relief. It anticipates the liturgical transition before us as the season of Epiphany, of light piercing the darkness, gives way to the season of Lent, of wilderness and testing. We are reminded that the Magi who journeyed to Jerusalem from the East to witness the Word-made-Flesh, return now by the same dessert highways that carried them to the site of his nativity. And I believe here we have an image of who we are: yes, we are wandering in the desert wilderness of our worlds -- those within us and those about us -- but we are not simply cosmic wanderers adrift without purpose or direction, without an origin or a future. We are more properly pilgrims, magi and lepers, returning from an encounter with the Incarnate Word that promises to change forever how we relate to our world, if we let it. We have touched the flesh of God with our own hands, we have seen his light with our own eyes, we have heard the murmur of his infant lips with our own ears, and, yes, we have imbibed the living water of his words. We pass through the desolate places of our lives and of our world -- the two intimately joined in an undeniable, yet oddly beautiful, brokenness -- with this hope: the Word became flesh, so that in our very flesh the Word might speak life to these desert places.

To be sure our deserts are somewhat different from the Magi's; they are more akin to the desert of the leper: not so much built on sand, as on the fear and sadness that come from feeling alone in the world: often even in the midst of family, friends and community we may experience that strange, inexplicable feeling of being abandoned by our deepest desire, of being deserted by the possibility of ever knowing fully another even as we are fully know. We may feel, as one of our Spirituals puts it this morning, "like a motherless chile." Thoreau famously coined the phrase "quiet lives of desperation" to describe this condition, while psychologists today speak of a general "alienation," often called the  "disease" of the modern soul. But the leper in today's gospel was separated from his community, from his self-integrity, by a different kind of disease, one that could be cured in the flesh. So when Jesus healed the leper, he presumably restored him to health in every part of his life -- physical, spiritual as well as social. And, I believe, the manner of that healing teaches us about the potential of our own power to heal when word and touch are joined together in an authentic bond of love, when the distance between love and justice is so narrowed that the two seem to blur into one indistinguishable spring of life and hope, an oasis rising from the desert floor.

But lest I get ahead of myself, I must admit that if you're like me, you might find it a little hard to imagine that words could ever carry the power to actually heal bodies. I suspect many of you here, like me, learned in college anthropology that believing in a mechanistic relationship of manipulation between an utterance and an event is an informal logical fallacy called "magical thinking" (under the rubric of formal fallacies non-sequitur and post-hoc). Words don't really have that kind of power, I was taught. This is only a convenient lie we tell ourselves when the power of positive thinking is necessary to push forward in difficult situations. There really is no such thing as incantation or spell -- these are only ritualistic fictions that serve a cultic and perhaps therapeutic purpose in cultures less advanced, more primitive than our own. We, on the other hand, reject such nonsense, holding an enlightened, sophisticated understanding of words -- of their utility, ambiguity and limitations. That's was the bottom line on "magical thinking" in anthropology 101.

But what troubles me is this: that line actually seems to have no bottom. If words are esteemed to hold this incredible capacity to mediate cosmic power in other cultures, then in our own it feels all too often like just the opposite is true -- that, instead, the bottom has fallen out of our verbal world, and we are in a kind of free fall. In an age that sees language and bodies as primarily material realities to be exploited for whatever expedient end presents itself in the moment; in a time when many people pop in earbuds either to avoid uncomfortable silence or to shut everyone else out by listening to music wherever they are; in an age of mass marketing and publication where words are wantonly deployed to grab our attention at any cost; in an age of texting, tweeting and data plans for smart phones: we are invaded by arid prose like the sands of the Sahara blowing into the Sahel, claiming as desert what had once been arable land. In this desertification of our verbal landscape words pelt us relentlessly as they are taken up into the churning winds of our furious commercial, social and political enterprise. And because we are bombarded by words on every side, it's no surprise that like other desert creatures we grow thick, waxy skins to desensitize us to the affects of this constant assault. It's no wonder that in our society we can say things like "talk is cheap," and actually mean it, without intoning even a hint of irony.

This morning's gospel reminds us, though, that talk is not cheap, but a reflection of the divine power to create, to bring reality itself into being. In fact, this understanding of language's power is still implicitly present in the English word "poet," which has its roots in the Greek verb "poieîn," literally "to make."  And to be sure, the Jesus we encounter in today's gospel is the Poet of us all, the Word through whom "all things came into being," as the prologue to John's Gospel boldly declares. Yes, we hear this morning of a costly word, of a healing word given at a great price, bearing witness to the Word who restores our brokenness at great cost to himself.

Notice that in the story Jesus trades his own freedom for the leper's. The text is quite clear on this point: even after Jesus "sternly" warns the leper to "say nothing to anyone" about what has happened, the leper goes out "to proclaim it freely, and to spread the word."  But in so doing he vastly restricts Jesus' capacity to move about freely in the Judean countryside. We are told that Jesus "could no longer go into a town openly, but stayed out in the country"where people swarmed him with their need. Earlier in this same chapter, when Jesus goes away to pray for a while after spending the whole day healing the masses, we read that "Simon and his companions hunted for him" (G. Mk. 1:35-36). "Hunt" is a strong word. But people were thirsty for this Word-of-Life-in-the-flesh, they wanted Jesus to come to them. In what reads less like a purely narrative statement and more like an early Christian commentary on the existential yearning of the human heart for the presence of this Lord, the disciples, feeling the pressure of the crowds, desperately exclaim: "Everyone is searching for you!"And this is something we need to remember when speaking with each other in the Church about the Word of God.

Our Christian faith does not profess that this Word of Life comes to us as some disembodied text. No, we hold that this Word comes to us in the particular life of Jesus of Nazareth -- a life broken open and shared by assuming all our brokenness to itself, all our sinful flesh, and bearing it into the very life of God. This is what we mean when we call this Jesus of Nazareth our "Christ." We profess that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. One of the things that makes Christianity rather special among the religions of the world, one of the things that I think is too often lost on our brothers and sisters who claim to be so-called "Bible-based believers," is this central claim of the Incarnation that is given witness, ironically, in Scripture itself. That witness teaches us that Scripture -- the Holy Bible -- at its best points beyond itself, not to itself, in the service of proclaiming the Incarnate Word. That is, we believe that in Jesus Christ of Nazareth we have received a clarification and deepening of the revelation of God's very self to us: not only of God's will for us, but equally, nay surpassingly, of God's unfailing love for us. In Jesus Christ we witness how through grace our human wills may be confirmed and perfected in divine love. This, I believe, is the most basic meaning of this morning's Gospel passage.

Rarely in the Gospels do we find direct statements about Jesus' internal life, but, here in Mark, Jesus' emotional response to the leper is rendered with unmarred clarity: "Moved with pity" we hear "Jesus stretched out his hand and touched him." Moved with pity (pause). Many of you know that I have a mother who has suffered from Multiple Sclerosis for over twenty years now, and who has spent the last thirteen years in a nursing home. When I gaze into my mother's eyes, and see in them that indescribable longing for restoration to wholeness, I have some sense of the pity that Jesus felt for this leper. It is not the pity of condescension informed by social obligation -- this is no "White Man's Burden."  This pity is the burden of love: of the leper's longing intersecting with Jesus' own longing, uniting them in a bond of silent but mutual understanding that Jesus acknowledges as he touches the man, and speaks a word of life to him. In Jesus, the leper's deep longing finds not only a companion, but a God, who alone has the power to satisfy, to quench his parched lips. In that moment, Jesus crosses over into the leper's fear of rejection, into his alienation, steps into his deep sadness and isolation, and he lifts him up out of that despair into the glorious hope of the children of God. Jesus proclaims: "I do chose. Be made clean!"

This mesmerizing Word of Life calls out to us this morning like the spellbinding sound of a bubbling brook in the distance, betraying the presence of Living Water, of lush vegetation, of reprieve and shelter from the impersonal harshness of the desert. Of course, we may be tempted to believe, as many historical Jesus scholars do, that this miracle story is only a mirage -- a figment of the early Christian imagination. That it is projected into our consciousness by an ancient people struggling to make meaning out of the life of a beloved leader in the traumatic aftermath of his tragic death. We may believe that the unrelenting heat of the existential desert that is our human condition has so clouded our judgment over time, has so overwhelmed our senses over the past two millennia that we have deceived ourselves into believing in the possibility of miracles like this. We may believe that it is now our responsibility in our cool-headed, grown-up modern approach to insist on the primacy of reason, to put off this childish way of thinking, this "magical thinking." We may want to chuck this story into the intellectual trash bins of "superstation" and  "mythical religious fiction," or, perhaps more politely, into the recycling bin of "metaphorical and symbolic meaning" where we imagine that the story's particular shape is only the result of a particular cultural appropriation of a generic form, that it's simply one among many examples of a plastic, malleable genre of religious expression called "miracle stories." But what would happen if we didn't?

What would happen if we heard this story in more than a merely metaphorical register?  What if these words of Scripture that attest to the Incarnate Word really are an oasis for us, and not merely a mirage? What would happen if we actually allowed ourselves to be loved by this Jesus? What if that love led us to recognize his presence in, among and beyond us? What would happen if we actually dared to love one another as he loved us and loves us still? How might the face of the earth be renewed if we truly dared to be the Body of Christ in this particular place, in our particular lives -- making Jesus' love for an afflicted, thirsty world known in our very flesh? What if we asked him in all sincerity to cleanse us from the isolation and alienation that plague our increasingly self-absorbed world? What if we asked him to heal our myopic vision, to turn our sight toward the lepers in our midst, the leper in each of us?  How might it change how we speak and relate to each other? How might it change how we speak and relate to God?

In posing these questions I don't mean to suggest that this transforming love is somehow absent from St. Mark's. On the contrary, I cannot count the number of times that I have personally received and publicly witnessed that love being shared in and among us. But, I hear in this morning's Gospel a challenge. A challenge to go deeper, to become that Oasis, that pool springing up from the desert sand, a source of health and hope to the desiccated flesh of fainting hearts everywhere as we strive to lead lives that are a living testimony to the Word made flesh. I hear in this Gospel a challenge to risk a little magical thinking, to risk crying out like the leper, "If you choose, you can make us clean." And I have to tell you, I can almost him hear him pronouncing his blessing -- his word of life -- over us. I can hear the Lord. Hear him. He's saying: "I do chose. I do choose! Be made clean." Amen.