Scripture: Mark 6:53-56; Ephesians 2:13-14; Genesis 32:22-32; Matthew 25:40 Series: After Pentecost
Drawing on a vacation injury at Petrified Forest, the pastor distinguishes wounds that heal quickly from those that linger, applying this to both physical and spiritual wounds. Spiritual wounds include lies told about God and the body, and the slander of the devil (diabolos = slanderer) and the powers and principalities. Using Jacob wrestling the angel and being renamed Israel, he argues Christ’s healing is a wrestling match within the heart between who the world says we are and who God knows we are. Christ breaks down the dividing wall (Ephesians 2) within our souls. Wounds cannot be healed against our will; we must admit our need, and forgiveness and mercy are the heavenly balm. We touch the hem of Jesus’s cloak by serving the least of these (Matthew 25), giving, and ceasing to hide our wounds.
Illustrations: petrified-forest-fall, unnoticed-injury, diabolos-satan-slanderer, jacob-wrestles-angel, come-o-thou-traveler-unknown, climbing-jacobs-ladder-hymn, risen-christ-scars, teacher-forgiveness-medicine, more-things-dreamt-philosophy
July 21
Healing Wounds
“But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.” - Ephesians 2:13-14 NRSV
“When they had crossed over, they came to land at Gennesaret and moored the boat. When they got out of the boat, people at once recognized him, and rushed about that whole region and began to bring the sick on mats to wherever they heard he was. And wherever he went, into villages or cities or farms, they laid the sick in the marketplaces, and begged him that they might touch even the fringe of his cloak; and all who touched it were healed.” - Mark 6:53-56 NRSV
When we were on our vacation at the end of June, we went to Petrified Forest National Park in Northern Arizona. This is the national park that most people pass through in the country. Not visit, that would be Great Smokey Mountains National Park in Tennessee and North Carolina. No, more people pass through Petrified Forrest because it is right on I-40 between Albuquerque and Phoenix. It is an older park, named to the system in 1906. A lot of people pass through but very few people camp there or stay there. Even on the website, it says,
There is no RV, car, or front country camping in the park. There is no boondocking, dispersed or “primitive” camping, or just pulling off into a parking area. There is only backpacking…
So we were in the backcountry, and I was running. I didn’t have a pack on, but I was running. And I tripped and fell and crashed down on a pile of rocks. I didn’t hurt myself, but I cut out up my hands pretty badly. I was in a hurry and just because I fell didn’t change the fact that I was in a hurry so I kept on going. Didn’t clean them up. I didn’t even wipe them. I just kept on going. Blood was dripping a little bit. Eventually, it all got sorted out. I cleaned up my hands and bandaged them up. I had a really a deep cut on my thumb that was bleeding a lot and a small cut on my palm with almost no blood. There were a few other abrasions, but those were the ones that I needed to cover in order to keep from getting infected. The cut on my palm wasn’t very deep, and it didn’t bleed a lot. The cut on my thumb had a little flap and a lot of blood. Once the bleeding stopped though, my thumb healed fairly quickly. The cut on my palm did not bleed very much, but it took a lot longer to heal.
Some wounds that we receive take a lot longer to heal. At the end of Mark chapter 6, Jesus and his disciples are still around the area of Galilee. This is where Jesus was raised and where he spent nearly all of his early ministry in the northern part of what is now Israel. The people are here to listen to him and see him and they are coming in droves. The people want healing. They have wounds that need to be healed, and they are seeking Jesus.
There are some wounds that heal up on their own. You don’t have to do anything with them and then they go away on their own. There are other wounds that linger and linger and linger. And I think we should understand wounds here as both physical and spiritual. There are physical wounds and spiritual wounds.
One of the funny things about cuts and wounds is that sometimes they don’t hurt until you notice them. Many times in my life, I’ll find some blood on my pants and be like, “where did that come from?” And then I see a gash on my arm or on my head or wherever it would be. Only then would I start to feel the pain. The body is a curious thing.
How can that work? How can you be injured without realizing it. You can go a long time without realizing the injury that you have sustained. I think that this is especially the case with spiritual wounds. We can be wounded spiritually for a long time without realizing it.
Now some examples of spiritual wounds are important for us to make sure we are talking about the same. I think spiritual wounds include being told false things about God. Being told you’re not good enough or being told you must be perfect in order to be loved. Being told you must fit inside a certain box, being told you must do certain things in order to be loved by God or by other people. Being told that all love is conditional and that anyone telling you otherwise is selling something. I think these actions can cause spiritual wounds. One of the lies of this world is that our bodies must adhere to certain norms or be marked deficient. It is a lie and a spiritual wound.
We must also acknowledge and admit that there are spirits of this world, there are more things than are dreamt of in our philosophy. All of us have seen moments that cannot be fully explained. The word devil comes from the Greek word for slanderer, diabolos. Satan, or Shayton in Hebrew, terms the accuser.
There are cinematic and cultural understandings and images of devils and demons throughout the past 2000 years, but we shouldn’t get too far away from the original language to make sure that we are following the bible and not culture.
And I think that it is centrally important to remember that the devil original describes slander, not possession. It describes words against us, tearing us down. The serpent in the garden. Satan bargaining with God in order to test Job.
The evil spirits in the Gospels that possess certain individuals and groups slander and accuse. They tear down. The people don’t turn into robots or puppets. They act against their community and their people.
The Gospels also develop the structure of the world as governed by forces contrary to the will of God, described in places as the powers and principalities of the world.
They wound us with temptation. Temptation like the temptations of Jesus. They offer us the world, power, adoration. They wound us with false expectations.
We need healing. We need to be cleansed.
Last week, we sang Come O thou Traveler Unknown. And we shouldn’t sing old hymns two Sundays in a row, even if I like them. The song is about the wrestling of Jacob with the angel in Genesis. If you remember this story, this is before he sees his brother Esau, so the long of it. Esau and Jacob are the sons of Isaac, and Isaac is elderly, and Rebecca, their mother, prefers Jacob to Esau. Esau is this burly man of the fields in the country, and Jacob is a man of the hearth and the hope. And Rebecca tells Jacob to get their father’s blessing by and Jacob puts on sheepskin to be as hairy as his brother, and he goes in to receive a blessing. So then there’s this animosity between Jacob and Esau. And it continues and continues until they’re older. They’re both wealthy. Jacob is finally coming home after many years working for his uncle, Laban. This is also after he’d also deceived his uncle by painting sheep in the night in order to take most of his uncle’s property. Jacob is married to Leah and Rachel, and he’s coming home. He hears word that his brother, Esau, is across the river. And like the coward that he is, Jacob sends all his property, and his wives, across the river and he stays on the other side just in case Esau is not in a friendly mood.
And before he sees his brother, he has a vision, or maybe he doesn’t. It’s often interpreted as a dream. There’s a previous dream of Jacob’s Ladder. That’s a great old song. We are climbing Jacob’s Ladder. We are climbing Jacob’s ladder. We sang that earlier. And then there is a confrontation between Jacob and this unknown figure. Before this moment, Jacob is a fairly unsympathetic figure. I mean, he lies to his father. He lies to his brother. He lies to his uncle. He is deceived by his uncle. His marries a woman that he didn’t love, but stays with her, keeps her around so that he can marry the woman he does love, who happens to be the first woman’s sister. He ends up with 4 wives. Again, not a super sympathetic figure. Then at this moment, this confrontation, he struggles with an unknown figure, maybe an angel, and the figure touches Jacob’s thigh that wounds him and overpowers him, but Jacob still does not let go.
Jacob goes from a deeply unsympathetic figure to the father of a nation. He is ready to receive healing from God for his wounds.
He is blessed by the wound. His name is changed from Jacob that day to Israel, because he struggled with God, and did not give up. Sometimes wounds are the result of struggle.
They take place after a journey. Wounds can also affect other aspects of us. Our bodies can be wounded. Our spirits can be wounded. Our pride can be wounded. In this way, there are good wounds and bad wounds. Right? A wounded pride is humility, and this is good. A wounded heart is sorrow, and that is bad. When Christ heals our wounds, it looks a lot more like Jacob wrestling the angel than it does going to the doctor and getting shot. When Christ meets us where we are, there’s a wrestling match that needs to take place. Between who the world thinks we are and who God knows we are. And it’s gotta take place within our heart. If it doesn’t, we will never be healed.
In Ephesians, Paul describes how in Christ “you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.”
This works for different groups, different bodies. I think Paul also is speaking directly to us, the dividing wall inside our soul, where we wall off ourselves from other people, where we wall off ourselves from loving our neighbor, where we wall off ourselves from loving ourself, from seeing God in us. Christ breaks down that wall. There can be a struggle. And yet in the midst of that struggle, God is with us. God is offering us life. God is offering us purpose and peace and hope.
Some wounds linger. Some wounds heal quickly. Yet amazingly, Christ in the resurrection showed his scars. His wounds were not erased. His experiences were not erased.
All our wounds can be healed, but they cannot be healed against our will. The gaping hole in our leg will not close up if we refuse treatment. And it might not heal in the way we expect or the world expects. We could look broken to the world and whole to God. Nevertheless, we must admit a need before we receive healing God has for us.
The spiritual wounds we have undergone will not be healed if we refuse to acknowledge them.
Forgiveness and mercy are the great heavenly balms against spiritual wounds. Even the slanderer, the devil, cannot handle mercy. The devil wants conflict. Which is why Jesus teaches us to turn the other cheek. Turning the other cheek is not about weakness but faith in a God bigger than our power of revenge. Taking revenge is a lack of faith in God’s justice. Mercy, Forgiveness is an act of faith in God’s justice.
As a teacher of mine said,
“Forgiveness thus involves the personal and intimate connection of God and the one who he made in his image. There is…one healing. The all-powerful medicine can heal us from any sickness and any wound, whichever it is, because something incurable does not exist for it, but still must we wish to be healed: God] cannot save us in-spite ourselves.”
We must reach out and touch the hem of Jesus’s tunic to be healed.
How do we do that?
As Jesus says in Matthew 25, when you do so unto the least of these my brothers, you do unto me. Serve. Give. Share. Offer. When you reach out to touch someone in need of Jesus, you touch Jesus. When you give of yourself, you receive. When you let go of yourself, you find yourself.
Because Jesus has found you. Stop trying to save yourself. Stop trying to hide your wounds. Stop pretending that you are fine. Admit your reality and seek God’s peace by giving, by serving, by loving.
In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.