Transcript
From John’s gospel: “Pilate asked him, “So you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world.’” May I speak in the name of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
There’d be nothing all that interesting about Israel proclaiming the greatness of its God if she were one of the big winners of history. But in fact Israel was one of the pawns in the ancient Near Eastern game of empire-making, strategically located and therefore successively overrun by armies from Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece, and finally Rome.
In 70 AD when the army of the Roman Emperor Vespasian killed Israel’s priests, destroyed their Temple, and erected one to Jupiter in its place, Jews recited Psalm 145. In the twentieth century, Jews did the same thing at Auschwitz, praying the same words:
Your kingship is kingship over all worlds,
And your dominion lasts through generation after generation.
The Lord sustains all who are fallen
And raises up all who are bowed down. (vv. 13 – 14)
The Psalter, the book that teaches us to praise, flies in the face of what we would call the facts. A people noteworthy chiefly for their bad political luck proclaim the absolute dominion of their God over all times and circumstances.
This is either mass delusion or else an unusually deep understanding of the nature of reality. If God’s kingship is indeed over all worlds, then the way we ordinarily think about the shaping forces of our lives is woefully inadequate. If God’s majesty is absolute, then the social, political, and personal facts on which we spend so much energy are not determinative. They’re important, and we have to help each other cope with them, in good times and bad, in hospital or at home. But if God is ruler over all then it is God’s goodness and that alone which determines the shape and quality of our lives.
And so on Christ the King, a week after we commissioned Mary Cramer as our Parish Nurse, I want to speak directly to all you members of our congregation who are dedicated to the healing arts, and I want to single you out for praise. Perhaps you’re a nurse or a physician or therapist, perhaps you’re caring for someone close to you suffering from dementia. Perhaps you’re a member of the team of healing ministers who pray and anoint with holy oil people who’ve come to this Altar to receive the Sacrament then come to you for healing prayers.
People are hurting, hurting and desperately in need of repair and reconciliation and remembering, to God and to one another. At Good Sam, when we say Jesus is Lord, Christ is King, we don’t gloss over our anguish. One of the things I admire about us as a church, a character trait, is that we don’t pretend we have got it all together. We recognize that all of us have deep places of brokenness that require healing.
The New Testament speaks to this question of how wounds, whether self-inflicted, societally-inflicted, congenital, PTSD, substance-related, can be healed. And today I ask you to think with me about healing people who are sick and people who are sunk in mental darkness, some of them oppressed by their own demons.
Think about the Gerasene demoniac, in the fifth chapter of Mark’s gospel. There we read an account of a man who is living out “among the tombs,” as Mark says. He’s damaged and acting in ways where he’s damaging himself. He’s frightening people and he’s out of control, and no one knows what to do with him. And he encounters Jesus. And Jesus casts out the demons. And Jesus asks their name and the demons reply, “My name is Legion.” And of course ‘legion’ is an allusion to the units of the Roman army.
Mark doesn’t say that this demon-possessed man was a soldier. The name ‘legion’ might be a way of thinking about the internalized damage left as a result of military conflict, of mortal combat. We don’t know.
What we know is that after Jesus drives the demons out, Mark says the man is “restored to his right mind.” And Jesus says to him, “Go back. Go back to your own home, to your own people. Tell them what the Lord has done for you.”
So that image, not only of healing and driving out of oppressive powers that are eating this man alive but also the restoration to family and community that come at the end of the story. That’s an incredibly powerful sign for the way in which Jesus addresses people suffering from mental illness, from wounds of war of some kind, from conflict, wounds from perfect strangers or wounds from people close to you, including wounds from your friends. Godric, an early 12th-century saint—he was Bishop of Durham in England, and his name means “God reigns”—it was Godric who said, “What is friendship but the giving and taking of wounds?”
None of these woundings, no destructive powers, can finally separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Insofar as I ever think about what it would be like to be wholly in the presence of God it seems to me to have something to do with being seen candidly and met on the road the way the prodigal son, who had lost everything, who had squandered his inheritance, was seen by the Father who ran down the road to meet him and was held there in his arms.
I began with Jesus standing before Pilate. I’ll end with him crucified between two thieves. As they were dying, one of them said to him, “Jesus, remember me, when you come into your kingdom.” You’ll remember what Jesus said to him in reply. “Today, you will be with me in paradise.” Who talks that way as he’s being crucified? Christ, the King. In the name of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
