September 8, 2024, Being Beggars, Mark 7:24-37 – Mtr. Kathryn Boswell

saintphilipsnorwood ♦ September 8, 2024 ♦ Leave a comment

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Today is the first of what will hopefully be monthly healing services. It’s been awhile, and we’re kind of feeling our way, to see what will be the most helpful way to organize ourselves. Our goal, certainly, is to have a service that is “user-friendly” (to use a modern term) for everyone who wants to seek prayer, for themselves or for someone they love, or for something more global – whatever it might be – as well as a service that is prayerful and meditative and worshipful. But the main reason we want to have healing services is that we need healing, and our friends and family need healing, and our world needs healing.

In the time of Jesus, sick people seemed to always be running into Jesus, and crowding around Jesus, and following along after Jesus. When Jesus walked from place to place, he passed beggars who were blind or deaf or lame, just sitting by the side of the road. When Jesus stayed with friends in a village, like when he stayed at Peter’s house, the whole village heard he was in town and they all showed up at the door.

But Israel in the first century was a very different time and place than the world we live in today, and in many ways we think and behave very differently from the people we read about in the gospels. We absolutely still need healing, that hasn’t changed, but the way we think and act about healing has changed a lot. We have a lot of options for health care, for one thing; there are a multitude of medical professionals with a multitude of specializations for any problem we might have – if only we can get an appointment within a reasonable number of months. But we are blessed by scientific advances and medical discoveries and all those things, no doubt about it. Medical conditions that were desperate in the time of Jesus might respond easily to a course of antibiotics nowadays. Leprosy, for instance, is no longer the horrifying, life-destroying thing it once was; it’s a treatable illness. A lot of us wouldn’t even be here today if it weren’t for modern medicine.

But the fact remains that we still need healing here in the 21^st century. We still suffer from disorders of the body or of the mind or of the spirit, just like the ragged multitudes of Jesus’ day. For all the advances of science, there isn’t a little pink pill or a surgical option that will take care of all our problems. And even when there are treatments for what ails us, there is still suffering, as anyone knows if you are a cancer survivor. So we need healing. Our bodies need healing. Our minds need healing. Our hearts need healing. Our souls need healing.

But along with all the advances and benefits we enjoy in our modern age, a lot of us seem to find it so much harder to pray for healing. I think there are several reasons for that. We rely much more, and reasonably so, on doctors and medications and all things scientific. Those are a blessing, and we should give thanks for that. On the other hand, we all – or most of us – suffer from one great disability. And that is the certainty, implanted in our minds and hearts from the time we were babies, that we are supposed to be strong and self-sufficient. We ought to stand on our own two feet. We are willing – maybe – to tell our doctor what’s going on with us. That’s his job, after all; that’s why he gets the big bucks. But most of us are a little reluctant to broadcast our weaknesses to our friends at church. We might call it the American spirit; we might call it bootstrap mentality. But we might also call it pride, and we wouldn’t be wrong.

I want to look at one word from the gospel reading today from Mark. We read two different healing stories: one about a frantic mother, and one about a deaf man. Very different people and very different life stories – but the two stories have one important word in common that I want to look at. The Syrophoenician woman’s daughter was suffering from something that was classified as demonic. Maybe it was epilepsy. Maybe it was a kind of mental illness. Maybe it was actually a demon – we don’t really know. We know it was terrifying for the mother. She came to Jesus, and she threw herself at his feet. And she begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter.

The second story is about a man who was deaf. Because he couldn’t hear he also couldn’t speak clearly. Even nowadays – when deafness and other physical handicaps are better understood, and we are supposedly more humane and enlightened – even today that man would have suffered a great deal of humiliation and abuse just because he was different. But in the first century, he would have had a hard time just surviving. How do you carry on any kind of work if you can’t communicate? What would it have been like growing up, unable to hear the other children, being mocked for talking funny. But this man was blessed with good and caring friends, who brought him to Jesus. And those friends begged Jesus to lay his hands on the deaf man.

We use a lot of different words to talk about asking for healing – prayer, intercession, petition, supplication, entreaty. Those are all nice words, reverent words. But that’s not what the desperate mom did. She begged Jesus to heal her daughter. When Jesus gave her a cold reply, she talked back. She wasn’t going to take no for an answer. She was there to beg Jesus. The deaf man’s friends didn’t come to make supplication or petition or entreaty. They weren’t there to intercede for their friend. They were there to beg Jesus to have mercy on him.

There’s something very helpful about hearing these people coming to Jesus in their desperate need and begging him for help. First of all, people don’t consult the prayer book to find the proper words for begging. Begging generally involves very few words, and very basic words. “Help!” “Please!” That’s really about it. Begging doesn’t involve a lot of theological niceties. How did the mom approach Jesus? She fell in the dirt at his feet and begged. How did the friends approach Jesus? They brought their friend to Jesus and begged. That was their whole strategy, and then the ball was in Jesus’s court.

We might notice Jesus didn’t engage in a lot of religious verbiosity either. He told the woman You can go home now; your daughter is well. He took the deaf man to a quiet place; he touched his ears; he spit, and touched the man’s tongue with the spit. And that was all.

We don’t need to know how to pray fancy. We don’t need to know how to do it right. We don’t need to tell Jesus why or what or how. We don’t need to hold back in fear or embarrassment or insecurity or pride. What could we possibly bring to Jesus that he doesn’t already know about? What could we possibly say to Jesus that would make him more willing to listen and to help us? All we need to do today is to come to Jesus as beggars, because Jesus loves beggars. We prayed in the Collect this morning, You resist the proud who confide in their own strength, but you never forsake those who make their boast of your mercy. He hears the cries of the orphan and widow. He hears the cries of the helpless and the weak. He hears the cry of the beggar. And he will hear you today. +