Mark 1:40-45
“The Secret”
February 12, 2012 - Sixth Sunday after Epiphany

         “O.K., this is now officially the worst-kept secret in the history of the Covenant Church.” So said our president, Gary Walter, right after he announced to several hundred Covenant pastors that Dave Kersten would be the nominee for dean of our seminary. The thing is, the announcement was being made before a crucial part of the process was complete, the confirmation of Dave by the North Park board of trustees, which will actually happen this coming week.

         Gary’s problem was something like Jesus’ problem in our text. He had a secret that he knew could not be kept. For Gary, there were too many people who needed to know, like seminary faculty planning for the future and the Board of Ministry who needed to start right away searching for Dave’s replacement in his previous position. So, as much as it would have been better procedure to keep it quiet, he decided to proactively inform all of us at our pastors’ Midwinter Conference, rather than let the news dribble out in rumors.

         Gary was a bit frustrated by this short-circuiting of good process. In Mark 1:40-45 we glimpse Jesus experiencing that same human emotion of frustration regarding His desire for the secrecy He knew would be best.

         The primary agent of Jesus’ frustration was a leper. For us, “leprosy” primarily means what is sometimes called “Hansen’s Disease.” It’s a bacterial infection of nerves and mucosa in the respiratory tract. Untreated it results in skin lesions, further nerve damage and possible loss of limbs through secondary infections. Untreated lepers often have faces deeply scarred and ravaged by the disease. It can be transmitted, but it’s not highly contagious.

         However, the Bible word for leprosy included other skin diseases. “Leprosy” also meant severe ringworm and other skin conditions. Those who suffered with these diseases were outcasts, forbidden to have social contact with others.

         You may remember an advertisement from the seventies for a treatment for another skin condition. A Tegrin commercial made “the heartbreak of psoriasis” a household phrase. When younger, we who never had that debilitating autoimmune condition of the skin may have joked about it. What is so heartbreaking about a rash? The reality is that because your skin is what other people see of you, to have it appear diseased and damaged can be terribly devastating.

         George MacDonald, the writer C. S. Lewis admired so much, suffered from eczema. He said, people “shrink more from skin-diseases than any other.” Growing up, all the children in our neighborhood were frightened of a man whose only “fault” was that his face had been horribly burned in a fire.

         In Bible times, peo­ple with skin conditions were regarded as beyond hope and help. It was against scriptural law to touch a leper. Even accidental contact would make you unclean and untouchable yourself for the rest of the day.

         The leper that frustrated Jesus came and knelt down begging in front of Him, declaring in verse 40, “If you choose, you can make me clean.” His plea sounds humble and self-effacing, but it was so full of misunderstanding that it made Jesus frustrated.

         Now I know verse 41 goes on to say that Jesus was “moved with pity” or “filled with compassion” in your Bible. That’s exactly what you and I would expect. Jesus has the most tender and compassionate heart of anyone. He wouldn’t back away from a person in need just because his skin was repulsive. That’s absolutely correct. It was Jesus’ courage and compassion that made Him able to do what we read here, that He “stretched out his and hand and touched him.” Jesus had compassion enough to touch the untouchable.

         Yet there’s a very good case to be made that what Mark actually wrote was that Jesus was angry. One ancient manuscript and several later ones have a Greek word for “anger” instead of the one for “pity” or “compassion.” The reason these few manuscripts may be right over all the others is a basic principle of manuscript reading. Imagine the reasons why a scribe might change a word when copying a holy text. It might be just a mistake, but it could also be an attempt to make it sound better, more understandable. Here it would be an attempt to be more our Lord sound more like the Jesus we expect.

         It’s more likely a scribe would have erased “anger” and written “compassion” here than the reverse. He would have reasoned that Mark must have meant Jesus was feeling pity, not anger. So it gets changed. This is confirmed by Matthew and Luke. When they tell this story, they don’t say anything at all about Jesus’ emotions. A little like that later scribe, they would rather leave it out than to say Jesus was angry. All this is why a number of Bible scholars think “anger” is really what Mark wrote.

         I’m suggesting that Jesus was angry because He was frustrated. Part of His frustration was being misunderstood. The leper’s plea sounds humble, but it gets Jesus completely wrong, in a couple different ways. The first misunderstanding is exactly what that scribe who first changed the word “anger” to the word “compassion” correctly grasped. Jesus cares about everyone. Jesus really is full of love and pity for anyone in need. To imply, even in an attempt at humility, even for a moment, that Jesus would not want to help him, meant the leper didn’t really know much about Jesus.

         That would explain the tone of how Jesus actually speaks to this man. The first thing He says is pretty abrupt, “I do choose. Be made clean!” He doesn’t take time to sympathize or reassure him. Jesus just corrects his false impression and then heals him.

         Verse 43 continues the angry tone of Jesus response by telling us, “After sternly warning him he sent him away at once.” Once again, Matthew and Luke don’t say anything like this. They include the actual words of the warning, but they don’t write about it being stern or the fact that Jesus immediately sent him away. And “sent him away” actually has a stronger feel to it. It’s something like Jesus “threw him out.”

         It’s frustrating to be misunderstood. Jesus is God, but Jesus is also human. He experienced frustration. As He began His mission on earth, He encountered over and over people who misunderstood who He was, what He was about, what He had come to do. And it should be no surprise He was bothered by it.

         We want people to understand us, to know who we really are. I remember being with some people for several years. We worked together, talked together, became friends. They heard my stories. They learned who I was. But somehow they missed a basic fact about me, about my name. “Bilynskyj” is Ukrainian. It sounds just like a Polish name that’s spelled differently, “Bilinski,” but it’s different. I’m not Polish. There’s nothing wrong with being Polish. It’s just not what I am. But when I left that place, they gave me a parting gift that showed that as often as I’d said it, they didn’t get it. They gave me a T-shirt that poked fun at my love of fishing by suggesting that along with a particular brand of fishing tackle, I was one of a number of famous “Poles.”

         That story is just a minor little frustration in being misunderstood. Imagine how Jesus felt. He’s the Son of God. He’s the Messiah. He’s come from the splendor of heaven to the squalor of earth. He’s come to suffer and die, to give His life for all people. And they just don’t get who He is. They don’t understand.

         Part of what angers Jesus with the leper is another misunderstanding which occurred constantly early in His ministry. The man came to Jesus totally focused on being healed of his leprosy. He saw Jesus simply as a healer, a miracle worker. He didn’t come to listen to Jesus’ teaching. He didn’t express any faith in God. He didn’t consider his sins. For him, Jesus was just a means to getting what he wanted.

         Part of the lesson of this text is for you and I to consider whether we treat Jesus that way. Are we really interested in Him or is He just a way to get what we want, whether that’s forgiveness for sin, or inner peace, or healing like the leper desired? How are we missing and misunderstanding who Jesus is and what He really wants for us? Is Jesus frustrated with our shallowness the way He was with that man who had leprosy?

         The theme of Jesus’ frustration with being misunderstood also explain the next verse. In verse 44, we hear Jesus saying, “See that you say nothing to anyone; but go, show yourself to the priest, and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded.” Why would Jesus tell this man not to go out and spread the good news? Isn’t that part of what it means to meet Jesus? Aren’t we supposed to share our story of faith with everybody?

         Why Jesus tried to keep the man quiet is part of a bigger theme running through Mark’s Gospel. We’ve already seen how in this first chapter in verses 25 and 34 Jesus silenced the demons He was casting out. They knew who He was, but Jesus didn’t want them telling anyone. In chapter 5, Jesus orders a man released from a demon to tell only his family about it. In chapter 7, He tells a crowd who witnesses the healing of a deaf and mute man not to talk about it. And then in chapter 8, when Peter makes the great confession that Jesus is the Messiah, He warns the disciples themselves not to tell anyone.

         Early in the twentieth century, a Bible scholar named William Wrede noticed this theme of secrecy in Mark and wrote a book called The Messianic Secret. His theory was that this whole idea of Jesus keeping people quiet about Himself was Mark’s fictional way to explain why Jesus didn’t talk more about being the Messiah and why He wasn’t widely recognized as Messiah until after He died.

         Later scholarship pretty much discredited Wrede’s theory, but there remains this thread that wraps through the Gospel of Mark. For some reason Jesus often told people to keep quiet about Him. They regularly disobeyed that order, like the leper does here in verse 45. But it was not what Jesus wanted.

         Part of Jesus’ secrecy surely had the same motivation as any celebrity who wants to go unrecognized in public. I grew up in Southern California, where encounters with famous film and television stars were part of life. Once when I was a boy my mother was driving us down the Pacific Coast Highway in stop and go traffic. As we sat there waiting for things to move, I looked over at the red convertible next to us and saw David McCallum, who played Illya Kuryakin on one of my favorite shows, “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” It was all my mother could do to keep me from leaning out the window across the lane to shove a piece of paper at him and ask for an autograph.

         That’s how people behave around celebrities. They lose all judgment. They surround and mob the person, just for a word, a glimpse, a touch. That was certainly true of Jesus. The man’s disobedience in telling everyone about Him made it impossible for Him to enter a town and find a place to rest. He ended up staying out in the country where crowds still came out to find Him.

         Yet it wasn’t just the inconvenience. It was the misunderstanding again. There was a “messianic secret.” Jesus didn’t want to be widely recognized as Messiah because so much popular conception of who the Messiah was and what he would do was completely wrong. The Jewish people lived in an occupied country. They expected a military leader who would lead them to freedom in a revolt. They had almost no idea that God’s Messiah had come to free them from sin and reconcile them to Himself and to each other. They especially had no idea that He had come for everyone, not just Jews.

         So Jesus tried to keep news about Him quiet until it could be made clear what He was really about, who He really was. He tried to squelch a popular excitement that would only lead to confusion and disappointment. He didn’t want healing and miracles to become the only thing for which He was known, obscuring what He had come to teach.

         For us, of course, the secret is out. Part of it was Jesus’ identity as the Son of God. We learn that fact right at the beginning of Mark’s Gospel, as we heard in verse 1 on the first day of this year. Yet for the disciples and everyone else in the midst of the Gospel story, it’s a secret to be discovered and grasped bit by bit. For those in the narrative, it’s only fully revealed at the end, while Jesus is on the Cross in chapter 15. It’s the Roman centurion who finally speaks what we know from the beginning, “Surely, this man was the Son of God!”

         Yet even though we know the secret, we know who Jesus is, we still have some of the same misunderstandings of Him as the leper and the crowds and even the disciples had. As Jim Hukari said last week, we need to delve deeper, to find in Scripture and in discipleship the real Jesus, not just the person we want Him to be.

         The secret being revealed in Mark’s Gospel is that Jesus is not just a compassionate buddy who’s going to make everything better for us. He’s the suffering Savior who calls us to join in His sufferings. Jesus is not just a kindly forgiver of any and every sin. He wants to change us and make us people who sin no more. Jesus is not just a private source of inner peace. He expects us to reach out like He did and touch and help and be reconciled to those who frustrate and misunderstand us.

         The secret of Mark is that what we know of Jesus Christ is meant to keep growing and deepening. We’re like the hobbits who meet a rough character named Strider in The Lord of the Rings. It’s only after they walk and ride with him through struggle and hardship that they discover Strider is in fact Aragorn, the great, good, powerful and kind king who is to come. We meet Jesus and it’s only after we walk with Him awhile through life’s struggles that we really get to know Him, really discover what it means for Him to be our king.

         There’s a lot yet to learn, but don’t let that stop you. Even the beginning of the journey is good. This man who knew almost nothing about the secret of the real Jesus was still healed. Like that leper, Jesus may have some stern warnings for us about our misunderstandings, but we will still have plenty of wonderful news to tell about Him. Jesus is almost certainly the worst-kept secret that ever was. Let’s keep telling it.

         Amen.

Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2012 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj