When he had said this, Jesus called in a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” The dead man came out, his hands and feet wrapped with strips of linen, and a cloth around his face.
Jesus said to them, “Take off the grave clothes and let him go.”

John 11.43-44, NIV

I wrote a post some time back about the widow of Nain and her dead son, making the point that Jesus only works where there is faith; and faith requires a living person to exercise it. The dead son didn’t exercise faith, neither did Jairus’ daughter, and neither did Lazarus. The people of Nazareth had so little faith that He was only able to heal a few sick people (the few who did have faith, implied). In the case of Lazarus, Jesus seems to have identified Martha (not Mary) as the person able to exercise a mustard seed of faith. She could have allowed the stone to be removed without comment; Jesus had to get her past her odour-based objection by saying “did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?” Objection withdrawn, they rolled away the stone.

So there is the faith, active in the arena (equivalent to the Widow of Nain ceasing her tears). It seems very small to us, hardly faith at all; and maybe that is because we should really be reading that word as trust (its primary meaning), rather than ‘faith’ with its overtones of spiritual superpowers. A mustard seed of trust in Jesus will move mountains.

But what happens next?

What Jesus does is even less elaborate than most English translations suggest; and that bears thinking about.

We can get very confused – and confusing – as we “prepare the atmosphere for amazing miracles”. Why? Because we are trying to engender an environment in which faith will arise. Jesus took a different approach: He found out where the faith was and then activated it using the least possible number of words. And the least complicated.

There are other examples. Elisha telling Naaman to dip in the Jordan seven times to be healed of his leprosy (which annoyed Naaman until a brave subordinate convinced him to just get on and do it); God telling Moses to speak to the rock, to bring forth water (which cost Moses his right to enter the promised land, when he disobeyed and used last year’s striking action instead); and perhaps, most significantly, God igniting the whole universe by saying “Light: be!” (Which is extraordinarily interesting when you listen to cosmologists talking about the first few seconds of the universe, and the structure of the universe formed by what were essentially acoustic waves working upon the earliest proto-matter as it condensed. But I digress…) (Except to say that you should never be frightened of science; all it can do in the end is arrive at a picture of what God did and how He did it. Which probably didn’t involve screwing the legs onto a giraffe…)

So what about Jesus and (the extremely dead) Lazarus? Jesus, ‘having said these things, cried out in a great voice! “Lazarus! Here, outside!” (In Greek, that is just “Λάζαρε, δεῦρο ἔξω”)

And Lazarus appears covered in his grave clothes – he has literally done nothing but what Jesus ordered him to do, which is to come outside to Him. Jesus tells those with him to release him from his bindings.

To summarise, if we want to operate like Jesus, we need to:

1. Find the person with faith and the relevant authority (Martha was the senior living relative in this case; in most case it needs to be the person themselves who needs a ‘miracle’)

2. Speak with authority and no fuss, the minimum words that describe or arrive at the answer.

3. Hand over to others the pastoral tidy-up, as required.

So we don’t need to hide behind a barrage of words and prayers, “babbling like the pagans”. Let your words be few, and to the point!

As a PS: If it is something not involving people being raised from the dead or saved from imminent death (which tends to be time critical), then time may be an element as the pieces assemble themselves; but as Mark 11.24 tells us, believe that you already received it when you spoke, and it shall be yours.

I was struck by something in Isaiah 53 (the so-called ‘suffering servant’ passage) this week, during an unexpected stay in hospital. Cutting a long story short, I heard a testimony of complete healing from a life-shaping genetic disorder, in which the person healed was standing on 1 Peter 2.24, specifically ‘by His stripes you have been healed’. So the main thing is, wow, anyone can see dramatic healing when they stand on God’s word, and that was and is relevant to me, too.

But I would like to suggest that this little phrase means more than we credit it with.

So the first thing that struck me when I looked at 1 Peter 2, was that the writer quotes from Isaiah 53 three times in one and a half verses (53.4, 53.5 and 53.6 to be specific)*

And when I started working through the Hebrew of Isaiah 53, it seemed to me that, as ever, the desire to write good English results in a significant loss of definition. That isn’t even a criticism, it is just the nature of languages that nothing in one language is likely to have an exact equivalent in the other.

Let me share my lumpy version of Isaiah 53.1-5 and then return to the subject of mending.

Who has believed what we report, and to whom has the strong arm of Yahweh been revealed?

Growing up as a suckling before Him, and as a root out of dry ground, He has no beauty or splendour, and when we see Him there is nothing to see that we should delight in Him.

He is held in contempt and rejected by men, a man of sorrow, knowing sickness / grief, [then complicated pun beyond my ability to explain, based on fact that Hebrew word spelt ‘master’ ( מַסְתֵּר ) and meaning ‘Master or Lord’ but pronounced (according to the entry in Strong’s, about which I am starting to harbour grave doubts) ‘ahDOHN’ can also mean ‘hide’ so something like ‘we adonaied’] our faces from Him; He is held in contempt and we did not take any account of Him.

Surely our diseases / griefs He has carried away, and our suffering He has suffered, and yet we accounted Him struck down, slain by God (Elohim) and defiled.

But He was desecrated for our rebellion [ie rebellion against God], bruised for our punishment, the discipline for our peace was on Him, and by His stripes of wounds, we are mended by stitching together.

If my version has any virtue then it is just to make crystal clear, the blindness upon God’s people as they look at the one He has sent, and in every single dimension think that what they are seeing is God’s judgement on this Man, when in fact it is the price of their freedom from sin and rebellion they are seeing on display.

They rebelled, so ‘Yahweh’s strong arm’ is desecrated; they deserved punishment, so He was bruised; they needed correction if they were ever to achieve shalom, so He was disciplined; and they were like a torn bag or garment, so His stripes – the long lines of bleeding weals and wounds on His body, stitched them back up.

So is it just ‘healed’ as in ‘healing’? It certainly includes that. But it is actually ‘mended’, and to understand what mended would look like, I think you need to look at the Deuteronomy 28 blessings, Isaiah 61, Malachi 3 and every other statement of covenant blessing and restoration.

I have an older friend who was suffering from bad knees; two other friends prayed for him for healing, when he wasn’t expecting it, at a Men’s camp earlier this year, and his knees were instantly healed. But when he went for his annual medical (he drives a bus), the doctor was astonished; she told him he now had the heart of a 20 year old man, his incipient macular degeneration had disappeared and a couple of other things also. He just knew his knees needed a fix, they prayed for healing and he got it all! (Update: he had a nasty fall last week; turns out he was still taking strong meds for the high blood pressure he no longer has, and blacked out…)

And that is how we need to read that verse in Isaiah 53, and also in 1 Peter 2.24 (because it is clear to me that the writer understood it wasn’t just ‘healing’ healing). Whatever the gap between where I am and all the promises of God’s covenant love towards me – whether health, prosperity, influence, being a blessing to all nations, whatever – He has already stitched it up with the most perfect mend ever, through the torn lines on Jesus’ back.

Which makes “by His stripes I have already been healed” a declaration for every day and every circumstance.

—-

(* this is the biblical equivalent of a paleontologist identifying the last meal consumed by a fossil creature; what was the writer of 1 Peter meditating on that morning…)

He replied, “Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you hypocrites; as it is written:
“‘These people honor me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me.
They worship me in vain;
their teachings are merely human rules.’
You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to human traditions.”

Mark 7:6-8, NIV

If you are like me, you have heard preaching on why Jesus referred to the Pharisees and others as hypocrites, and how this referenced their behaviour as ‘actors’, pretending to be one thing when they were actually another. I am not sure we have this right.

The reason I say this is because even when ὑποκριτής references an actor, it isn’t about pretence; it is about interpretation. And I think we will find that it is the act of ‘interpretation’ or ‘expounding’ with which Jesus is taking issue.

The ὑποκριτής as actor is not the equivalent of Ryan Gosling or Sir John Gielgud. He is actually a mime who acts out the speech delivered by a speaking actor, presumably because doing both speech and movement together was considered too hard (perhaps like ‘walking and chewing gum at the same time’!); and the reason he is called ὑποκριτής is that he is interpreting what the speaking actor is saying. In a more general sense, the word is literally under (ὑπο) judge or umpire (κριτής), that is, someone who explains what a judge means; and it is this sense of explaining or interpreting that is key to what Jesus is saying here.

Look at the passage above, from Mark. Jesus isn’t accusing the Pharisees of pretence, but rather of thinking they are able to say what God really meant – and in the process, ditching God’s intention in favour of purely human tradition.

And suddenly, this is uncomfortably relevant. The word of God is not for us to interpret however we like, improvising on a familiar tune to serve our own ends, like a narcissistic jazz musician. I have often observed how Jesus absolutely refuses to find “layers of meaning” in scripture; however popular that practice was with the Rabbis and continues to be with modern pastors and theologians.

God’s Word only ever means what God meant it to mean, and we (and the Pharisees) monkey around with this at our peril. Which is also, I suspect, why James says that “we teachers will be judged the more strictly.” A little humility – and a lot of asking Holy Spirit for wisdom and insight – goes a long way.

One thing I find myself doing a great deal is attempting to read scripture in a way that removes 2000 years of religious pomposity from the equation. Maybe Paul did speak like a Catholic encyclical; but then again, maybe he was just hoping to be understood. The fact that he wrote such terribly long sentences only underlines this for me: stream of consciousness works better when people can follow what you are saying.

Case in point, the opening of the letter we call ‘Romans’:

Through him we received grace and apostleship to call all the Gentiles to the obedience that comes from faith for his name’s sake. And you also are among those Gentiles who are called to belong to Jesus Christ.

Romans 1:5-6 (NIV)

To my point, this is only part of a sentence in the Greek, which runs from verse 1-7. And I admit it kind of makes sense, but by the time you string it together with the rest of the Greek sentence it just sounds self-important; which is not who Paul was at all.

So let me give you an alternative: I absolutely do not insist on any of this; but personally I find it far more meaningful, not to mention something I can respond to personally. And it doesn’t lose its definition if I put it back in its very long original sentence. Here is the literalist version:

“…through whom we received a commission [a legal grant] and a send-off into answering the prayer [or even ‘answering a knock on the door’] of faith on behalf of His name amongst all the nations [or ‘Gentiles’], amongst whom you also are gathered of Jesus Christ…”

We can smooth this out and put it back in the sentence:

Paul a servant of Jesus Christ, summoned as someone to be sent, marked down for the reward that comes for carrying good news from God, which He promised beforehand through His prophets in the sacred writings concerning His Son, the one born as the seed of David according to the flesh, the one identified as Son of God in power by the Spirit of Holiness from His resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our master, through whom we received an assignment and our despatch to go answer faith on behalf of His name in every nation, amongst whom you also are gathered to Jesus Christ, all you who are beloved of God there in Rome, called to be saints: grace to you and peace from God, Father of us and of our master Jesus Christ.

And to make my central point in the bold portion above, perfectly clear: Paul isn’t sent in this version to bring people to obedience but he goes to respond to their faith. If that seems an alien idea then go back and read Jesus telling His disciples to find the man of peace in a village; and any one of a bazillion missionary testimonies about their (the missionary’s) surprise when they reached the place where the unreached were waiting, only to hear them saying some version of, “oh, you are here at last – we were beginning to wonder when you would come…”

You see, God’s plan is well laid, and His enemy is already crushed. No bullying is required: people are looking for God and calling out, even when they don’t quite realise it. As a very proud witchdoctor kind of person said to my colleague and I in Indonesia some years ago, when I asked him what he actually wanted of us (since he had just spent over an hour telling us how useless Christians were):

“I want to be saved, of course!”

Well, that will not be a problem, sir…

Μὴ φοβοῦ, μόνον πίστευε (Do not fear, only believe.)

Mark 6:36b, SBL Greek Testament

No, this one isn’t another one about climate change. Rather, it is a good opportunity to explore a factor that crops up in some of Jesus’ interactions with people needing healing; namely the need to take control of the environment.

Remember the blind man Jesus takes out of the village (Bethsaida, in Mark 8) before healing him? When his eyes are fully opened, Jesus tells him to go straight home and not even enter the village. What was in the village? Something that wasn’t going to help the man; maybe people who would mock him, possibly even some root from which his blindness had arisen. We don’t know, but Jesus certainly did; and He wasn’t playing games.

And there is the Widow of Nain, in Luke 7; Jesus commanded her not to cry. That was at least an opportunity for her to respond in faith, but also quite likely Jesus cutting off a declaration of loss and despair from the one person with some authority over the dead boy and who therefore needed to be shut down (or up).

So here we are in Mark 5:21-43, the story of Jairus and his daughter, with the ‘interlude’ of the woman with the flow of blood.

We will pick up the story halfway through, except to note in passing that Jairus never said that his daughter was dying; nor did he say she was already dead. His exact words were “Τὸ θυγάτριόν μου ἐσχάτως ἔχει” – my daughter is in her last extremity; or she is in extremis. So his request that Jesus “coming might lay his hands on her in order that she be saved and live” was an genuine expression of faith (I think), which would account for Jesus immediately following him with all His disciples and the crowd.

In other words, my daughter is alive, just – and if you lay your hands on her she will be saved and live (but not otherwise). Jairus did well: declaring that someone is dying is not a helpful statement if you wish them to live!

So things change when the woman with the flow of blood is healed. Even as Jesus tells her that her faith has saved her, people come from Jairus’ house to say this:

Ἡ θυγάτηρ σου ἀπέθανεν· τί ἔτι σκύλλεις τὸν διδάσκαλον;

“Your daughter is dead; so why are you still annoying the teacher.” Not exactly the voice of compassion!

Jesus changes the plan at this point; so what is going on?

At the very least, there is an indication that the people who have followed Jairus are saying “you know perfectly well that your daughter is dead, so what stunt are you trying to pull?” “So why are you still bothering the teacher?” looks more like ‘putting the boot in’ than any concern at all for Jesus’ time being wasted.

Why was this so? We know Jairus was εἷς τῶν ἀρχισυναγώγων, “one of the …” – well, what were they? Rulers of the synagogue is a fair translation, as long as we realise that synagogue is a Greek word meaning “gathering” (ie a close synonym for ἐκκλησία – maybe gathered together as opposed to called together). And we simply don’t know that synagogues had rulers (although there is never any shortage of people asserting this and other biblical ‘facts’ on the basis of zero evidence).

Most of what we know about synagogues comes from 200 years later when the Talmud was being written. Until ruins of synagogues from the first century and earlier were found, there were even those who denied Jesus had ever seen a synagogue, let alone spoken in one.

Probably a better guess than ruler would be some equivalent of the French term, le responsable – not the caretaker, not the manager, certainly not the priest or pastor, but something of the person making sure that things happened on time and due order in a community space.

And it really doesn’t sound like Jairus was getting much respect from his role (which is sadly sometimes the lot of those who perform a public service of this kind). Jealousy and envy? Resentment? Who knows. But the people coming from his house to find him carry not one kind word of comfort, just a rather heartless rebuke.

At this point, Jesus is alerted. He instructs the ἀρχισυναγώγῳ “don’t fear, only believe” – and He refuses to allow anyone to come with Him, except Peter, James and John.

When He reaches Jairus’ house, I am sure He found exactly what He was expecting – a lot of confusion, wailing and crying, none of it genuine. Forget whatever you have heard about professional mourners, that is just a guess about something we have no evidence for. I think it is more likely that these people were there to feed on the grief of Jairus and his wife. Their insincerity is immediately apparent when Jesus tells them that the little girl is not dead, just sleeping. They LAUGH at Him. That is mockery, not grief.

One begins to understand why Capernaum featured in Jesus’ list of places that were going to wish they were somewhere less wicked, like Sodom or Gomorrah.

So He sees the wailers off. We are not told how, but the text doesn’t suggest anyone was trying to hang around after Jesus told them to go.

And then with just the parents and His three ‘inner circle’ disciples, He goes into the house, takes the little girl by the hand and tells her to get up. Which she does.

Jesus then tells them repeatedly – gave them many express orders – not to tell anyone what has happened; and to give her something to eat.

The sandwich we can understand, but why hide the unconcealable?

I don’t think Jesus is suggesting that they can pretend she did die after all; a twelve year old girl can’t be kept in a broom cupboard. People are going to see her in town. But He knew that people had it in for Jairus and his family, and would only take any information to work them harm if they could, whether practically or spiritually.

“So Mum and Dad, keep your big mouths shut, and just carry on as if nothing has happened. I mean it…”

Jesus at least thought that there were times when control had to be exerted over the immediate environment, both before and after a healing. I am not suggesting that we need to keep healings a secret – but we should at least be alive to the possibility that sometimes we should be doing the same as Jesus did.

This could be the shortest post ever. In my reading this morning I noticed one of the most egregious examples of religious massaging of the text I have seen.

John 10:10b says

ἐγὼ ἦλθον ἵνα ζωὴν ἔχωσιν καὶ περισσὸν ἔχωσιν.

The NIV says

I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full

The Greek says, literally

I came in order that they should have life and they should have abundance

Abundance, beyond the regular amount, more than sufficient, surplus, etc etc is a positive asset to the great Shepherd’s sheep, showing His care for them and for them to be able to fulfil their assignments. So why pretend it isn’t there and instead make it a qualifier of life? In the. Greek these are inescapably two separate things Jesus has come that we might have. Jesus makes a clear statement: the thief comes to steal kill and destroy; I came to give them life and abundance.

Perhaps it is because we would prefer that if God gives, He also takes away. We need to realise that when Job said those words, he was expressing his own self righteousness, not truth about God. (“He gives and takes away, blessed be the name of the Lord”. You have probably sung that as part of a worship chorus.)

The truth is that God has given us ALL THINGS. Including life and ABUNDANCE.

καὶ ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς συνοχὴ ἐθνῶν ἐν ἀπορίᾳ ἤχους θαλάσσης καὶ σάλου

Luke 21:25b, SBL Greek Testament

Just a note to comfort those who feel that to acknowledge even the possibility of climate change would be tantamount to denying the Lord. Relax, He talked about it.

In Luke’s version of the “Synoptic Apocalypse”, we read the lines above. The NIV renders this as “On the earth, nations will be in anguish and perplexity at the roaring and tossing of the sea” which is already pretty clear, once you consider in what circumstances the roaring and tossing of the sea would suddenly be of concern.

After all, anyone who has spent more than 5 minutes near the sea has seen storms, even impressive ones. The point at which this becomes of concern, is when the sea is no longer sticking to its historic (in human memory) boundaries, and threatening to advance. The Old Testament even says that God has set those bounds (Psalm 104).

But Jesus doesn’t say that the waters will again cover the earth: He does warn that, along with signs in the sun, moon and stars, that

“upon the land a contraction / narrows or holding together [as in a trap] of nations in perplexity, [from] echoes and rolling swells of the sea…”

My too-literal-for-comfort rendering of Luke 21:25b

So nations in perplexity and finding themselves in a literally reduced state by the behaviour of the sea (which would cover both sea level rise and the increased incidence of storm surges, which are the predicted and increasingly experienced chief symptoms of rising average global temperatures) seems a good fit with anthropogenic climate change.

So before you say, “huh! If the world is getting warmer why are we having such cold weather…” or some other failure to understand the science of complex systems, please consider that the global conversation around climate change and the increasing evidence for this change (collapse of polar ice, disappearance of glaciers, increased incidence of catastrophic weather events, increases in average global temperature), what is happening – including the conversation itself – actually looks a lot like the fulfilment of what Jesus said was coming…

Jesus said to them, “A prophet is not without honor except in his own town, among his relatives and in his own home.”

Mark 6.4, NIV

The first six verses of Mark 6 tell a story that sounds a lot like Nazareth suffered from ‘Tall Poppy Syndrome’. In Australia this relates to anyone who is doing well, running the risk of being cut down to size. The Asian equivalent is usually expressed in terms of ‘the nail that sticks up, gets hammered down’.

The main thread is easy enough to understand: people are amazed when the person they remember as a growing boy comes back to town with a big reputation and words of great wisdom. Unfortunately, as they reflect on the fact that they also know his mother and brothers and – reading between the lines – that some of them have married his sisters, they decide to take offense. The result is that they have so little faith that even Jesus is unable to do any miracle there, other than healing a few sick people.

(And yes, that – seeing a few people healed – would be a really good day in most of our churches! )

So there is a simple decision to make: when you choose to take offense, you are choosing not to have faith.

But verse 4 reads a little differently in the Greek. As we have it in most English versions, prophets are generally honoured: just not at home. The Greek is a little different: “a prophet is not dishonoured, except in his own country and among his relatives and in his own house.”

Maybe this seems a little subtle, but it is a healthier picture. It is not about according honour to someone because they are a prophet: the Bible (actually Paul) tells us to “test everything, and to hold fast to what is good and true”.

So it isn’t about honoring people because of a label they carry; but for goodness sake, don’t dishonour someone just because you are jealous or think you know them. Let them speak and if faith arises, miracles will follow.

If you just take offense, then nothing is going to happen. You may think your skepticism is thereby vindicated, but really you have just become an object lesson: don’t take offense, it removes the possibility of receiving!