Adult Bible Study Online

Finding healing and wholeness

See this lesson as a Word Document

Lesson text: Mark 1:29-45
By: Omar Eby
Email: ebyo@emu.edu

“Mark is a great stylist as a writer: clean, concise, brisk: the voice elliptical, spare, selective,” I wrote in Markings: My Own Musings on the Gospel of Mark (Cascadia Publishing House, 2003). Here, in seventeen verses, the action moves from Simon Peter’s home in Bethsaida, a fishing village suburb of Capernaum; to a solitary place in the wilderness; to the synagogues throughout Galilee, the northern province of Palestine; and again to lonely wilderness places.

Not only do settings shift swiftly, the characters, too, dash on and off the stage, some named, some nameless, all too numerous to count: Peter’s mom-in-law, the sick, the demon possessed, lepers, and “many who had various diseases” (v. 34).

Thematically these settings and characters are tied together by one constant image of Jesus as healer, a divine medical doctor with a specialty in psychiatric disorders (“God knows your hearts,” Luke 16:15).

We have space to examine just one incident in this lesson: the healing of the leper. I write in Musings, “A modern reader finds curious the omission of a cured leper’s name—yet the inclusion of such a detail as ‘he begged on his knees’ (v. 40).” Do “too often our analytically trained minds insist on authentication established by eye-witnesses and detailed fact?” We lack faith to believe without proof? Or is Jesus kind, not naming the chap, because later he disobeys Jesus’ instructions; “Don’t tell this [healing] to anyone” (v. 44)?

“I am willing,” Jesus said, [“to heal you.”] He “acknowledged [the leper’s] faith without a theological or moral examination. No catechistic query? No: ”Are you divorced and remarried? Are you celibate? Are you a tax cheat?’’ Just: “Be clean!” Any lessons here for us in harvesting sinners? With “his new flesh radiant, the leper strode the marketplace, the waterfront, the country lanes, clad only in a loin cloth, the better to display the miracle of new flesh and a fresh set of hard abs. He’s a hand-waving, Jesus-jumping charismatic, thinking only of his cleansed self, certainly not thinking at all of Jesus.” His self-centered ecstatic spluttering killed Jesus’ ministry; it drove him “outside [the towns] into lonely places” (v. 45). Any lesson here for stifling our need to blather the name of Christ, who healed us? How might the language of testimony (“born again,” “saved,” “God said to me . . .”) mar the witness to the Christ one intends to praise?

This message relates to the Adult Bible Study. For additional information on Adult Bible Study or Adult Bible Study Teacher, send email to info@mpn.net. To order either publication call Mennonite Publishing Network at 1 800 245-7894.