NewCreation

Homily for the Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B

Welcome, my sisters and brothers, to this, the homily for the fifth Sunday in ordinary time. And here we are with the immediate continuation of last week's Gospel. You remember last week Jesus and his friends were in a synagogue where there was someone who was in a spirit of unholiness, and this one recognized the Holy One of God, and Jesus had him keep quiet because it was not yet clear to anybody what the Holy One of God might actually be. It's only at the very, very end that it becomes clear who the Holy One of God really is. We continue immediately from that — in fact, that same day — in today's Gospel. And here I'd like to bring out and emphasize something which I've mentioned before but which is going to be increasingly important. Mark's Gospel presupposes always a spiral reading, and I mean that in this sense. At face value we are having an account of what happened in Jesus's public life at the very beginning of his ministry, before people knew who he was, and a number of significant elements are being shown which were memories of people from the time when they didn't understand who he was. And yet every single one of these is being told by people who knew who he was, because they had lived through to the end of the story. So in fact they always describe these initial moments as if they were in fact the things that happened after Jesus had fulfilled his mission. So you get this double vision, if you like, at every single passage of Mark. It's something that happened initially, and yet it's also something that happened after Jesus's death and resurrection. And we're expected always to notice these two things happening together. The Holy One of God was misrecognized by the unclean spirit, but it was in fact that's who he was, and what he was doing after his resurrection is being shown lived out here. Which is why at the very end of the Gospel the angel tells the lost and muddled disciples to go back to Galilee, where he would show them everything. And that's exactly what we're doing here — where we're part of the going back to Galilee of the disciples after the resurrection, seeing what he's doing so that we know what to do. That's how Mark's Gospel works. So let's follow this carefully. As soon as they left the synagogue — remember, where there had been an unclean spirit — they entered the house of Simon and Andrew with James and John. So now they're in a domestic space. Remember, it's still the Sabbath; they're in a domestic space, a peaceful domestic space. But there is a suffering there, a genuine suffering. Simon's mother-in-law was in bed with a fever. Not without talking about an unholy and impure spirit as in the synagogue, just a sickness. And they told him about her at once. In other words, there was no attempt to say, "Well, let's …not mention this until after the Sabbath is over, and immediately he comes to her. He came and took her by the hand and lifted her up. Okay, these are important phrases. That same phrase will happen three times in Mark's Gospel: with Simon's mother-in-law, with the young lady who died — the little girl who dies and whom Jesus then touches, takes her by the hand and says, "Little girl, arise" — and with a boy in Mark 9 who is almost dead. Jesus takes him by the hand and tells him to rise, causes him to rise. And what do we have here? We have reference, of course, to Isaiah: "I am the Lord, I have called you in righteousness, I have taken you by the hand and kept you, I have given you as a covenant to the people." So what we're having here, in fact, if you like, is a post-resurrection scene already in life. It is the risen Lord, the Lord, who is raising her up, and uses the word — the active word — to raise, to raise someone up, because he's the one doing the raising up. Later in today's Gospel we'll see him resurrecting; we'll see him actually acting out, already early in Galilee, his own resurrection. But at this stage, this is the fruit of the resurrection. The fruit of the resurrection is the Lord raising people up. The fever left her, and she began to serve them — in other words, she became a deacon; she entered into the diakonia, the service — which is exactly what happens to the disciples after Pentecost. Once they have received the Holy Spirit they are raised up and they become servants. That's key to what's going on here. She is, in fact, if you like, the first post-Pentecost Christian disciple, and it's already in the family home in Galilee at the very beginning. "That evening at sundown" — so that means at the end of the Sabbath. The Sabbath would have ended at sundown on the Sabbath day, so from six o'clock in the evening it would start to be the next day, the day after Sabbath. "They brought to him all who were sick or possessed with demons." Now please notice: no discussion here of impurity. Here it is people who are ill and people who are demonized. We'll look at that in a second. I just want to bring out something of what's going on. Before, he'd been in the synagogue, where there was a spirit of impurity, and it was the Holy One of God. Remember: at Pentecost, the Holy One of God comes out of the Temple effectively and comes into a house. So the distinction between the holy — the Temple — and the profane is undone. And here we have the new house after Pentecost, where the disciples worshipped freely, in between the house and the Temple. There was no longer a distinction between the holy and the profane. But here we have the house, and instead the whole city was gathered around the door. Okay, the word "gathered" — the word "synagogue" — is the word meaning the gathering to… gather together, and here we have the intensified form of the same verb: the intensely gathered together. They were intensely gathered together around the door, which is exactly what the profane means. "Profanum" means in front of the temple rather than inside it. That's literally what profane means: in front of the temple. So here we have the new holy space, the domestic house, and the intense gathering together in front of it, as people become aware that all forms of evil start to be undone. And he cures many who are sick with various diseases and casts out many demons. In other words, the strength of the Holy One is beginning to go out. It's beginning to go out. It takes the form of enabling creation to be fulfilled, so that sick people are made whole, and those people who are bound down by the terrible patterns of desire which the profane world can produce – patterns of desire caused by economic factors, military factors, bad family relationship factors, any number of these things that are not strictly to do with purity and impurity. All of these are ways of binding people down, which we would now regard in various psychological or mental or environmental ways, which at the time they understood to be patterns of desire that people are locked up in, that literally take pride in themselves, making them mad and unviable. But he does not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him. So here we have the word going out, the building up happening, but not yet the naming of the one who enables them to be done. That the disciples will have learnt at Pentecost, because then they later know in what name they too must cast out demons and in what name they too can heal. Just in case there's any doubt about this, here we have the resurrection scene suddenly, in Galilee. In the morning, while it was still very dark, he got up – "anastas," he resurrected. So remember, this is the equivalent of the end of the Sabbath. When the Sabbath comes to an end, the first morning – when in the Gospel this was the time when Mary Magdalene came to the tomb – but he's up already. He got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed. And Mark is no fool: with what verb does he pray? Well, with exactly the same verb as he prayed in Gethsemane in Mark's Gospel. In other words, all of the later events are being concentrated here. And Simon and his companions hunted for him. Where have they taken him? Where has he gone? The same response that the disciples had after the resurrection. When they found him, they said to him, "Everyone is searching for you." So the question is: where is he? Where is he to be found? Remember, they have been told by the angel – they get told by the angel, "Go back to Galilee." And he answered, "Let us go on to the neighboring towns. Let's go on in other…" "…for that is what I came out to do." What did he come out to do? He'd come out to make repentance possible, because the kingdom of heaven had drawn near. And what we get is him announcing that at the very beginning of his ministry, and the disciples coming back and understanding that that is exactly what is now their job to do with him, proclaiming his name. That's what he came out to do. "This is what I came out to do." This is a very quick, subtle reference to Moses going out to see his people. But nothing is lost with Mark. "And he went through Galilee proclaiming the message in their synagogues and casting out demons." In other words, the Holy One of God is making the full holiness of the synagogue and thus the Temple alive, but also healing the profane — that world where demons, where people are bound down by spirits that dehumanize. So both the holiness of God and the humanizing, bringing into being of creation, going on at the same time. What do we do when we preach the Gospel? We go back to Galilee and watch and learn and pray to be taken into the same Spirit, so that we may discover what is really holy, and we may bring each other to life. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.