You call the church office in search of the pastor. You have an urgent personal problem which needs immediate attention. But all you get is the infamous church answering machine. You hear this recording: “The Pastor is unavailable. He is busy working on next Sunday’s sermon. You can leave a message at the sound of the tone. . . . Beep!” You are insulted! How could the Pastor think that his preaching is more important than being there for you!
Something similar happens in today’s Gospel. Jesus is in Capernaum healing the sick and driving out the demons. He heals Simon’s mother-in-law of a fever. The news rapidly spreads and sets off a fire storm of interest. People flock to the house of Simon’s mother-in-law seeking to be healed by Jesus. You can just see the crowd standing in line . . . like so many fans lined up at the box office to buy tickets to the concert of their favorite rock star.
Jesus is worn out by it all. Early the next morning he goes off by himself to pray. He will need all the strength he can get to make it through another day like this. However, Simon and the disciples love it. This was the kind of fame they relished. Jesus had become the ancient equivalent of a rock star! But where was Jesus? They go hunting for him. When they finally find him, you can almost sense the irritation in their voices. “Jesus, everyone is searching for you! . . . Hurry up! People are waiting!”
What Jesus does next must have stunned them. He leaves Capernaum for the next town. He has no more time for healing. Can you imagine how the disciples and the crowds must have felt? Just when they needed Jesus, they were LEFT BEHIND.
What if Jesus would have stayed in Capernaum and continued to heal? How long would he have stayed? What would happen when it was time for Jesus to leave? Some would still have been LEFT BEHIND.
Do we not have similar fears and disappointments, when we are standing in line, ready to tell Jesus what we want, only to discover that He seems to have moved on and LEFT us BEHIND? Was not Jesus supposed to be the Santa who gives us what we want?
It’s like visiting our Doctor with a chest pain. We are afraid of what it might mean. We are desperate for the assurance that all is well. The Doctor knows it and wants to please us. So, he tells us to go home, take two aspirin, drink lots of fluids and get plenty of rest. We leave his office happy, grinning from cheek to cheek. What a great Doctor we have! He gave us just what we WANTED . . . but not what we NEEDED. He didn’t tell us the truth. The consequences are deadly.
Just like the people that day in Capernaum, we want Santa. But Jesus is not Santa. He leaves the Santa seekers behind. It might seem cruel but He has come to give us not what we merely want but what we truly need. What we need is a God we can trust in a world that will always be dangerous and deadly.
I am sure that it was very difficult for Jesus to LEAVE BEHIND all those people lined up outside the house of Simon’s mother-in-law. They wanted was a rock star, but Jesus was no rock star, eager to please his fans.
Some years ago I had a conversation with a friend about a prominent TV evangelist who broke the law and got sent to jail. I was critical of the evangelist, but my friend defended him. “Lots of people who believed in him and his ministry were helped. You can’t argue with the numbers! Who can argue with success?”
Jesus was similarly tempted. That day in Capernaum He must have been tempted to give up on His mission and seek the lures of fame and fortune. Perhaps that is why he rose early the next morning and went off to pray. He would need strength from his Father to resist what lie ahead. Such temptations would continue all the way to the night of his betrayal and arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane. Even at the 11th hour Jesus was tempted to give up his walk to the cross. He prayed to his Father to remove his “cup of suffering.” His prayer was answered. But His Father gave him not what he wanted but what he needed . . . to keep on believing in the goodness of His Father and to keep on walking to the cross.
That day in Capernaum Jesus’ prayers also were answered. His Father gave Him the strength to keep going and keep believing. He left the fawning crowds of Capernaum behind and continued his mission, preaching: “The Kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe the good news!”
Jesus has bigger fish to fry. He leaves Capernaum behind and goes on to the next city. Why? Because this was his mission: to take upon himself all the wrongs, ailments, diseases and sins, everything that stood between God and us, all those things that would undermine our faith in God and turn us into self-serving, insatiable, rock-star seeking consumers. He carries it all, . . . all the way to the cross. There he suffers the consequences of our misbehavior and unfaithfulness FOR US. There he plugs the dike. There He gives up His life so that we would never be LEFT BEHIND. On the third day God raises Him from the dead. Everything that would destroy our faith and undermine our trust, everything that would leave us stuck in the mud, forgotten and LEFT BEHIND, even God’s own disgust with our selfishness, . . . is destroyed!
The illnesses that still afflict us, the death that still frightens us, the failures that still haunt us, the sins that still burden us, . . . . everything that seeks to destroy our faith in God, Jesus overcomes. Jesus contradicts everything that wants us to believe that we have been LEFT BEHIND with lives that no longer matter. They want to convince us that we cannot escape the ironclad jaws of fate. We sin. We fail. We fall. We die. No one gets out alive. We will be LEFT BEHIND. And the day is coming when even our loved ones will no longer remember what the voice of dear old Dad sounded like.
But Jesus is alive and stands in our midst, daring to announce the utterly unexpected: Nothing will cause God to leave us behind. No sin or failure or affliction will separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ. We will never be forgotten. We will always matter.
A child, so young that she has not yet been able to do anything to earn her place in this world, receives a promise, as water is gently poured over her brow “In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit . . . You are a child of God, Jesus’ little sister, a princess in the Kingdom!” It defies the assumption we hold dear: everyone must earn their keep! But now she has been declared a success even before she has added one penny to the gross national product. Regardless of her future failures, flaws or flops, . . . she will never be LEFT BEHIIND!
What a difference this glorious good news can make in our lives. When we believe that we will never be LEFT BEHIND, we live differently. In today’s Gospel we see a marvelous example of that. Once healed, Simon’s mother-in-law immediately returns to her vocation, doing what able bodied women always did in that world: serving and caring for her family and the guests in her house. She would not LEAVE BEHIND the world to where God had called her to serve.
Have not our lives have been similarly changed by Jesus’ miraculous intervention? Will we not live our lives differently this week because we have been touched by the good news of the Kingdom and have received what we do not deserve? When we leave this place and return to our families, our neighborhoods and ours jobs, we like Simon’s mother-in-law will seek to do our best. We will look out for our neighbors. We will do our jobs to the best of our ability. Why? Because we like the God, who has not LEFT us BEHIND, want to assure the world that it too has not . . . and never will be . . . LEFT BEHIND!
Christ Church, the Lutheran Church of Zionsville
Rev. Dr. Steven E. Albertin (Click to E-mail)
