We’re walking through a series of reflections on Mark 1:29-39. (Part one) (Part two)

But doesn’t healing help us feel better about following him?

Actually, no it doesn’t. Not necessarily.

There is another story about Jesus healing 10 men of their skin disease. Only one of them comes back to thank him. There would have been a few hundred people in Capernaum that day. As he went from town to town in the area, by the time we get to the feeding of the thousands, there were thousands who followed him. They would have watched him heal, or been healed themselves. They would have seen demons cast out. They would have heard stories about all kinds of miracles. But within a couple days of that mass feeding, almost all of those people gave up on him.

The truth is that healing doesn’t make us trust Jesus more. Because it’s not permanent. We’ll get sick again. We’ll age. We’ll die.

Does that mean we’re not supposed to ask for healing?

Not at all. You ask for stuff from people in relationship all the time. You ask for help, they ask for help.

But we don’t make relationship contingent on whether someone does something.

I’m reading a book called Prayer in the Night. Tish Harrison Warren, the author, talks about something she heard in a sermon that stuck with her. “You cannot trust God to keep bad things from happening to you.”

Then what good is a good God? If we can’t count on being protected.

But what if the life we live in the world we live in is, by definition, broken. In this world you will have trouble. The creation groans to be healed. Death, and decline to death are part of this life.

But what if life is more than the life we see? If we get a glimpse of it when Jesus died and rose again with a new and renewed body built to last forever.

If that’s true, then the troubles of this life are hard but not permanent. A man who was beaten and left for dead and homeless and betrayed and sick and beaten and misunderstood could talk about our light and momentary troubles.

Here is the really hard thing. God’s deepest desire is relationship with us. What breaks that relationship is our demanding relationship on our terms, rather than accepting God’s terms.

He faced and experienced death for the sake of that relationship.

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To be continued.