As soon as they left the synagogue, they went with James and John to the home of Simon and Andrew. Simon’s mother-in-law was in bed with a fever, and they told Jesus about her. So he went to her, took her hand and helped her up. The fever left her and she began to wait on them.
That evening after sunset the people brought to Jesus all the sick and demon-possessed. The whole town gathered at the door, and Jesus healed many who had various diseases. He also drove out many demons, but he would not let the demons speak because they knew who he was.

Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed. Simon and his companions went to look for him, and when they found him, they exclaimed: “Everyone is looking for you!”

Jesus replied, “Let us go somewhere else, to the nearby villages so I can preach there also. That is why I have come.” So he traveled throughout Galilee, preaching in their synagogues and driving out demons. – Mark 1:29-39

If I could heal sick people at will, do you think there is anything else that I would bother doing in this life? If I could sneak in while patients were sleeping, touch them and remove their cancers, stitch up their broken bones, give sight to their eyes, eradicate the viruses and germs – do you think you could drag me out of the hospitals with chains and a tractor?

Not a chance.

Obviously, I am not Jesus.

I don’t see things as He did and does. I don’t see what sin does to people; how it rots them from within and brings death to their cheery, healthy, happy-looking faces.

I will confess something to you, though. I’ve had a glimpse.

Not just in this life, but in a dream a few nights ago. A nightmare, actually. I dreamed that I could see the effect of evil on people. I dreamed that I could even see objects that had been used for evil purposes, and I saw them differently. They were grotesque underneath their translucent skins, in the kind of way that H.R. Giger designed the black-and-bleached-white flesh-ripped-from-bone world of the creature from the movie Alien and its sequels. Horrific, dead-through-and-through, rank with wickedness, eaten up with malice, consumed by self.

I think I once blogged that I wished I could see things as Jesus sees them.

I no longer wish it.

I understand now – a tiny fractional understanding – the way He sees evil, and sees it in us.

What I cannot comprehend is why He loves us anyway.

But I now have a greater appreciation for His desire, when tempted to spend His time healing the physical, to move on with the good news that brings healing to the inner man.

“Abba, Father,” he said, “everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will.” – Mark 14:36

Abba. It’s the Hebrew equivalent of “Daddy.” The first word babies can put together, whether they realize it or not.

In this case, a desperate plea: for mercy, for release, for any other way for His will to be done.

My friend Jim lost his faith over this moment in scripture. He had just become the father of a beautiful little boy. Good man. Husband. Science instructor. Could not get past the idea that God could allow His only Son to die when He could have done anything and everything to stop it. Jim’s faith crumbled. Not long after, his marriage crumbled. And his son grew up, of necessity, with a part-time dad.

It’s a moment in scripture that shatters my heart, too.

Because parents have to send our kids out into a world that will have its way with them. We have to let them go. We have to let them live. Sometimes, we have to let them die – because we can’t be with them all the time; and we can’t always keep them safe.

And if you look at it only with respect to one life lost and one death taking place, it will destroy your faith in this incomparable truth, too. But there is so very much more at stake here.

There are the lives of thousands of millions on the line. There is a perfect plan, a uniquely just and merciful scheme of redemption to rescue as many as will through the sacrifice of One. The One knows He must make that sacrifice, both as Father and Son.

So I see it differently than Jim did.

I can see myself letting my strapping 14-year-old son dive into dangerous waters to drag as many drowning others as he could to a deck or a dock where I could pull them to safety. I can see that, as a 50+ year-old, I would have a role in that rescue – and that he, as a strong, excellent swimmer, would be better suited for another role. If he were willing, I would want him to try. And if anything went wrong, I would be right in there with him to make sure he made it to safety, too.

I’m not sure I could live with my conscience – whatever the outcome – if I didn’t let him try.

That would be just the merest human example. The rescued would not even have to be familiar to me for me to want my son to try. They would not have to be other children of mine, estranged from me and yet precious to my heart.

That’s who the endangered are to God, you see; they are and always have been His children – no matter how prodigal; no matter how lost; no matter how hateful and hurtful and proud and rebellious. They are His still children.

And He is their “Abba.”

His Son knew that. So the will of the One who stood by became the will of the One who would die.

Like Father, like Son.

Okay, I’m reading between the lines here. (At least I try to admit it when I do.)

Because you won’t find in most versions of the Bible a phrase that specifically describes Jesus as exasperated. Mark, however, twice records Jesus doing something that other gospel writers do not:

He looked up to heaven and with a deep sigh said to him, “Ephphatha!” (which means, “Be opened!” ). – Mark 7:34

He sighed deeply and said, “Why does this generation ask for a miraculous sign? I tell you the truth, no sign will be given to it.” – Mark 8:12

I don’t know about you, but I have been known to sigh when exasperated. When I exptected more, or better, or smarter. I’ve sighed for other reasons, too. But in the context of these verses, Jesus sounds exasperated to me.

He used other expressions that support my suspicion. “You of little faith,” He addressed Peter, who had failed to walk on water. As well as all of the chosen, when a storm nearly swamped their boat … and when they didn’t understand His warning about the leaven of the Pharisees. He also upbraided a whole group of followers who heard him describe how God clothes the field with lilies. That conversation began when someone tried to get Jesus to arbitrate an inheritance disagreement, and Jesus responded: “Man, who appointed me a judge or an arbiter between you?”

Then there’s the time early in His ministry, John records, that He evicted animal merchants and money changers from the temple courts, telling them, “Get these out of here! How dare you turn my Father’s house into a market!” Perhaps the incident presages His return some years later to do the same thing, and add: “It is written, ‘My house will be a house of prayer’; but you have made it ‘a den of robbers.'”

And He went so far as to call some folks “snakes” and “vipers,” and called Peter “Satan” once. That had to hurt.

It all sounds pretty exasperated to me.

You can probably think of more explicit examples.

“In your anger, do not sin,” advises Psalm 4:4. But being angry itself, or even just exasperated, is no sin.

It is human.

So was Jesus.

The pattern I suspect, though, is that most of us humans get ticked off about relatively small things.

As I recall the situations that seemed to exasperate Jesus, they were when other folks couldn’t see the big picture because of their focus on the microscopic. When they couldn’t see the eternal beyond the transient.

A sign or miracle that would only last as long as memory and life. A storm that would pass. A chance to make a few bucks from an inheritance, or from a temple worshiper who didn’t have the right kind of money or the right kind of animal to sacrifice. A fascination with this temporal life, with no hope nor faith for a life that cannot end.

Am I reading between the lines?

Or do the lines converge on Jesus’ point each time – putting everything into perspective?

As a conduit of God’s power to heal on the earth, Jesus seems to have been shorted out on occasion.

I’m not talking about those instances when He – as many have said – went to “recharge His spiritual batteries” in prayer, alone or with His closest friends, after exhausting missions.

No, I’ve got two specific instances in mind from scripture. One is found in Mark 6:1-6. He could heal just about anywhere – except at home, where virtually no one believed in Him. The last two verses of that citation read:

He could not do any miracles there, except lay his hands on a few sick people and heal them. And he was amazed at their lack of faith.

I don’t know if there’s a cause-effect relationship there. But I suspect it. The reason is found in the second instance, in the previous chapter (Mark 5:21-34). He has gone to help Jairus’ gravely-sick daughter when a woman in the crowd about Him reaches out in faith that just touching His garment will heal her, too. He stops, apparently surprised; feeling power leave Him. He asks who touched Him, and she knows what He means by it and confesses. He tells her that her faith has healed her. Did He have nothing to do with it, as far as His own will is concerned? If so, then hers was enough. If not, perhaps He was waiting to see if she would act upon it.

We know that when He walked this world, He could divine the thoughts of others. To what extent, I’m not sure we can accurately surmise. Maybe the din of the crowd’s thoughts around Him drowned her out. Maybe He knew exactly what she prayed for.

But in the previous instance, there was an almost-complete lack of faith. And He apparently could do little. Mark’s gospel doesn’t say that He wouldn’t, but that He “could not.” Perhaps His power was, in fact, short-circuited by the lack of faith around Him. Perhaps those around Him refused to recognize the miracles He performed for what they really were – supernatural acts of God on earth – because it would naturally follow, then, that the Mary’s son they knew (with four brothers and at least a couple of sisters) might not be the carpenter’s boy after all.

The point I’d like to get to doesn’t depend on the correct answer to those questions, fortunately.

In both these situations – and in many more – I find evidence that Jesus actively wanted to work through the faith of the people around Him. I don’t believe that has changed. In fact, I believe that His Spirit is sent among those of us who seek to follow Him for that very reason and purpose.

That prompts the uncomfortable question:

Are we short-circuiting His power in the world today – not because He can’t work around us, but because He wants to work through us – simply by our lack of faith?

That’s how Jesus pictures himself in parables in Matthew 13:1-40.

Sowing seed. Rooting out the weeds sown by an enemy. Harvesting the good grain at the end of the season.

Pointing out that even the tiniest seed can grow into a tree sturdy enough to support the nests of birds.

You know He’s the farmer for certain in the last of the parables in that group, because He says so (v. 37).

This is an accurate agronomical forecast he’s giving.

You’re not going to get 100% yield.

Sow anyway. Sow all you can.

Sow even along the edges of the path where the birds will eat it up. They have to poop sometime, somewhere.

Sow even among the rocks in the sun. You never know what might spring up, even for a short time.

Sow even among thorns. You’re not responsible for them choking out the new growth.

Sow on the good soil, too. You might get a hundred times more seed-bearing plants. Or sixty. Or thirty.

Sow even where the enemy tries to sabotage the harvest by planting weeds. it’ll all be sorted out later.

In the first parable with the different soils, the seed is the word of God. In the later one with the weeds, it is the sons of the kingdom.

But who’s the farmer in the first parable?

I think it’s us.

I think from the first parable’s phrasing, we’re to sow the same way He does in the later one:

Any way and anywhere we can, expecting nothing, weeding out bad teaching (such as a false “gospel” of wealth in this life) just in the same way He weeds out bad teachers … then rejoicing at whatever growth God gives and whatever harvest the angels bring in.

It’s pretty amazing how much a Carpenter knows about planting and seeds and trees. How sin began with a tree, and ended with one. How God cast man out of a garden, and men took God captive in another. How that story becomes a gospel that grows like dough with yeast. How we grow to maturity in it, and it grows in us, and we grow more like Him.

But He gets that knowledge honestly.

As I recall, His Father planted that first garden in the east, in Eden …

That’s how He referred to Himself, at least once.

The backstory is in Mark 3:20-30:

Then Jesus entered a house, and again a crowd gathered, so that he and his disciples were not even able to eat. When his family heard about this, they went to take charge of him, for they said, “He is out of his mind.”
And the teachers of the law who came down from Jerusalem said, “He is possessed by Beelzebub! By the prince of demons he is driving out demons.”

So Jesus called them and spoke to them in parables: “How can Satan drive out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. If a house is divided against itself, that house cannot stand. And if Satan opposes himself and is divided, he cannot stand; his end has come. In fact, no one can enter a strong man’s house and carry off his possessions unless he first ties up the strong man. Then he can rob his house. I tell you the truth, all the sins and blasphemies of men will be forgiven them. But whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven; he is guilty of an eternal sin.”

He said this because they were saying, “He has an evil spirit.”

Jesus was the thief in the story He told, carrying off the possessions of Satan – the “strong man.” By exorcising demons, he was tying up the strong man and stealing back what belonged to God.

Not a metaphor most of us Christians would use for ourselves.

Maybe we should.

Maybe we ought to be more about our Father’s business of stealing back His kidnapped children from the enemy.

Maybe it would help if we realized that we’re not alone in the Godfather’s business … He has given us His Spirit to unite His kingdom and empower us to tie up the strong man just as Jesus did.

The deep irony of this metaphor, to me, is that Jesus describes the unforgiveable sin as blasphemy of that Spirit – the one they had called “evil” – by comparing His mission to breaking and entering and tying up the owner and theft.

Something we would, under normal circumstances, consider quite wrong.

Unless the justice of this world had failed, and it was the only way to take back the ones God loves who had been abducted by Satan.

The irony would be hilarious.

– If the stakes weren’t so high.