Sermon Tone Analysis

Scripture

Mark 2:1-12

Introduction

I hope I haven’t bit off more than I can chew here.

I studied this topic for a whole semester while I was in seminary and I have always wanted to do a sermon series on it.

That is the difference from how we understand disease and healing and the way they did in Jesus day.

It is fairly complicated, but I think, an important topic for us.

There is a lot of misunderstanding about the way God heals versus cures.

Healing and curing are not the same thing.

Let me explain.

We live in a goal oriented time, we don;t have to worry as much about our survival as they did in Jesus day.

In Jesus day the average person was more concerned with just being than doing like we are today.

You can refer back to Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs here.

As you can see in Jesus day they were stuck in the bottom two parts of the pyramid.

Today most of us have those needs taken care of and can go on to self actualization, pr being driven by goals.

You could say we can look forward to the future where the first century folks could only live day to day.

Our kind of living, which is goal driven results in individualization and competition.

In jesus day it took a community of people to survive.

Rather than competition there was cooperation.

if there were any goals they were group as opposed to individual goals.

Also, the people in Jesus day had no control over nature whatsoever.

We do, just one example would be vaccines or even antibiotics.

To sum this up, we understand illness in an individual sense, as something that prevents us from functioning to maintain or individuality.

Where in Jesus day illness had to do with the whole person as a state of being rather than functioning.

That state of being was a wholeness as it relates to community.

In other words sickness excluded us from the community.

This means that the sickness problems presented to Jesus are concerned with a state of being rather than an inability to function.--values

make the difference.

What a westerner might interpret as a loss of function an ancient reader would see as a dis-valued state of being, paralysis for example.

So, in a nutshell today we focus on therapies on causes seeking a cure.

This is control over nature.

A cure is taking effective control of a disordered biological and/or psychological process usually identified as a disease.

This is curing.

As I said somewhat complicated.

But because of our worldview toward scientific control of nature, and Jesus of no control over nature the emphasis on Jesus time was on the person and today its on the disease.

I think the ideal situation would be a balance between the two, which frankly we only see at the end of life today in hospice care.

I think methodist Theologian Leonard Sweet sums it up best “When medicine has done all it can do, which is everything humanly possible, religion is supposed to take over.”

As I said somewhat complicated.

But because of our worldview toward scientific control of nature, and Jesus of no control over nature the emphasis on Jesus time was on the person and today its on the disease.

I think the ideal situation would be a balance between the two, which frankly we only see at the end of life today in hospice care.

I think methodist Theologian Leonard Sweet sums it up best “When medicine has done all it can do, which is everything humanly possible, religion is supposed to take over.”

Curing just involves function, healing involves mental, social, and a spiritual dimension.

Sweet again:

The healing forces of faith, hope, and love are not incidental to health and medicine.

Like an antibiotic, faith, hope, and love enter the system quickly and do their work slowly.

Curing, or the removal of disease, may take place with medical means alone.

But healing, or the triumphal reentry into one’s total environment, only takes place in partnership with faith.

Medical healing is the knowledge of God manifested through science.

Spiritual healing is the knowledge of God manifested through faith.

It is the same knowledge.

It is the same God.

So, it’s possible to be healed, but not cured!

Now with this in mind, let’s turn to the scripture for today

Exegesis

I think the place to start today is to understand Jesus message in Mark.

Mark 1;14-15

Jesus message in Mark is that the Kingdom of God has come near.

He proclaims the same thing in Luke at the beginning of his ministry by quoting form Isaiah.

Luke 4:

of course this is what we have talked about for the last 4 weeks, the new creation or the Kingdom of God when God has set all thing right, defeated evil, and there is no more death, no more disease.

There is the shalom of God, or the wholeness that God always intended for his creation.

We see this in jesus’ miracle here.

jesus has just started his ministry and has returned to his home base in Galilee.

He has taught, healed, exorcised demons and run into some trouble with the religious authorities.

he is attracting huge crowds and even more attention from the religious authorities inJerusalem

The story begins in a house we don’t know if it’s Jesus house or Peter’s house.

Most scholar’s think it was Peter’s house because Peter’s house seemed to be Jesus base of operations.

First century Palestinian houses were not too big.

(describe houses.)

The roofs were accessible from the outside and flat.

Here you can see what the roof would have looked like.

There are too many folks for the 4 men to bring their friend in for Jesus to heal him.

So they lower him through the roof.

This would not have been as unusual to the people there as it is to us.

They often let things down through the roofs of Palestinian homes.

They dig through the roof it says and the lower him on his mat.

This mat would have been basically a large bag filled with straw.

Jesus looks at him and the first thing he says is “Child, your sins are forgiven.”

Now, I want you to consider for just a minute going to your Doctor.

Waiting 30 minutes to an hour past your appointment time, goin to the examination room, and your Doctor walks in looks at you and says “Child, your sins are forgiven.”

That would be really odd would it not.

Well, the Scribes are upset, but only because they think only God can forgive sins.

But Jesus is doing a merciful thing here.

As I said, healing wasn’t about restoring functionality it was about creating new meaning for the sufferer.

Jesus treats the separation before the function.

Ge goes right to the man’s soul.

Secondly, this is not that unusual because the prevailing worldview was that only sinners were the one’s stricken with this kind of illness.

Now, Jesus didn’t believe this.

Here

God does not practice retribution.

Now, this is not to say that some of our illnesses are not caused by bad choices.

We know cigarettes can cause cancer, hypertension and ruin our lungs.

Drug and alcohol abuse can run our hearts, our teeth, our pancreas and liver among other things.

Promiscuity can lead to STD.

Byt he same token you can look at someone like Keith Richards who has had a lifetime of drug abuse, or Ozzy Osborne and they haven’t seen any of these kind of consequences.

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So Jesus heals the soul, then heals the physical.

By just speaking the word, the man is able to rise, pick up his mat and walk home.

The insight is that there is indeed a close and age-old connexion between man’s fallen estate and everything that afflicts him, with the further implication that God’s will is for man’s wholeness, or completeness in every aspect of his being

We tend to treat our bodies as machines.

If we have a defective part we go to the Doctor and ask him to fix that part so we can function normally again.