The Magnetic Jesus
In Saint Mark’s Gospel, everything moves fast.
Jesus is baptized. He is tempted. He goes to Galilee and begins preaching. He calls Simon and Andrew, and James and John to be his first disciples.
On a sabbath: they follow him to a synagogue where he teaches and drives an unclean spirit out of a man. They go to the home of Simon and Andrew, where he heals Simon’s mother-in-law of a fever. At sundown, still on that same day, everyone comes to the house, the whole city is outside the front door, with all the sick and all the people who were possessed with demons, and he heals.
It is the first day that Jesus does any healing or exorcism, and it starts with one (1) public exorcism, in the synagogue, and then one (1) private healing, in the house, and it concludes with all the city [] gathered together at the door.
Saint Mark quickly establishes Jesus as a magnet in the center of this city. The next morning his disciples, finding him outside the city in prayer, tell him that “everyone” is seeking him. He replies that he needs to go on to the other towns. His fame and his healing power spread through all the region.
If this weren’t Jesus and if you weren’t familiar with the story of Jesus, what would you make of it?
You’d see a charismatic political figure making contact with his base. He is going from town to town, helping people who have been overlooked by the established powers, helping people who are cut off and despised, giving them health and sanity and above all hope. You might well wonder where it would lead. This movement is getting off the ground very quickly, so fast it may be impossible for any authority to control. Where will this Jesus fellow go with his power? Again, if you didn’t understand Jesus, and a few months or maybe a year later you happened to be in Jerusalem, when a huge crowd came together to shout cheers for him as he entered into the city, riding on a little animal, the crowd casting garments and flowers and carpet-like plants in front of him and shouting and cheering, you might think that a competitor political power had come to town, a revolutionary, someone who intends to overthrow established power.
You would be both right and wrong. Wrong, because Jesus does not intend to throw out the Roman governor and take up residence in his palace. Right, because Jesus really is a counter-authority, a true king.
It is clear from the scriptures that political authority is a good thing that God has granted to us for our flourishing as human beings. We think of Romans 12 perhaps especially but it is an underlying conviction that runs throughout the scriptures, that God has given certain powers to rulers over cities and nations for the good of the people. But the power of any earthly authority is always under divine sufferance. Authority on earth exists under authority in heaven, and is subject to God’s ultimate judgment.
Jesus does not intend to overturn Rome. But at the same time, Jesus has a political authority superior to that of Rome and which Rome cannot understand.
You may recall a scene from the end of Jesus’ life. He has been physically abused by the soldiers. You can imagine his face bruised, bloody; the soldiers may have knocked a few teeth loose. Pilate asks him if he is ignorant of the fact that Pilate has the power to release him. Jesus, the bloodied prisoner, tells Pilate that he would have no authority were it not given to him from above. In this same exchange, which Saint John gives to us, Pilate is trying to figure out whether Jesus thinks he is a king. Jesus says it is right to call him a king, but his kingdom is not on a level with the empire of which Pilate is an instrument; “My kingdom is not a worldly kingdom.” And he adds: “My servants . . . everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice.”
Jesus’ people hear his voice. Jesus does not intend to overturn Rome. What he does instead—what Pilate cannot comprehend—is to pull Rome’s people out from under it and lead them into his kingdom. Instead of being Roman subjects, they now follow King Jesus, and are Jesus’ friends.
That is Jesus’ magnetism. When Jesus teaches he explains this to people, that there is a kingdom of God in which every human being can flourish. To be a citizen of that kingdom is worth more than anything anyone could ever get on earth—worth more than prime real estate in this beautiful state of Florida, more than the honor and power of being a governor or a judge, more than family, more than any earthly thing however good that thing may be. Whoever it was who said “Paris is worth a mass” had it upside down. To receive God is worth more than even Paris.
Throughout history all sorts and conditions of people have felt this magnetism of Jesus and chosen to entrust their lot to him. But it is signally important that his magnetism, according to the Gospels, was first felt by those who were helpless in society. The man possessed, who came to him, spontaneously, that sabbath in the synagogue in Caperneum. Peter’s mother-in-law, laid low by a fever, in danger of her life. And then, at the door, the whole city—I think it is significant that Mark does not say just a crowd of people, but he says, the whole city—there they are, drawn to him, bringing everyone who is sick.
When Jesus heals the sick, and when Jesus liberates people from demonic possession, he cures people from conditions that isolated them or cut them off from flourishing as human beings in society. Healing in that sense has a political dimension—it creates citizens. When Jesus heals he liberates people to follow him—and they want to, because of what they see in him.
Despite advances in medical science and economics, that magnetism of Jesus is still felt today, particularly in situations of oppression. I was speaking just last Sunday with a young woman in Dallas. She’s 25, she works in finance; our conversation turned to the mess in China. We discovered that in our different ways we both had been following news from there. I was going through the litany of disheartening events as I saw them. And then she said: Perhaps there will be a great outburst of Christianity in China. She said: People who are persecuted often turn to Jesus.
It’s true, and worth our keeping in mind. Jesus is still magnetic today. He is a king who offers every human being citizenship in the kingdom of God. May we pray for the spread of his kingdom, and for the grace and wits to do whatever part in that that God would give us.
Sermon preached by the Rev. Canon Victor L. Austin, Ph.D
Church of the Redeemer
Sarasota Florida
5th Sunday after Epiphany
7 February 2021