Heart

Mark’s Gospel is a great story, and great stories have a hero and they have villains. Great stories have a beginning that gets you in, and great stories have heart. That’s what we’re thinking about today: a great story has heart.

Ask me what my favorite film is: What’s my favorite film? I’m glad you asked. It is a film which was made way back in 1938 by an American director called Frank Capra, and it’s called You Can't Take It With You. It’s my favorite film; I discovered it quite by accident when I was a teenager and I’ll tell you about it later—I’m not going to tell you about it now. I love it because it’s got just a lot of heart. Remember the last scene in To Kill a Mockingbird, the one with Boo Radley on the veranda? Every time I see it, every time I read it, I get quite emotional; I get quite choked up every time.

Can you remember reading a novel where you just fell in love with the characters? I read a novel a couple of years ago called One Day, and I got kind of attached to the characters so much so that, you know, as you’re getting towards the end of the book, you’re thinking, “Oh, this is going to end and I just don’t want it to end; it’s so good”. I first read the Narnia series when I was about 19; I was working for Qantas in the hangars and I would work from 3:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m. at night. I’d go home, I would sleep till about 8:00 a.m., then I’d go to Cronulla Beach and I’d read Narnia on the beach, and then go to work again and do the same thing over and over again—rinse and repeat. I fell in love with the series.

There was a time when I would read a Tim Winton novel every summer. I love the way that Tim Winton can describe a scene that is so evocative; you can read a sentence over and over again and it’s like you’re tasting something for the first time, and you say to yourself, “How did he do that?”. Like you read the sentence and you think, “How did he write such a great phrase even?” But it’s his characters that are the best because something in the story has to get you here.

In music, you can have your instrumentals and your beats, and that’s good, but at the end of the day, it’s the way a Bruce Springsteen can cast a song that makes you actually feel something, where you actually care about it. The Australian singer-songwriter Paul Kelly was asked once to write a Christmas song. He came up with something that was never released as a single; it was never played on commercial radio. It’s got no chorus, it’s got no bridge, it’s got no middle eight. It’s a song about—which is a letter from a guy in prison to his brother—passing on a recipe for making gravy and how much he regrets not being there, and the longing he has for his family and his love for his partner. The song is "How to Make Gravy". Now that is a track, and Kelly says, “It’s the sense of absence that gives the song its heart”.

I spent about five or six years of my life going to see theater and writing about theater, and I won’t go into details of how this happened, but I managed to get a gig doing that. The pay is terrible—you don’t get paid anything—but you get to see some great shows and then you write about them. What you often look for in theater is heart. You know, you can walk away from something and say it had real heart to it. It’s difficult to put your finger on what that exactly means, but you know people will be moved by what they see.

David Brooks, writing in the New York Times earlier this year, says in his article, “We are living through the great detachment”. He goes on to cite, in his case here, Gen Z as a cohort who are particularly concerned with security and averse to risk and slow to trust people. The problem, therefore, is there is no vulnerability, and therefore, as you keep going, you just become more and more detached from the people around you and from society. He asked this question: “What are you loving right now?” It’s a good question, isn’t it? What are you loving right now?.

I used to, as you know, I used to work with young teenage boys, young men, and you know, it’s often easy in that environment just to be very cynical and tough and cool. I would say to them, “You know, you need to feel things”. Sometimes we lock ourselves away for fear of showing vulnerability just to protect ourselves, but real connection with people will not work without vulnerability. You need to feel things.

Now Mark’s a great story and it’s got so much heart to it, and nothing depicts that better than these three cameos in Mark chapter 5—three short cameos. Three people: each of them are on the edge, they’re on the limits of their resources. Life has served up to them some pretty bitter things and, as you read it, the stories are entwined together. You know, you can study this and you can say, “I’m going to compare and contrast the characters and I’m going to look for deeper connections in the story,” but in the end, it’s probably just the way the day worked out—it’s just the way it happened.

Real life is not just neat and chronological; sometimes it is entwined and twists back on itself. So, have a look at them with me. I’m going to be quite quick going through these passages and I want to say to you that we will not plumb the depths of everything that’s here because we’re going fairly quickly. But we’re on page 994 of the Red Bibles, and the first of these people, the first of these characters or cameos, is a man with evil spirits.

Now again, we could spend ages on this and we could dive down rabbit hole after rabbit hole, but I just want you to notice with me that this man is deeply broken. He’s a very sad man, he’s in a very dark place, he is a mere shell of a man, and he would have been a very, very confronting sight. There he is; he lives amongst the tombs in the graveyards. He’s chained, he’s shrieking, he’s self-harming, he’s terrifying, he’s helpless, he’s hopeless. Spiritually he’s in a mess, socially he’s in a mess. Have you ever met someone who is just so out of control that they’re scary?.

He’s deeply unwell, and for him, all earthly answers have failed. I remember at a church I was at many, many years ago, a man spoke on this passage and he was talking about being in a third-world country. He came across a beggar in this third-world country who had some legs protruding from his torso, and he said that in the discussion with this person, he’d worked out that the person had once been a twin and the twin had died. He said to this man, “There are doctors who can fix this, you know; this can be fixed with surgery”. And the man said, “But how would I beg?”. You know, there are some pretty messed up things in life, isn't there?. I mean, such tragedy that there are people and that’s their condition.

This man here is somewhat similar—he’s a tragic sight, isn’t he?. And your heart goes out to him. Can you imagine being this man? Can you imagine being around this man?. And Jesus with a word changes him. If you want a "before and after" story, think about the chaos of this man before, and afterwards it says he’s calm and in his right mind and he wants to go with Jesus. Jesus says to him, “No, no, you go back to your people and you tell them what the Lord has done for you”. And he does. I want to ask you just in passing: Have you got a better story than this man? Is your life a better story than this man?. And I think you have got a better story because you know much, much more about what Jesus went on to do.

So that’s the first one. The second is the woman. So there is a woman who comes to Jesus and she has got a multi-layered problem; you see her there from about verse 25 onwards on page 995. Her problem is multi-layered: physically she’s bleeding, her life is draining from her, she is frightened for her life, presumably. Presumably this would be draining her strength, presumably she would be anemic; it would be draining her finances. It says she suffered under many doctors; that just means the doctors were not able to help her, but she only grew worse. Today, we live in the 21st century and medicine is much, much better today, but even today there are problems that have no earthly solution.

So she’s physically challenged; socially she’s isolated. I don’t have time to go into this, but she’s cut off from her community, and there are reasons for this; it’s got to do with various rituals that are prominent in that community. She’s been cut off, she’s been somewhat socially isolated for 12 years. When you’ve been isolated that long, it must just get exhausting, mustn’t it?. The way you meet the world and the way the world meets you is affected by this condition. And she’s frightened. She comes up to Jesus to touch him; she thinks, “If I can just touch the hem of his garment”. She’s desperate—you would have to be desperate to do that, wouldn’t you?. She’s desperate because she has no answers. She doesn’t really know what she’s doing; it’s very superstitious.

She just sneaks up to touch his cloak and it says in verse 29, immediately it works. Immediately she sensed in her body that something had changed. In all the chaos, Jesus knows that someone has put their faith in him. That’s true even today, isn’t it? That amidst all the chaos that we’re in—the world—Jesus actually knows the people who put their faith in him. They know he knows when it works.

But then something very surprising happens in this story: He calls her out of the crowd. He knows, and power’s gone out of him. He calls her out from the crowd and says, “Who touched me?”. And he has this interaction with her, and it must have been unnerving for this woman to have this interaction in this very social space, to be drawn out to have this very open conversation with him. And I wonder if you ever ask yourself, why do you think he does this? Why do you think he calls her out?. It’s a good question to think about for those of you who talk about the sermon during the week; it’d be a good question to think about and turn over in your mind.

I want to suggest to you that the reason is because he wants to publicly declare her to be well; he wants to give her a promise, a promise that is solid ground to stand on. So you imagine she just touches his cloak and she feels something’s changed, and there is no conversation. She goes home and perhaps she says to her husband, “I saw this guy and it seems to be fixed,” and the husband says, “Well, I’ve heard this before. Remember all those doctors you went to? Remember all the pills you had? Remember all the treatments? Why is this any different?”. And she says, “But he gave me a promise; my faith has made me well”.

“Daughter, your faith has healed you; go in peace and be freed from your suffering”. It’s a lovely promise there, isn’t it? Verse 34: “Daughter, your faith has healed you”. It’s a beautiful promise. “Daughter”—there’s a lovely sense of inclusion to what he’s saying. She’d been excluded, but now she’s being included. I want to suggest to you there is real heart here. There’s real heart in this story. Has she got a better story than yours?.

And then the final person here is Jairus; Jairus is mentioned by name, he is a very influential man, and Jairus has a daughter who is gravely ill. Your heart goes out to him, doesn’t it?. He comes to Jesus and says, “My daughter is dying; please come and make her well”. It would be a terrible thing as a father to watch your daughter dying, life ebbing away. Jairus realizes he’s way out of his depth and he realizes he needs help, and he gives up all pretense. You’d do that too, wouldn’t you? If you knew that that was your daughter’s state and you knew there was someone who could possibly do something, you would give up any pretense. He puts his faith in the right person, and that person is Jesus Christ. It’s a humbling thing to do that—to put your faith in someone like that.

If you are a parent or have ever been a parent, put yourself there. You have to trust Jesus, and you are vulnerable. There are areas in life, aren’t there, where you just need to trust someone else?. You might be the sort of person who’s used to just having everything under control; there’s probably a name for it in the Myers-Briggs scale or something like that. But, you know the sort of people that just are used to having everything under control, and it’s not easy to trust someone else or perhaps to say things are not in control.

I know of a young woman who is expecting a baby and she’s overdue. She is very much of the mindset that this is the way the birth is going to go: it’s going to be a natural birth, it’s going to be at home. She’s got these super high expectations of what it’s going to be. However, she’s going to have to be induced, and so she’s got to come to grips with not just having a baby, but realizing that the way she wants everything to be is not going to be the way she wants it to be. In the end, a safe baby is the best thing, but sometimes it’s very hard to let go of that control and say, “I can’t change these things, I can’t control these things”.

There is God on his throne who has not fallen off it, but he’s got everything under control, but it may not be the way we think things should go. Jairus discovers that Jesus is not only Lord of the sick bed, but Lord of the death bed as well. Jesus arrives and it’s a complete disaster—the girl has passed away. But Jesus says to Jairus, “Believe me”. He’s saying, “Put your trust in me; I will do this”. So now Jairus has a choice: he can now say to Jesus, “That’s all, thanks very much. It was nice while you were planning to come, but it’s too late now. See you later”. Or he can say, “Okay, I don’t understand this, but I will trust you”. And Jesus uses the words that her parents might have used each morning: “My child, time to get up.” And she gets up. Just when you think it’s the end, Jesus turns it into the beginning.

Now we know he can do this because when Jesus died on the cross, he took the sting out of the grave. By his resurrection, he opened the door for the future so that everyone who has their trust in him will go through. You have a better story than Jairus because you know this. I can think of a few people I know who have life-threatening illness; sometimes they say to me, “Will you pray for me?”. And my prayer is that they would trust in the promises of God and the right person, which is Jesus Christ.

It might seem like an obvious question that might come from this passage; maybe you’re thinking, “Well, God, Jesus has helped these three people, then why doesn’t he help me now? Because I know people like this now, and I pray for them and I pray for them, and nothing seems to happen. I know people who are desperate, I know people who are broken, I know people who are sick, people who are dying—why no answer to these prayers?”. And sometimes, you know, there’s just a greater wisdom at play, a wisdom that’s just greater than our wisdom.

The Bible has got plenty to say on this and plenty to help us with, but I’ll just say to you this morning that Jesus is not taking people backwards into this world. There are happy surprises and we rejoice when they come, but he’s not taking people backward into this world; his orientation is to take them forwards into the next. He wants them to be safe in the next world despite this.

Well, Mark’s story is a great story because it has real heart. Sometimes you hear a story and you think to yourself, “That sounds too good to be true”. It sounds a bit like a Hollywood story; it all ends up happily ever after at the end. But what about stories that are good and are true? What if at the heart of the universe there was a God who really did love you, who really did take notice of the little people—the ones that no one else could bother with?. What if here we were looking right into the heart of the living God himself?. It would be a beautiful picture, wouldn’t it?.

That the whole of the cosmos was written by a God who loves everything and loves everyone he’s made, and although there is pain and sadness, he will not let that be the last word. When I see the way Jesus is and the way he treats people like this—that’s why I’m a Christian. In the 1930s, a man called Bertrand Russell, a famous atheistic writer, published his essay Why I Am Not a Christian. It’s worth a read; it’s a bit dry. In it, he seeks to deconstruct the classical rational proofs of God. When you read it, you can see lots of faults in his argument, but he wrote that saying, “These are the reasons he’s not a Christian”.

When I look at Jesus and the way he treats people, when I look at the obvious heart that he shows towards them, that’s the reason I am.

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