Everyone Is Looking For You November 20, 2016 Rev. Dave Benedict Give the people what they want. That s how officials of the National Broadcasting Company NBC justified rigging their popular quiz show called 21 back in the early days of television. Producers for the show fed the questions and the answers to attractive contestants who then pushed up the ratings and the advertising revenues. One man, a college professor named Charles Van Doren, became a national sensation by winning the weekly contest 14 straight weeks his handsome face even made the cover of TIME magazine. He earned the equivalent of a million 2016 dollars through the answers fed to him each week. A brilliant man, Van Doren could have won without getting the answers in advance, but the lure of easy money and fame got the best of him, and he fell right in with the producers. It took a congressional probe into the entire quiz show industry to uncover the fakery. And that s when the final witness said. What s the problem? It s entertainment. It s what people want. Give the people what they want! Rigged television shows? Fakery on TV? Say it isn t so! Right. Giving the people what they want has gone right ahead, and, all these years later, the idea that Congress would investigate the reality of Reality Television is laughable to us. We know our shows are rigged, but we eat them up anyway. Why this critique of television this morning? Because Give the people what they want is an old story. It goes at least as far back as the Gospel of Mark. But, unlike Charles Van Doren, Jesus refused to go along, and the integrity of the Kingdom of God was preserved, as we ll see. Give the people what they want. God doesn t do that. He gives the people what they need. Rarely are they the same thing. Please turn in your Bibles to Mark 1:35-45. If you are using one of our pew Bibles, you ll find it on page 1557. Last week we left Jesus in a dark Capernaum street, surrounded by a crowd of people who came to Him for healing. The word was out. It doesn t matter what ailment you have, this man Jesus will heal it. We don t know how long into the night Jesus ministered to them. Our text picks up the story the next morning, although by most of our standards, it was still the middle of the night. Verse 35. Very early in the morning while it was still dark.
In Bemidji, in November, that would be 7 AM. Not all that early. In Israel, in the summer, it starts to get light at about 4:30 AM. To me, that s the middle of the night, and Jesus went off to pray before that. To a solitary place. It s interesting that Mark uses the same word here desert that he used when Jesus went into the deep, deep desert to encounter Satan. But there wasn t a desert near Capernaum. Often in the OT, the word desert was a code word for Israel, a metaphor. Just like the places they wandered in for so long, the desert was a place of solitude and dependence on God. It was the place you went to regain your focus and your identity by removing yourself from the distractions of life and connecting closely with God. Jesus went to such a place to pray. Mark only records Jesus at prayer three times. Each time, Jesus was retreating from the crowds, even from His disciples, to connect with His Father in total dependence, aligning His will with His Father s will. Just as He did in the Garden of Gethsemane where Mark records what Jesus prayed, Not my will but Your will be done. The other gospels make it clear Jesus did this regularly. Just a thought. How often do we think of prayer as a time of realigning our will with the will of God? Putting our agenda in front of Him and allowing Him to reshape it to match His agenda? Or, do we primarily view prayer as an opportunity to tell God what we want Him to do for us? Just a thought. So here is Jesus, away from everyone so that He can discern and obey His Father s will, and verse 36 Simon (Peter) and his companions that would be just Andrew, James and John at this point come looking for Him. Generally, I love the way our pew Bibles, the NIV, translates the original Greek of the New Testament. But most commentators me included don t like how the NIV translates verse 36. They weren t just looking for Jesus. They were tracking Him down. The way my mother did when I missed my jr. high curfew for the first time. (I got home 45 minutes late, and when I snuck in hoping she would be in bed and not notice she was out in the car looking for me. Not a pretty sight when she got home. Where were you!) The disciples were out tracking Him down! Where were you. Everyone is looking for you! You need to get back to Capernaum, right now. That s the sense of Mark s language in verses 36 and 37. Who could blame them? Suddenly, Jesus was the biggest thing in Capernaum. Nothing like Jesus healing had ever happened in their town. People were demanding to see Him. There are three ways you could interpret the insistence of Peter and the others. Ok, mostly Peter. Mark s gospel is Peter s story of being with Jesus,
remember? And Mark makes it clear to us that Peter is running the show, already. So, there are three ways you could interpret Peter s insistence that Jesus get back to Capernaum and give the people what they want. First, you could view it as Peter shrewdly seeing that it s time to catch the wave! Strike while the iron is hot! Get this movement rolling, because momentum is on our side! A month ago, Jesus was an unknown carpenter from Nazareth. Today? He has the entire town clamoring for Him. Everyone is looking for you! You don t waste momentum like this! Or, you could view this as Peter recognizing what this meant for himself and the other three men who had dropped their nets to follow Jesus. They were at the center of it. This was their chance to show their families why they left their businesses to follow this guy. Look, He s the talk of the town! We got in on the ground floor. Or, if you want to put a better face on Peter, you could view this as a purely humanitarian concern. There are needs out there, Jesus. People are suffering and You can help them. Give the people what they want! Here s where I think about Charles Van Doren, the man from the rigged quiz show in 1955. When he was presented with the idea of cheating, he resisted the idea at first. But the producers came at him another way. They appealed to his sense of responsibility. Think of how the example you ll be setting for the children of America; showing them that hard work in school pays off! Doing the wrong thing even with worthy motives is still doing the wrong thing. And anything outside of His Father s will was the wrong thing for Jesus. (And, of course, for us.) This was a pivot point for Jesus. If He succumbed to the lure of giving the people what they want and all the trappings of fame that come with it or even to the lure of helping so much brokenness by setting up shop as a healer, He would been finished. But He had prayed. He had connected with His Father. His identity and His agenda had been firmly attached to the will of His Father. And He was able to say no. Verse 38. Let s go somewhere else. Let s leave the city and it s advantages, and let s to the villages where I can proclaim the coming of the Kingdom. This is why I came. I will follow my Father s agenda and no one else s. Peter made sure Mark told this story, and that Mark implicated him as the leader of this attempt to establish a false agenda for Jesus. And it won t be the last time we see this kind of thing from Peter either.
We all do it. All the time. There is no end to the ways we in the Church try to set Jesus agenda for Him, based on our ideas of why He came. The Crusades come to mind, of course, but we re still doing it. We ll come back to this. Now let s move to the second story in today s text. Jesus heals a man with leprosy. We re going to see how this is another angle on the same story. Give the people what they want, and in this story, we ll see how badly it goes wrong for Jesus when we don t let Him set His own agenda. The story seems simple enough. Verse 40. A man with leprosy comes to Jesus and begs to be healed. On his knees! If you are willing, you can make me clean. But just this much of the story is charged with meanings that would have been clear to anyone in the 1st century, especially Jews. Leprosy exists among us, still. Most of us have seen pictures of what this brutal disease does to people. It s official name is Hansen s Disease, and we finally understand it as a treatable medical condition. It s not even a skin disease; it s a nerve disorder. But even within our lifetimes, it was still understood as a highly contagious, incurable disease that required isolating its victims in leper colonies like the one on the island of Molokai in Hawaii. In the Bible, though, the word leprosy was applied to almost every skin disease. We don t know if this man had Hansen s Disease or a skin disease like eczema, psoriasis, or dozen of others. But those distinction didn t matter if you had leprosy. If you had leprosy, you were a threat to everyone else, because whatever you had, it was thought to be both highly contagious and incurable. Only God could cure leprosy. If you had leprosy, you were as good as dead. Based on practices laid out in the OT book of Leviticus, lepers were isolated from the community, socially and religiously. Because leprosy was thought to be a punishment from God, by definition, lepers were considered unclean and separated from God and His people. They couldn t worship or offer sacrifices for their sins. And anyone who came in contact with them became unclean also, and had to go through a months-long series of cleansing rituals and sacrifices. Lepers wore rags and didn t cut or comb their hair, so as to be recognized from a distance. They were to keep themselves at least six feet away from others. And, if someone inadvertently approached a leper, it was the leper s obligation to warn them by crying out, Unclean...Unclean! There is simply no way to express the misery that being labeled a leper caused for men and women, even children, in those days. It is no wonder a leper rushed into Jesus presence to be healed.
Back to the text. Because here is something we don t expect from Jesus. Verse 41. Jesus is indignant! What? Is that what we have learned so far about Jesus. That He receives people who need to be healed with anger, and not compassion? But that s what this text says. Right? Do any of you have a different English translation than the NIV open this morning? What does your Bible say in verse 41? Many English translations of verse 41 say, Jesus was filled with compassion. Jesus was indignant. Jesus was filled with compassion. Just different translators preferring a different English word, like in so many other places, right? No. Not here. The NIV and a few others have recently changed their rendering of this passage to indignant. Most English translations stick with compassion. What is up with this? This is an example of what is a called a variant. Obviously, we don t have Mark s original manuscript of his gospel. We have copies of copies of copies. Scribes of that day were rigorous in their determination to copy exactly from one manuscript to the next, and it is truly remarkable how identical our remaining copes are. But every now and then, there are variants. Spots where the texts that don t exactly match. Usually, the differences are minor and easily correctable. A tense here. A plural there. Easy to reconcile. No difference in the meaning of the text. But this variance is a doozy. Many earliest copies read Jesus was filled with compassion, while some read Jesus was indignant. There are numerous theories as to how that could have happened, but regardless, it leaves us with quite a difference in how we are to understand the passage! The filled with compassion variant has been the choice of translators for years, but recent scholarship is beginning to side with indignant variant, which led the NIV to change their version in their last update. As you can imagine, it prompted a strong debate with those who still favor the other version. What are we to do when this kind of thing comes up? Which Bible do we read? Which do we trust? Even, can we trust our Bibles. Here are some thoughts. First, don t throw the baby out with the bath. Don t give up on Scripture and walk away. We can trust our Bibles. It is stunning how few variances of this kind there are in our Bibles. Most variants are easily reconciled. And even in cases like this, the essential message of Scripture is absolutely clear. Salvation through Jesus as a gift of pure grace. We can trust our Bibles.
So what do we do with the difference between these two renderings of verse 41? We work with it. We know what to do with a Jesus filled with compassion at the sight of a terribly afflicted person. We saw this in His response to Peter s mother and to all those who lined the streets of Capernaum last week. It s what we re used to seeing and what we expect to see from Jesus. But an angry Jesus? That s what is implied. He wasn t just put off at this man, Jesus was angry with him. How are we to understand that? I don t know about you, but I prefer my Jesus to be filled with compassion and tenderness no matter what He encounters in me or in others. He is much easier to drawn near to that way, and, frankly, He is much easier to sell to others that way. But Jesus is not tame. He is exactly like His Father, who also burns with anger from time to time. Righteous anger. So, if Jesus is angry here, let s see if we can figure out why. There are three possibilities I ve seen as I ve researched this: 1. Jesus wasn t angry with the man; He was angry at the misery this condition caused the man; angry at the assault against humanity leprosy represent. Jesus was compassionate with man and indignant at his suffering. That s one possibility. 2. Jesus was angry at this man, because of the way the man approached Jesus. He completely ignored the leprosy protocols established by Scripture and Jewish law. He didn t call out, unclean...unclean. He came up aggressively, the text implies, and threw himself at Jesus feet, risking making Jesus unclean like himself. So, Jesus was angry at the man s disregard for scripture and Jesus safety. 3. This man was a Jew, so he knew that God is merciful and compassionate, by His nature and by His demonstration of it throughout history. OF COURSE God would be willing to heal him. And, he knew that only God could heal lepers, so he was ascribing Godstatus to Jesus when he said, You can make me clean. This man knew that Jesus was willing to heal people; He was healing everyone. It was the talk of the province! But he approaches Jesus with, If you are willing.... If? If? There was an offensive attitude in this man. These are the three basic possibilities if the text actually said, Jesus was indignant. Here s where I ve landed as I ve struggled with it. Alongside #3. I don t dismiss the first two outright; I see merit in them. But I think there was something in this man s character that angered Jesus. Despite his
justifiable, desperate desire to be healed, there was something about him that Jesus could not condone. Jesus healed him, alright, but He was angry. The key for me is in verses 43 through 45. Jesus sent him away at once with a strong warning. Again, the Greek shows a deeper anger than the English. It s the same word as when Jesus casts a demon out of someone. Jesus expelled this man. Cast him out. There is no variance to worry about here. All ancient texts agree on this. Jesus was angry! And as we read on, we see why. Jesus could not have been more straight forward. Don t tell anyone. But the man did. And look at the consequences for Jesus. Verse 45. As a result, Jesus could no longer enter a town openly but stayed outside in lonely places. Now, Jesus is the outsider and the leper is clean and free to reenter his life. Jesus is left to battle the growing popular landslide that views Him as a dispenser of miracles. From this point on, as we ll see, the tension and conflict grows. This man got what he wanted and then stuck Jesus with a much harder road to follow. I think Jesus saw that entitled attitude in him immediately and though it angered Him, Jesus healed and cleansed Him anyway. Now that is a compassion I really need most of the time. How about you? Here s is something we need to own. We can disrupt Jesus ability to bring grace to others by the way we receive His grace for ourselves. If we receive Jesus grace as something we are entitled to, something that simply fixes our problem whether it be health or guilt or anything else and then go off our own way, without responding to Jesus in obedience, we will make it harder for Jesus to work with others. Just like the leper in this story. Jesus is not in the healing business. He is in the redemption business. He didn t come to give the people what they want. He came to give us what we need. OK. Give us something practical to do, then. And here it is. Pray. We don t have to get up before dark to do this, but we do have pray. If it was necessary for Jesus, it is necessary for us. Pray what? Pray as Jesus did. Not my will but Your will be done. Pray it everyday. Make it your prayer. And I guarantee you, life will be different. Your agenda will begin to line up with God s agenda, instead of trying to force things the other way around.