As Mark tells it, crowds are gathering even before Jesus arrives.  People are gathering, expectantly, eagerly, excitedly, because they hear that Jesus is going to be there.  I hope we gather that way, each Sunday.  We’re disciples.  Jesus is always with us.  I really want you to hear that, to take a moment to turn it around in your mind and your heart.  Get a good look at it.  Ponder it.  Jesus.  Jesus is always with us, always with us through the Holy Spirit.

Those crowds that were gathering, excitedly, were not disciples.  They were potential disciples.  They did not know who Jesus was, but they were eager to get a look at him, eager to be healed by him.  Wouldn’t it be wonderful, if those crowds crowded our churches on Sunday?  If only people today were as excited about Jesus as those people seemed to be.

You may have noticed that we skipped over a few verses in today’s reading: a few paragraphs, actually.  Those verses give the account of a mass feeding: five loaves and two fish—a great miracle and a great blessing.  The focus, today, is not there, not on that act of power.  The focus in what I read was on people gathering, hearing, and on Jesus having compassion and teaching and healing.  Mark records how, as Jesus went through the towns, villages, and fields, people would bring out their sick “and beg him to let the sick at least touch the edge of his cloak.  And all who touched it were made well” (6:56).  And wouldn’t we do the same?

And what happened after?  Mark does not record that all who touched the hem of his garment became disciples.  He does not record that many became his followers that day.  I mean, if anything would make someone a follower of Jesus, surely it would be getting healed by him!

I remember Dr. Oz talking about what got him into proclaiming his message.  You may or may not know it, but Dr. Oz is actually a very successful, prominent, heart surgeon, a professor of surgery at Columbia University Medical College.  Oz saw a patient on whom he had performed heart surgery, some time later, eating a hamburger—might as well say a bacon double-cheeseburger, just to get the point across.  Now, if you were a heart surgeon, and had more or less saved someone’s life through a very demanding, lengthy, complicated, risky, and costly procedure, only later to see that same person doing the very things that put him or her on your surgical table in the first place, how would you feel?  Good Lord!  What’s the point?  Or, Good Lord!  Did he learn nothing?  Did she hear nothing?

It seems being healed, helped, isn’t enough to make someone a follower.  People were flocking to Jesus the way they flock to any miracle cure, any power.  Jesus has power to heal.  People don’t understand that power, any more than they understand Jesus.  It’s not that Jesus is the long-hoped-for cure for cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, or schizophrenia.  The power of Jesus Christ is the holiness of God.  No malady, no disorder, no corruption of whatever sort can be in the presence of the holiness of God: whatever is not in company with God’s holiness simply dematerializes in the presence of His holiness, vanishes, ceases to exist.

I want to think that the focus of medicine, medical science, is supposed to be maintaining health, but I wonder sometimes if it isn’t actually disease.  After all, we don’t go to the doctor unless we feel sick, and some of us will not go until we feel really, really sick.  Doctors are highly trained in illness and injury.  When the illness ceases, when the injury is treated, the doctor’s work is done: medicine is no longer called for.  Medicine is not so much about health as about sickness.  Sick people want to get back to health, but their focus, as sick people, is on their sickness.  We assume health.  We think about sickness.

People do not come to doctors looking to change their lives.  They come to get back to the lives they had before they got sick.  This realization is what so demoralized Dr. Oz, and what drove him to change his focus, to go out on a mission.  In a land of bacon double-cheeseburger-eaters (such as me), he has a tough row to hoe.

When Jesus helps the woman caught in adultery, he doesn’t lay his hands upon her.  She doesn’t touch him or grab the edge of his cloak.  He extends his compassion—thank God!  Then he teaches her: “Go and sin no more” (Jn 8:11).  That is, change your life.  My hope is that she heeded his teaching.  An even greater hope I have is that, experiencing what Jesus did for her, she learned to have faith in him; I hope that, having encountered Jesus, she turned and devoted her life to him, the one who changed her life, who has the power to change her life.  That is discipleship.  That is the way of salvation.

What strikes me in what I hear Mark saying is what I do not hear him saying.  Jesus goes about.  All these people eagerly rush to where Jesus will be, and as he passes by, they beg him to let them at least touch the hem of his coat.  And all who touched it were indeed made well, but Mark does not say that any of them became disciples, or then got up and followed him.

Beloved, Jesus isn’t Jesus just when there is a crisis.  Jesus is not there at our convenience, like the aspirin or the cough syrup or the Ben-Gay, yet this is how these crowds seem to be regarding him.  There is great enthusiasm for this power that can remove their ailments, but not much enthusiasm for the faith that would save them from the greatest dis-ease of all: death.  We all die.  What saves us from Death (Big D) is Life itself, Life Himself: God.  The healing that Jesus is really offering is God Himself.

And God appears to be the one thing so many people don’t want.  Well, that’s too harsh.  Yes, they could potentially want God (on their terms), provided God doesn’t, you know, expect them to do things or say stuff.  What these people would really prefer is something to get them out of their present mess so that they can get on with what they were in the middle of pursuing: their own interests, as they perceive them.  Happiness, I suppose.  The pursuit of happiness.

Only, what is happiness?  Well, that’s different for each person, right?  It’s a feeling, right?  We say, “I feel happy.”  Though we can also say “I am happy.”  But how do they know?  Because they feel that way.  So, the pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of a feeling?  That explains like every pop song ever written!  “Hooked on a Feeling,” for example.

Theologically, and philosophically, happiness is a bit more than a feeling.  The feeling is a helpful indicator, but not always reliable.  Many things that turn out not to be so good for us can give us a feeling of happiness, or a feeling like happiness.  I suppose alcohol is one example.  After a few drinks, everybody is laughing and, it would seem, happy.  A few more and barstools start flying and the police are involved.  The pursuit of a feeling is probably not the best way to happiness.  Hopefully, by age thirty-five we’ve figured that out.

So what is happiness?  From ancient times, philosophers have agreed that happiness is the goal of life, our aim, even our purpose.  Happiness is the fulfillment of our purpose.  But what is our purpose?  There is less agreement on that.  As God’s people, we should be asking this: what does God’s Word say about happiness?  Scripture, and the psalms, particularly, say a great deal about happiness: “Happy are those whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered” (32:1).  “Happy are those who make the Lord their trust” (40:4).  “Happy are those who fear the Lord, who greatly delight in His commandments” (112:1).  And, from the first line of the first psalm, which we heard this morning: “Happy are those who do not follow the advice of the wicked, or take the path that sinners tread, or sit in the seat of scoffers.”  Our happiness is entirely intertwined with our purpose.  Scripture tells us our purpose is God.

Yet it seems that God is the one thing so many people don’t want.  What they are looking for is something to get them out of the mess they have gotten themselves into, so that they can get on with what they were in the middle of pursuing: whatever they can get to make them feel happy.  It’s like Sheryl Crow sang, “If it makes you happy, it can’t be that bad. . . .”

Some of you have noticed the black woman doing bona fide street-corner evangelism in town.  One of the last times I saw her, she was speaking with a woman; it seemed like they were having a good conversation.  Another woman crossed over from the HEB parking lot and approached them.  She was asking them for something.  There was an older, dusty car in the corner of the HEB parking lot.  There was a guy standing next to the car, door open, looking like he didn’t know what he was going to do, not quite as if he needed a miracle, but like, you know, twenty bucks could help a lot, right then.

That woman saw the black woman, with her bullhorn and her repent sign, and understood what was being advertised: this is a Christian woman.  She knew enough to remember that Christians are supposed to help people.  Well, she and the guy she was with needed help.  Twenty bucks would be like, you know, a total God-send.  Anything helps, God bless.  Brothers and sisters, that street-corner evangelist was not advertising that she was a Christian; that was not her message.  Her message was repent and be saved, for the kingdom of God is at hand.  It is?  Where?  I must have missed that.  Beloved, the kingdom is coming, and the kingdom is here.  The kingdom is at hand, and it is time for decision: will you follow or will you not?  Will you devote your life to God who reveals Himself and His amazing grace in Christ Jesus, or will you not?  Truly, the kingdom is at hand.

Well, the traffic signal changed, and I had my business to pursue, so I didn’t see how this encounter ended up.  What would you do?  What would you say?  What do you suppose that street-corner evangelist did?  And what do you suppose Jesus would do?  I wonder.

As Jesus passed through those towns, people excitedly, eagerly ran and gathered, hoping just even to touch him.  Mark does not say they gathered, rushed to hear him, to follow him, or to obey him.  Obedience is overrated.  And Jesus offers the kingdom, saying, come, follow me.

The pastor and biblical scholar W. Graham Scroggie, whose name is almost as fun to say as it is to read what he writes, reminds us that “Our present-day institutions for the care of the sick and the poor are products of Christianity.”[1]  Hospitals, in the West, at least, are indeed traceable back to the Church, to Christians.  If you’ve benefitted from the existence of a hospital, thank the Church, thank God for the Church.  Charitable organizations that help the poor, the hungry, those who lack clothing and shelter, these, also are directly traceable to the Church.

Scroggie also says something that sounds hard, yet our reading in Mark today seems to show us the same thing.  “As then, so now,” Scroggie says, “many are eager for the temporal and material benefits which Christ gives, who do not want His teaching or Himself.”[2]  If you have been involved in benevolence work through a church, you have probably had the confusing, even disheartening experience of encountering people who come to the church for money—that’s a strange place to go for that!  They don’t come for God.  That’s not the help they need.  They aren’t turning to God for help—oh, but yes, they are, they are turning to their god: money.  ABBA, that most hedonistic of bands, got it right, “Money, money, money.  If I had a little money.”  Hooked on a feeling, but, if it makes you happy, it can’t be that bad, right?  “If we only had more money,” people say.  Have you ever heard someone say that, or have you ever said that?  I have.  And I say, if we had more God.  But who knows where to get Him?

Scroggie can say some shocking things, like, “It were better to have a healthy soul in a sick body than to have a sick soul in a healthy body.”[3]  I’d rather have a healthy soul in a healthy body!  Can’t we?  God-willing.  What if we can’t, though?  What if we don’t?  A healthy body or a healthy soul.  Which will it be?  The kingdom is at hand.  “But this is not the prevailing view:” Scroggie observes, “the multitude prefer loaves to life, and fishes to faith, and health to holiness.  Do you?”[4]

And to Jesus Christ, who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood, and made us to be a kingdom, priests of his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever.

                [1] W. Graham Scroggie.  Gospel of Mark.  Study Hour Ser.  Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1976.  126.

                [2] Scroggie 126.

                [3] Scroggie, 126.

                [4] Scroggie, 126.