WEdnesdy, 20 August, 2003

From William C. Placher’s “Narratives of a Vulnerable God”



Jesus acts of healing.

…this Jesus heals and performs other miracles, but he silences those he has healed almost as if the act were one of shame… In the act of healing, moreover, he touches lepers (Mk 1:41) and spits on the tongue of a deaf man (Mk 7:33) – the very forms of his healing would have been, to his contemporaries, both ritually polluting and physically disgusting. When the leader of the synagogue asks for his help in curing his daughter, Jesus makes Jarius wait while he tends to a woman who has been suffering from menstrual hemorrhaging. For the business of wonder-making, this gets every priority wrong: Jesus postpones raising a child from the dead for a comparatively trivial cure whose results both their physical character and the cultural taboos of the time would have kept invisible; he turns from the socially important male to heal a nameless woman; and he responds to the woman’s polluting touch with praise of her faith. Then he turns to the really dramatic miracle and nearly renders it into a farce, insisting, in the face of all the evidence, that the child is not dead but merely sleeping, so that onlookers burst into laughter (Mk 5:40).



If we are looking for a God who will break into the world and awe everyone with great power and able to command the attention of everyone, the gospels tell us of Jesus who comes in through the back door and leaves the power plays out in the market place. The stories (actually it is two stories wrapped together as one narrative) that Placher uses from Mark give us that vulnerable God in the flesh. This God-in-the-flesh is not on a pedestal or lifted up onto a mountain separate from the masses. Here there is touch where touch is forbidden and an acknowledgement of great faith in a person who would usually be pushed off to the fringe of the religious community. This adventure into the heart of such actions by Jesus makes this picture of God quite out of the ordinary…in the god making business.



Connection: We culturally turn our backs to much of the world around us. We tend to look to the clean…the orderly…the well-groomed…the large and the influential – and that is not merely in regard to what we like in the world around us. This is a picture of the God we long for. Today, can you see our God around you in another form…waiting to be encountered?



Precious Lord, you offer us a balm to heal our wounds. You not only offer us a balm, you come and touch and hold and enter into the pain and suffering of life so that no one will ever be left along and isolated. Hold us up so that we too may have eyes for the healing ways of your reign within this day. Amen.