"If you choose, you can make me clean,"

Wouldn’t that be great! A simple prayer for help. An immediate answer. And they lived happily ever after. End of story. I think I’d like to live in a world that worked like that!

Or maybe the Bible could be just a little more "real life." A person, suffering from an illness, comes to Jesus, and says to him, "If you choose, you can make me well." And Jesus says, "Well, let me think about that for awhile. Ask me again tomorrow, and then again the next day. Maybe in a week or two, or a month, or a year, you’ll be feeling better. Or maybe never. We’ll see. But thanks for asking."

Tell the truth. Isn’t that more often the way that we experience illness and suffering in our lives? Not with an immediate, miraculous healing, but with a longer term that may (or may not ever) lead to us getting better? This isn’t to deny the reality of the miraculous. I’ve been visiting people in the hospital for over twenty-six years now, and I have to say I’ve seen more than one recovery that would fit the category of "miracle." But I’ve also seen a lot of chronic illness, long-term suffering, and unresolved situations. It’s much too simplistic to say that if you would just pray hard and have enough faith, then all your troubles would go away.

Sometimes it really does seem like we come to Jesus with a problem, and we say to him, "If you choose, you can make this go away." And he says… "I’m sorry. That’s something you’re just going to have to live with."

But notice what I didn’t say there: "That’s something you’re just going to have to live with… alone." No – never alone.

We’ve been hearing all these stories about people who were sick and were immediately healed by Jesus, and that might set our expectations pretty high. In fact, somebody came out of church a week or two ago, after one of these healing stories was read, and asked me, "Do you think these people who were healed ever got sick again?" – like maybe in the healing, they were inoculated against further disease. I don’t know about that – it’s an intriguing thought. But I do know this: that not a single one of them is still alive on earth today. Eventually, even at the very best, their bodies grew old, and wore out, and they died. And I wouldn’t be at all surprised if at least a few of them had some additional bouts with illness along the way. But I suspect that for a lot of them, there was something lasting that they gained from the healing they experienced, even if it wasn’t perfect health forever – but instead, the knowledge and the faith that God was close at hand; that God knew their struggle and their need, and that God could be trusted with their very life, in sickness and in health and in whatever else might come along the way.

I thought this week that it might have been helpful if Mark had included in his book a story about someone who came to Jesus and asked to be healed, and was not – and what that person might have learned in the encounter. And then I remembered that there is such a story in the Bible; not in Mark’s gospel, but in one of the letters of the Apostle Paul. In fact, it is Paul himself who prays for healing, but in the end has to be content with something else. In Second Corinthians (12:7-10) he talks about this "thorn in the flesh," as he calls it, that bothered him and that wouldn’t go away. We don’t know exactly what it was – most commentators assume that it was some sort of a chronic illness or condition that made his life uncomfortable – maybe epilepsy, or poor vision, or some other malady. "Three times I prayed to the Lord about this," he says, "that it should leave me." But the answer Paul got was "No." But not just "No." The answer Paul got from God was this: "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness."

What kind of an answer is that? I understand the first part. "My grace is sufficient for you." In fact, that’s one of those Bible verses that it wouldn’t hurt any of us to have memorized, stored away in our heads and hearts, so that at those times when prayer goes unanswered and life seems less than we think it ought to be, we could hear those words ringing in our souls – My grace is sufficient for you. Say it with me: My grace is sufficient for you.

But – "My power is made perfect in weakness." How can that be? We usually think of the power of God in terms of its strength – God’s ability to do anything, even the impossible. And so when we see the state of the world, and the state of our own lives – broken, weak, imperfect, unhealed – we might be tempted to take that as evidence of God’s absence. But Paul seems to think just the opposite. And Martin Luther agreed. The place where the glory of God is most evident, Luther was fond of saying, where the power of God is most effectively at work, is nowhere other than in the death of Jesus on the cross. In that moment of ultimate weakness, as Jesus was crucified and died, the power of God was most perfectly at work.

From that example Paul could say, "In my own weakness, in my own suffering, even in my own death, God is not absent or saying, ‘No.’ God is present in the deepest, most profound, most gracious way."

The leper was healed by Jesus of his disease, and that was a powerful and gracious moment for him. No doubt about it. His reaction shows it. "He went out and began… to spread the word." And there may be times when we experience physical healing, too, in our lives, like that, or the nearly miraculous resolution of problems that bedevil us. But even at the times we don’t (and maybe even more so at those times) that can be a powerful and gracious experience as well.

How can that be? Well, look – first of all we have to admit that there’s something ultimately mysterious about all of this – mysterious, and unsolvable. We can’t know why one person is healed and another person is not. I heard a guy being interviewed on the radio a day or two ago. He had a ticket for the flight that crashed on Thursday. Missed the plane. What do we say? That fifty people were meant to die, and he alone was meant to live? I don’t think we can say that; I don’t think we can pretend to have things like that figured out. Maybe he just got stuck in traffic.

Life and death; healing and sickness – there’s something ultimately mysterious about it all, something that is beyond our comprehension. We can’t, and probably shouldn’t, go any farther than the Apostle Paul, but that’s plenty far enough: "Whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s." (Romans 14:8) "Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus." (Romans 8:39) "My grace is sufficient for you." (II Corinthians 12:9)

How might God be at work in our weakness? Here are some ways: Suffering can build character; it can teach us patience in a way that nothing else will do. Weakness can remind us that we are not ultimately in control, not even of our own life; and it can help us learn to let go of our need to be in charge. Suffering can lead us to a greater dependence on God, driving us into a deeper life of prayer. It can create in us a sense of sympathy for others, who are also going through difficult experiences, maybe even worse than our own. Our patient suffering can even benefit others, as our need gives them the opportunity to love us without condition and to serve us with compassion.

I know we always want to ask the question, "Why?’ Why do these things happen to us and to the people we love? Why is the healing that is prayed for slow to come, if it comes at all? But the right question for us to ask is usually not "Why?" but "What now?" If this is what life has given me, what now do I do with it? I can choose to learn patience; I can come to terms with my own mortality; I can develop sympathy for others from what I’m going through myself; I can continue to pray and to grow closer to God.

And that’s really the point of it all, whether it be illness or healing, joy or sorrow, life or death. The point of it all - that in all our days, in all the things that come upon us, we would be drawn closer and closer to God. If it’s not that, then nothing else much matters. But if it is that, then nothing else much matters.

Be thankful and joyful when help or healing comes. Be patient and prayerful when it doesn’t. Be faithful no matter what. And in all things know this: We go through nothing alone; and God’s grace is sufficient for you.

Amen.