The region around the Pyrenees, the mountains that create a natural border between France and Spain, is also the home of a number of unique languages. One, Basque, is a language isolate, unrelated to other European languages. Others, like Catalan and Occitan, are derived from the romance language group, but distinct from either Spanish or French. It was in a dialect of Occitan, Gascon, that 14 year-old Bernadette Soubirous described her encounters with uo petito damizelo, “a small young lady,†or what she described simply as aquero, “that.†Those encounters, over the course of a fortnight in 1858, would come to be understood as apparitions of the Virgin Mary, for the damizelo would eventually refer to herself as the “Immaculate Conception,†a little too theologically convenient given that belief in the Immaculate Conception of Mary had only been promulgated by the Vatican four years earlier. Nonetheless, the apparitions and the spring that Bernadette discovered would become the heart of a faith-healing industrial complex at Lourdes in France, where approximately 350,000 pilgrims bathe in the waters annually, seeking cures.
Of those 350,000 pilgrims, one in ten thousand will report cures to the Lourdes Medical Bureau. Three to five of these are deemed worth investigation annually, and referred to the International Lourdes Medical Committee. That committee can deem the cure “medically inexplicable,†though only the bishop of the subject’s home diocese can declare it a miracle.
The good news is that the odds of experiencing a cure deemed medically inexplicable are almost twice as good as those of being struck by lightning. They still don’t seem that good. And remember, those who take the time and spend the money to go to Lourdes are predisposed to believe in miracles, or at least the possibility of miraculous healing.
These days, most of us are skeptical about faith healing, and with good reason. “Out demon lupus†shouts one charlatan in a recent segment of “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.†Snake oil is snake oil, whether or not you call it holy, and all the smoke and mirrors in the world cannot hide frauds like Benny Hinn.
Yet, here we are, a people gathered in the name of one of history’s most famous faith healers. So central are acts of healing to the understanding of Jesus that even Josephus, the Jewish historian who is our primary source for events in 1st century Palestine, mentions Jesus, his teaching and his healing, with respect, and not with the usual disdain he applies to most miracle workers of the age. In fact, only his Roman patrons and John the Baptizer are held in higher regard by Josephus.
The Catholic priest and scholar John Meier uses Lourdes to frame his own examination of the miracles of Jesus, in the second volume of his critically acclaimed “A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus.†He divides those who deny the historicity of the miracles of Jesus into two overlapping camps, a sort of Venn diagram of denial. First are those who point out that the Ancient Near East was a hotbed of religious passions, of prophets and cults, and that the idea of a miracle worker is not unique to Jesus. They point to miracles in Hebrew scripture, like those of Moses, Elijah and Elisha, to miracle traditions in later rabbinic literature centered around Honi the Circle-Drawer and Hanna Ben Dosa, to pagan miracle traditions around Apollonius of Tyana. Meier’s apologetic makes a strong case that each of these healers is substantively different than the gospel reports of Jesus as a healer. Unlike the others, the accounts of healing in the gospels were written during the lifetime of some followers who witnessed them, not a century or more later as with the othets, and Jesus himself performs the miracles, rather than simply praying that God might perform the miracle. The emphasis on Jesus as the agent of miracle in the gospels, and particularly of him as an agent of restoration and healing, has a lot to do with developing ideas of incarnation, of Jesus as Emmanuel, or God-with-us.
The second line of attack in denying the miracles of Jesus comes from Enlightenment thinking. The Newtonian universe, so central to modernity, is a great machine with fixed rules. What can’t be tested and reproduced is not real, according to this thinking. The odds that medically inexplicable healing would occur in relationship to this single human, Jesus, not once, not twice, but on what seems a daily basis, is incredible, literally not believable. For those grounded in this Newtonian rationalism, champions of detached Enlightenment thinking, science completely rules out the possibility of miracle.
Which is all well and good, except we have known for almost a century now that we don’t actually live in a giant Newtonian machine. The universe is quantum and weird and entangled, more lifelike than machine-like, and that on a good day. Very smart people will tell you that the fact that there is a good day at all, that there is something instead of nothing, is itself a miracle.
Only you can decide whether there is room in your head and your heart for both science and miracle. As for me, I choose to believe, choose to live in a world where logic and art are both true, love and evolution are both real, a world that is not yes and no, but is yes and yes, where we are touched by holiness.
Yes and yes… People experienced healing at the hands of the teacher from Galilee who went around announcing that something new and amazing was happening in the world, that God’s alternate reality was breaking into this reality, was available to all.
We could spend weeks just on the two encounters in today’s reading from Mark, the shortest gospel, for they are complex encounters, very different from one another, yet fitting like perfect pieces into the picture Mark is creating of Jesus.
Both encounters take place in Gentile areas, not among Jews. Tyre sits on the Mediterranean coast in modern day Lebanon. The Phoenicians, Syrophoenicians in our text, were a Semitic people, like the Israelites, and successful seafarers, with settlements as far away as Portugal. While they were culturally close to the Hebrews, as we have seen throughout scripture, those who were closest were often the most despised, other Semitic tribes like the Edomites, even non-Judahite Hebrews like the Samaritans. The Syrophoenician woman is other, markedly outside the Hebrew covenant people.
The ancient historian Eusebius tells us that Mark was a follower of Peter, and not a member of the original movement organized around Jesus, and we have evidence of that here, for the author’s lack of familiarity with the geography of Palestine shows through. He has Jesus move back from Tyre on the coast toward Galilee by way of Sidon, which is much further north. In any case, the text makes clear that the next healing takes place somewhere in the Decapolis, a loose cluster of ten Greco-Roman cities founded in the last century BCE. While Damascus and Philadelphia, modern day Amman, were outside of Palestine, the remainder of the Decapolis cities were in Galilee, and therefore were hotspots in the culture wars of that age, the struggle over immigration and assimilation, the tension between Hebrew and Hellenistic thinking and practice.
Both healing encounters are critical to Mark’s understanding of how the mission and ministry of Jesus could morph from a reform movement in the odd and insular Hebrew tradition into a worldwide movement that would take in non-Jews, both other Semitic peoples like the Phoenicians and culturally dissimilar peoples like the Greeks and the Romans.
Both encounters appear in Mark immediately after a dispute between Jesus and strictly observant Hebrews over cleanliness and uncleanliness, over ritual purity, a matter of great importance in some forms of the Hebrew religious system. Remember that even touching something unclean made you unclean, a fact that is critical in the story of the woman with the hemorrhage. To interact with Gentiles, to touch Gentiles, to eat Gentile food, as Peter would in Acts, to travel to Gentile regions, these actions always involved a risk of becoming contaminated, unclean. This excursion by Jesus and his disciples into Gentile regions, with acts of faith by non-Hebrews and acts of healing by Jesus, also surfaces the tension between faith, emphasized by Jesus, and appearances, emphasized by his opponents, so central in the message of Paul and in the Reformation under Luther. These two Gentiles Jesus encounters are not healed as a reward for scrupulous religious observance, for they are not Hebrews, but rather because they believed. We see this again and again. Belief and healing go hand in hand throughout the gospels and on into the apostolic age.
If the two stories share a theological perspective, they are dissimilar in other ways ways. One is an exorcism, the other a healing. We now understand conditions they interpreted as demonic possession, epilepsy, mental illness, as also being diseases, but they didn’t, looking for an outside cause, and finding it in the notion that there was inexplicable evil loose in the world.
In the first, Jesus is nowhere near the recipient of the miraculous healing, similar to the stories of the Centurion’s servant, found in Matthew and Luke, and the royal official’s son, found in John. Especially helpful is that parallel in Luke 7, where it is a non-Jew with deep faith who requests the healing, just like the Syrophoenician woman. In the second story, of the deaf-mute in the Decapolis, the healing is hands-on, with symbolic actions that border on the magic Josephus finds disreputable in other healers.
We could analyze and pick apart the details of these stories all day long, Newtonian skepticism pitted against the desire to believe. Those inclined to argue that the experience of healing was real can rightly point out that if the healings in the gospel, the miracles across the board, are a fiction, then everything else in Christ’s message is suspect, from his reconfiguration of God as a loving creator-parent to his announcement of the in-breaking kingdom. The simple fact is this: Jesus announced a new way of being in the world, a way charged with holy imagination and overpowering love, an awareness that the barrier between us and the transcendent, the more-than-us, is permeable. They touched his garment, made holes in the roof to lower a stretcher, heard his word of commend to the demons that troubled their souls, and they were healed.
They came as broken people. They left whole. Bodies became whole. Wounded souls experienced healing. Sin and guilt fell away. In the hyperbolic language of marketing, they came away new and improved. Jesus did not catch their uncleanliness. He shared his cleanliness with them.
The question “What would Jesus do?†is, in many ways, ridiculous, because Jesus could do, if we believe what we say we believe, what the stories report, things that we cannot do. You are not an incarnation of Divine Mystery, and I am not an incarnation of Divine Mystery, and the faith-healer Benny Hinn is not an incarnation of Divine Mystery, and the only physical healing we can offer comes through the science of modern medicine, though miracle intrudes even in that often hostile clinical space.
But you contain a spark of the Divine, and I contain a spark of the Divine, and God love him, and I hope God does, even the charlatan Benny Hinn contains a spark of the Divine, for as Jesus promised, he is with us always, and there are many forms of healing we can offer the world, mostly by creating space in which healing can occur, sometimes space in which we ourselves can heal.
We may not be able to perform remote exorcisms or use spit and mud and magic to heal. But we can be a powerful presence of God’s love in the world by doing some of the things that Jesus did. He prayed. He studied scripture. He spoke to the challenges of his day, but he also spoke of the love of God, which is timeless, a love not for one single tribe, but for a Syrophoenician woman and a deaf-mute in the Decapolis, a love that is real in the challenges we face today, that will remain when today has faded, that will remain for tomorrow and ever.
As I learned as a chaplain intern at my first deathbed, there is often nothing we can do that will fix what is broken. Sometimes all we can say is “That sucks. I’m sorry you are experiencing that.†Sometimes that and the simple ministry of presence are enough, the love of God experienced through our love for one another experienced through faith, in prayer and in song and in silence.
And sometimes we offer healing by giving rides and providing meals and reminding one another to practice self-care. Some of the work of healing comes when we boldly assert that every human deserves medical care, that no one uses a profit and loss formula to calculate the value of their own life. Sometimes we create space for healing by ringing bells and lighting candles and carrying signs of protest.
But we can do none of those things without love, a love experienced in story and song and in prayer. We don’t have to fly across the Atlantic and bathe in the waters of Lourdes, and our encounter with holiness need not be in a grotto, for that which we seek, aquero in Gascon, is with us always, here, right now. May you bring healing into the world. May you encounter healing in the world. May you be new and improved, and may you glow with a faith that leaves others new and improved. May we be agents of healing even when we need healing, and may we be catalysts of belief, even when we ourselves doubt. As the father of the epileptic boy said to Jesus, “Lord, we believe. Help our unbelief.â€
Amen.