Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
When you think of Jesus’ ministry, this morning’s Gospel
lesson is a nice, brief synopsis, and boy, is it loaded up for us. First, there
is the healing of Peter’s mother in law. (Surprise! Did you know Peter was
married?) Jesus restored her to health with nothing but His touch – from Mark’s
description, Jesus doesn’t even say a word. Some of you remember the asprin commercial
that promised their product would fix headaches, back aches and fevers as “the wonder
drug that works wonders;” when word gets out that the Healer is doing miraculous
healings, even driving out demons, the crowds flock to the house, all looking
for a miracle, praying that Jesus would work wonders for them and their loved
ones.
Those moments are referred to daily, hourly in houses, hospitals,
and nursing homes all across the world. You have probably prayed for these very
things yourself, for loved ones, for friends, for coworkers and classmates,
that the Lord would, in some wonderful and miraculous way, reach down from
heaven and heal the loved one who is gravely ill, remove the cancer, restore
the heartbeat, fix what doctors don’t seem to be able to fix. If only Jesus
will do the same for me, my mom, my grandson, my spouse…
It's very easy to read this section from Mark 1 (in fact,
back up to last week’s Gospel, 1: 21-28) and think this is all the kind of
Jesus you need – a miraculous, healing Jesus who drives out sickness and
illness and demons and every other kind of force that works against us as human
beings. Yes, Mark reports that He did these things, but remember: every one of
those people whom Jesus healed would one day die. So, if that’s all Jesus is
reduced to being, a miracle-working physician and demon-caster-outer, something
is missing – something eternal. There is more to Jesus than just being the
Great Physician.
I want you to notice something else: Jesus disappears, early
in the morning, to pray. And, when the disciples find him, he doesn’t say,
“Let’s go set up another Messianic clinic so I can miraculously heal.” He says,
“Let us go on to the next towns, that I may preach there also, for that is why
I came out.” He comes to preach a Word
that gives life, now and into eternity, to heal from the eternal sickness of
our sins, to bring immortality to life amidst death.
“Preaching” is such a negative word in today’s vocabulary. A
father is scolding his teenage daughter and she snaps at him, “Don’t preach at
me!” When the boss is giving a presentation that everyone knows about already,
we say he’s preaching to the choir. When we see Mom or Dad putting brother or
sister in his or her place, really letting them have it, we smile at the parent
and say, “Preach it!” It sounds so negative. But this is what Jesus comes to
do: preach.
I don’t know that we think of Jesus-as-preacher and the
significance of that act. Water-to-wine, stiller of storms, raiser of the dead –
we know and gravitate to those incredible narratives in the Scriptures because
they show His power, His authority, His Divine authority. But when we hear that
Jesus began to preach, we kind of yawn and look for the next action sequence.
Preaching is proclamation. Preaching is declaration.
Preaching is announcing words to listening – and sometimes non-listening –
ears. It is saying, “Thus saith the Lord” and “This is most certainly true!” And,
if that is true of human preachers, it is infinitely more true of Jesus. When
Jesus proclaims, it is to proclaim the Kingdom of God has arrived and is
standing among the people. In Christ, God reigns. The Kingdom has come. And the
only response to the Kingdom’s arrival is repentance. Lord, have mercy on me a
sinner! He does! His purpose is to have mercy, to offer Himself as the
vicarious atonement, the substitutionary sacrifice, for sinners. His preaching
declares that: His coming is not only for repentance, but salvation. Even from
the cross, the proclamation sounds forth in a great victory sermon: It is
finished! Not His life, not His suffering, but Satan’s lying hold over God’s
people.
Jesus has to preach. He must tell that this is His purpose,
His mission: to be the Savior for whom the world had long waited. He must move
on so others can hear, so others can believe. The miracles are important, but
their importance is not the miracle in and of itself. The miracles demonstrate
His God-ness, His divinity. Only God can do such a thing, and His doing the
miraculous healing shows the people He is God in flesh, Immanuel, Messiah – the
Christ – that Israel has long waited for. Think about miracles for a moment and
who benefits from them. When Jesus healed, we have no evidence that He did a
Benny Hinn show, waving his arms over whole sections of the audience to heal.
He did it one-on-one, by touch, by command. Yes, for that person, it was life
changing and for those who saw it, it was revealing, but the audience, usually,
was limited – even with the greater miracles, water-to-wine, calming the storm,
and even raising the dead. But, when He preaches, the crowds hear, the words flow
from Jesus’ lips to the ears of the multitudes, from Capernaum radiating
outward to Bethsaida, Galilee, Judea and even Samaria.
He comes to preach, publicly, openly, to declare He is this
One and that anyone and everyone can hear. That the Kingdom has arrived in His
ministry. That He must suffer and die and be raised. That He will take all of
our sicknesses, all our frailties, all our weaknesses that are a result of the
fallenness of our bodies and the fallenness of this world and He will take each
and every one to the cross. And He will die your death. And He will defeat it
into eternity. The miracles are evidence of the new creation that will be
restored. They are precursors, sneak peaks of His resurrection, when He – the
Creator and Redeemer of the World – begins restoring Creation again.
But His preaching – His preaching gives life that cannot be
taken away.
Last week, I said I was jealous of the people in the
Capernaum synagogue who got to sit and be amazed at Jesus’ teaching. Perhaps
you feel that about Jesus’ healing ministry: “Sure would be nice if we could
have a miracle like they had in Capernaum.” So, if you want to see a
miracle, here is one among us today: by the power of the spirit of God, who is
active in the written, read, and preached word of Jesus Christ, the preaching
of the Good News today in Mission Valley is as powerful as the Good News that
was proclaimed on a hillside in Capernaum 2000 years ago. Yes: in the
absolution declared, in the Scriptures read from the lectern, in the Creed
confessed, in the words of institution that offer Christ’s body and blood to us
in, with, and under the bread and wine, with the Benediction that will send us
out to the world, and, yes, even in the words of this sermon, Christ is present
in these simple, words spoken by human mouths.
We tend to jump from the work of Jesus in the New Testament
to waiting for the return of Jesus, skipping from past to future. Preaching is
always a present tense activity. There is the miracle: the Word of God is
living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword because Christ is the very
Word of God incarnate. When preaching happens, when the Word is rightly preached,
Christ, who is the very Word of God incarnate, is present and active. His Word gives life against death, it shines
light against the darkness, it breathes hope where there is doom, it
strengthens where there is weakness, it forgives where there is guilt and
shame, it restores, it gives peace, it raises up as on eagle’s wings.
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