NOTES for Mar 1:35-44

Human joy sometimes expresses itself in strange ways. A person who has suffered for many years from an incurable disease comes to a Prophet unknown to him, whom he most likely sees for the first time. This Prophet heals him and says: keep silent, do not chatter about Me on every corner; go and do what the Torah prescribes for cleansing. But the healed man, instead of doing what he was told to do, joyfully shouts on every corner about what happened to him, plainly blurting out what he had been asked to keep silent about.

What is this: talkativeness? Neglect and disrespect toward the One who healed him? It is hardly either one. Rather, not everything, sadly, is serious for us that really is serious. Or better: for us, only what is serious to us is serious in earnest. For the healed man, throughout the whole time of his sickness, the sickness itself was at the center. It blocked out the whole world for him, and he can hardly be blamed for that.

But now his life changes: Someone enters it who is able and ready to deliver him from sickness, to heal and cleanse him. What then: should all attention be given to Him? Surely it should. If He delivered him from sickness, if He is from God, then he should listen to Him and do everything exactly as He commands.

Why then does the healed man act otherwise? Perhaps precisely because he has not yet truly been healed. His body is already healthy, but his attention is still entirely focused on the sickness that is no longer there, but whose memory is alive. And the healed man shouts on every corner: not about God and not about the One who healed him, but about the sickness that is no more. He shouts so much that he even forgets what the mysterious Savior asked of him.

As we can see, Jesus did not always want the fame of the healings He performed to spread throughout Palestine. Sometimes He heals in such a way that the healing becomes a testimony, a testimony for everyone who saw it. But it also happens that Jesus performs a healing almost unnoticed, as far as that is possible.

More than that, He insists on strict observance of the prescriptions of the Torah. The Torah requires that a person healed of leprosy go to the priests so that they may certify that the disease has truly passed. It would seem to be an obviously unnecessary precaution: Jesus knows perfectly well whom He has healed, just as He knows that the disease has truly disappeared. The healed man knows this too; he certainly needs no other testimony, since he fully trusts Jesus.

He trusts Him so much that he is ready to go and tell everyone about Him, about the One who healed him. Jesus, by contrast, stops him and directs his preaching zeal into more traditional and moderate religious channels. Why? For what reason? The simplest answer would be the one usually given: Jesus does not want to be considered the Messiah; He does not want for Himself the fame that miracles and healings inevitably brought Him. In essence, during His earthly ministry Jesus never wanted to be a public figure. And if He nevertheless did something that made Him one, it was only where and when there was no other possible way.

The preaching had to be public, but all possible associations that could arise in mass religious consciousness had to be avoided as much as possible. Not only because they were false, but also because they were by no means spiritually beneficial for the people themselves. This was true for the healed man who was ready to run and testify: in essence, he had not yet had time to know Jesus at all; he had not yet understood what this Man had brought into the world. For now he had nothing to testify about except one healing.

What can such a person say? About a new wonderworker famous for healing every disease with one movement of His hand? That is true, but such testimony can hardly be considered adequate to the mission laid upon Jesus by His Father. Better than such testimony is ordinary restraint within traditional bounds. At least it leaves time to become aware of and reflect on what happened, which cannot be said of a stormy, emotional, but superficial proclamation.

These words sound unusual: if You are willing, You can make me clean. We are used to every petitioner putting his own desire first. And when we see this request, we understand that this man's rejection has produced in him an immense and genuine humility. In fact, this is the ideal of petitionary prayer.

And when one thinks about this, it becomes all the more terrible to see this man's behavior after his healing. Why can he not fulfill a simple request, at least out of gratitude?! This is hard to understand; each person has to struggle painfully with this text.

But it is not by chance that the Church chooses for us what is included in the Gospel reading. Let us notice the words with which the reading begins: and in the morning, rising very early, He went out and departed to a deserted place, and there He prayed. These words immediately soften in some way the storm of the soul caused by the former leper's behavior, and one remembers another petitionary prayer: Your will be done. It is not so difficult to say the best prayer in the world; it is much harder afterward to ascend the cross. This is exactly what does not happen with the leper, and sometimes with us.

The brief Gospel reading is a summary of what God chiefly does when He comes to people. Prayer, preaching, and immediate, prompt help in everything. The sick, the infirm, the demon-possessed - all come to Jesus for liberation. The city gathers at the house where He is staying because this encounter grants healing, the recovery of lost wholeness. There is no other way to receive it.

What happens after health, soundness of mind, and new life return? How do people behave when they receive what they wanted most? Some leave, some stay to watch what is happening, some follow Him everywhere. But Peter's mother-in-law immediately begins to serve the One who entered her house and, by touching her, healed her.

There is, of course, nothing surprising in the fact that the sick and the possessed long for healing and deliverance. Something else is interesting: exactly how the evangelist describes such events. He tells some of them in detail, for example the healing of Peter's mother-in-law; others he mentions briefly, as he mentioned the many healings Jesus performed in Capernaum. Of course, this difference could be explained in purely literary terms: by speaking of an event in detail, the evangelist thereby sets it apart, while in general terms he speaks of events that turn out to be a kind of background for the separate episodes. But in the Gospel there are no unimportant or insignificant parts; even the background matters here. And what first catches the eye in descriptions of such background events is the mass, the crowd, the multitude.

It is quite possible that all these healings did not happen at one single moment, that the brief mention of many healings is brief only in the evangelist's description, while in reality the healings described took more than one day. But even if that is so, the difference in how the events are described is still obvious: on the one hand, a single event; on the other, something mass-scale, where the individual person cannot be distinguished.

But perhaps the issue here is not literary composition alone. Perhaps it is the very nature of the Kingdom: the Kingdom in which there is no place for illness or possession, and therefore everyone it touches is delivered from both one and the other, if only he has even a drop of trust in the One who brought this Kingdom into the world. But deliverance from illness is only the first step. After that life begins, that new life in the Kingdom in which nothing simply happens by itself anymore, where one must serve so that this life becomes for the person who has shared in it not only an external fact, but also the inner content and meaning of his own existence.

And this is already a strictly individual and deeply personal process. Here it is not enough simply to come into contact with the Kingdom; what is needed is a spiritual process that cannot take place without the person's own conscious and purposeful participation. And while there are always many who want to be healed and freed from the power of dark forces, there are generally far fewer who make the effort to move forward on the spiritual path.

This is why, perhaps, there are not so many Christians among those healed by Jesus. Healing, after all, is only the beginning. It is a beginning that requires continuation. Otherwise the life of the Kingdom will never become reality for the one who has been healed.

Today's Gospel reading is devoted to Jesus' confrontation with evil: possession and sickness. The world was created by God in wisdom and perfection; there was no place in it for death and disease. The Book of Revelation says that at the end of time death and disease will be conquered. Today's passage tells of the beginning of this battle. We see that Jesus does not remain indifferent to the fate of suffering people, but conquers sickness and frees a person from the power of dark forces.

The Kingdom of God and evil are incompatible. This excludes every defense of death and sickness as some kind of good that God brings upon people for their correction. God permits the existence of evil as a consequence of the sinfulness common to humanity, but He does not create evil; He conquers it. We too must take part in this victory if we want to be co-workers with Christ. The sickness and bondage of people are a task for us as well. We must "overcome evil with good": relieve the sufferings of our neighbors, free ourselves from the power of sin, and free the world from it.