Follow after Jesus, because you aren't Jesus

One of the most difficult parts of following after Jesus is learning how to be both a servant in the way Jesus served and to admit we cannot be Jesus. This is a more difficult line to walk than we might realize at first.

For example, I was looking through the library this past week as we are getting ready to clear things out for the daycare, and I noticed a DVD from a certain charismatic preacher that will go unnamed. I don’t doubt that this preacher—like many TV evangelists—got into ministry for good reasons—helping people, following after Jesus, the whole drill—but at some point things went awry. This man is most famous for bringing folks up on to the stage, dramatically striking them down with the purpose of healing them from their afflicions, but he’s equally famous for not allowing people with actual verifiable conditions (i.e. those who obviously need healing) to ever be among those who are on the stage.

I want to be careful with what I say about this because there are two things that may be true about healing ministry. 1) God can work miracles out of anything, and 2) Those who make it a show are likely to be frauds. The road to following after Jesus is wrought with pitfalls where we might imagine we are Jesus.

I tend to believe that miracles are essential to faith. Without the miracle of the resurrection it’s hard Christianity lacks any weight—at least not as a faith that points that points to a deeper, ultimate reality. And, yet, from the earliest moments of the church’s foundation, religion has been the playground for any number of false prophets, claiming to do things that they simply haven’t done. One of the best examples of this was the sheer mountain of relics that appeared in Europe in the late Middle Ages. Every church on the continent seemed to have a shard of the cross, or one of the nails that pierced Jesus’ hands, or even the skull of a disciple. To this day, four different churches claim to have John the Baptist’s head, which (frankly) is a bit weird, isn’t it? Most of these claims are just fraudulent, and the adoration of relics was one of the practices that first led Martin Luther to be disenchanted with the Roman Catholic Church.

Jesus understood all the ways that human beings gravitate toward the miraculous—and this is especially obvious in Mark’s Gospel. He understood that we are desperate to interpret our lives in light of God’s favor, and that that is as natural as it is potentially dangerous, because it is a subtle line to walk between believing we have God’s favor and believing that we are gods ourselves. We are called to follow after Jesus—not to become Jesus—and an example of this can be found in today’s reading from Mark 5.

If I (as a pastor) acted the way Jesus did in this episode, you would be well within your rights to kick me out of the church. Nobody should walk into the home where a young girl has just died, ask why everybody is upset, and claim that she is still alive. Jesus is the only one who gets to play this card. Lots of folks believe that they can summon up the requisite faith to be a healer like Jesus, but lots of people are lying to themselves. The only person with enough faith in Jesus to pull it off is Jesus. For the rest of us, our prayer life can too easily become a hostage situation in which we hold God accountable lest anything bad happens to us. So often we make little deals in our heads, telling ourselves, “Yes, I will praise God and share it with the world if only…” if only we get what we most desperately want. Our faith can so easily become wed to whether our lives turn out the way we would like.

That’s why it’s so interesting that Jesus tells the family to keep it quiet. Don’t tell anybody, he says. Jesus shatters the illusion that his ministry is designed to prove anything about himself, because these healings—even a resurrection that clearly means the world to this family—is not the big thing. I mean, try to honestly believe that—your child has died and now they are alive again. How is that not the moral of the story?! But the big thing is still coming so don’t tell anybody. Just wait for what God is going to do on Easter morning.

After all, Jesus knew the scriptures well. He knew the story of the Exodus. When God brought the plagues down upon Egypt by Moses’s hand, Pharaoh’s initial reaction is to call in his magicians to demonstrate that what Moses was doing was just a trick. The easy explanation was that those signs and wonders were just a bit of hocus pocus. After all, in the normal course of life magic isn’t real. Moses’ signs didn’t prove a thing—not to one whose heart was hardened like Pharaoh. Jesus knows the skepticism, often rightly held, by people who have seem the shamsters and the impersonators. Miracles are miracles because they are miraculous, which means that the rules that they violate have to be awfully hard and fast. The dead stay dead. A terminal diagnosis means you will die. We pray for miracles not because we expect them but because we don’t—because we know how the world normally works and, yet, in spite of all visible evidence, we keep faith in something greater nonetheless.

We follow after Jesus because you can’t follow after God and try to be God at the same time. The distinction between discipleship and idolatry is surprisingly subtle, and whether we do one or the other will make all the difference in how we live our lives and how we do ministry together as church.

The church that follows after Jesus will do miraculous things without even realizing that is what we’ve done. We will simply do good work out of faithful response to following after Jesus, expecting nothing of it because—again—that’s usually what happens in this world that is covered by sin. We don’t expect much not because we don’t have tremendous faith but because our faith stands at Calvary and the empty tomb not on the vicissitudes of day-to-day life. We hold tight to Easter morning against whatever else may come, knowing that death wins every time but one. Even the girl raised from the dead has long since died again.

We hold to Jesus and not the miraculous, and in this way the miraculous seeps into our daily lives strangely, against all expectations. Jesus doesn’t tell us to believe in God because of miracles; Jesus shows us that a God who works miracles will also do something better. That should be the mission of the church—to share the good news of Jesus Christ not out of ambition to prove ourselves right but out of humility, understanding that our lives as Christians are no more precious or valuable than any other, and, yet, through Christ we are all children raised from the dead.

I want to end today with a small bit about my absolute favorite part of this story. At the very end, after Jesus has raised the girl and he ordered her family to make certain that nobody should know about this miracle—which, let’s be serious, this is an unreasonable request, seeing as the whole town was apparently desperate for him to come and save her. After all that, there is this final line where Jesus tells them that they should probably get her something to eat.

I love this. I think sometimes we lose the humanity in scripture. We get so obsessed with the religious element of Bible stories that we imagine that these people are mythical creatures but never quite so human as us. Then, Jesus raises a girl from the dead and, like any good doctor, he turns to the parents as if it to say, “You know, she’s been through a lot—dying and coming back to life—maybe cook her up a nice meal or something?”

A level deeper, though, this is what it means to be church. We baptize—often as babies—and we proclaim that you have been drowned in those baptismal waters; that you died in those waters and you were raised as a new creation. That’s the first sacrament. Then, we welcome you to the table for the second sacrament. We kill you by God’s power. We raise you by God’s mercy. And then we feed you so that you may follow in the dust kicked up by Jesus’ feet.

So, be fed. Be one who knows you need feeding. Don’t be one who seeks to be like God; be one who remembers that you once were dead and now are alive. Instead, remember to eat from the table. You’re going to need it, because death and resurrection will take it out of you.