Mark 1: 29-39
“Have You Found Jesus?"

When they found him, they said to him, “Everyone is searching for you.”

This is one where you just have to put yourself in the story.

Can you imagine the disciples waking up to find that Jesus is gone. One of them says, "Where is Jesus?" "Oh, he's probably outside the door." Someone opens the door: "Nope, not there." "Maybe he's down at the town well. I'll check." A few minutes later: "He wasn't there either. Nobody's seen head nor tail of him, and there are a lot of people out on the street wanting to see him." His companions look around the house hoping he scratched a note on a potsherd telling his whereabouts, but there is nothing. Not one sign of where or when he took off. Panic begins to set in. They spread out through the neighborhood and then into the countryside calling, "Jesus, Jesus, where are you?"

Have you found Jesus? People are desperate to find him. They have so many needs, so many questions, so many doubts and struggles, so many hopes and yearnings. They are ill and separated from their community, and they want healing:

Have you found Jesus? Are you and your people hunting for him? Does it seem you have lost track of his whereabouts? Maybe, Jesus has left where you usually find him, and he has again gone off to "a deserted place" (Mark 1:35). Maybe his ministry to you is to be Jesus the hunted so that you might leave the habitual haunts of your faith, because like him you need to move on to new territories (Mark 1:38). Maybe we are wrong to preach "Jesus is always with us." He was not always with his disciples during his earthly ministry so why should he always be with us now? Maybe Jesus knows that if he does not leave us to hunt for him, we will become presumptuous and complacent about our need for him.  

"Everyone is searching for you," they told him. It was true then. It is true today. Our culture is far too secular, or at least thinks it is, far too sophisticated to use the language and speak his name, but everyone is searching for him.

Jesus notices human need of the most basic type—a man’s mental or emotional dysfunction, an elderly woman’s physical impairment. Jesus notices, and cares enough to feel compassion, takes into himself the human pain and fear of a mentally ill man and an aging woman whose station in life could almost be defined as superfluous. Who needs her anymore? "Who needs me?" she asks every single day of her life, living under her son-in-law’s roof, always in the way, trying somehow to be useful.

Could it be that what we are searching for, all of us, great and small, important and insignificant, titled and anonymous—what we are most searching for is the meaning that comes from being useful—to be the hero of our own life?

That’s what we search for—a sense that we matter, that there is meaning to our lives because someone wants us and loves us, and, because of that, because we know ourselves loved and wanted, a way of being useful, a way to get up and serve.
 
That’s what we search for. There is, of course, someone who loves and wants us; whose love can restore us and give us confidence and meet our deepest needs and lift us up from where we are lying, waiting, and put us to work and make us the hero-heroine of our own lives. Jesus Christ is his name.

But one need not be at death’s door or living through a health crisis with a loved one to know the need for renewed strength that comes from waiting on the Lord. Anyone who worries about concerns for justice, anyone with a soul sensitive to the needs of the outcast, the refugee or the dispossessed, anyone who works on a regular basis with folks living on the margin, be they homeless, addicted or mentally ill, anyone working in disaster relief knows this need.

So often we figure that when we come to church, we are supposed to leave all of our hurts and pains outside the church door. We figure that we have no business bringing our problems to God, since God must already have enough on his mind with all the other troubles in the world. But that church reminds us that God is always ready to help us, especially in our times of suffering.

When we read through the Gospels, one of the first things that become obvious is that healing was a central part of what Jesus did. In this particular passage in Mark, we are told that not just some of the sick people of the area were brought to Jesus—they were all brought to him.

And we need to remember that that gift of healing did not end with Jesus. For example, there is the story in the Acts of the Apostles where one day Peter and John were going into the temple in Jerusalem. And sitting there at the gate begging was a man who had been lame since birth. So as the apostles went by him, the beggar called out to them for some money. But Peter stopped and said to him: “I have no silver or gold, but what I do have I will give you; in the name of Jesus Christ, stand up and walk." And then taking him by the hand, Peter helped him up, and immediately the man's legs and feet were made strong. And that man began to leap about and praise God. And all who were there were filled with amazement at the power of God.

But somewhere along the line, we have shied away from that ministry. Maybe it's partly because of the phony faith-healers who have been exposed over the years. But for whatever reason, we shy away from talking about God's power to heal, because if we talk that way, we are afraid of what people might think of us. So instead we try to make ourselves and our churches more respectable in the eyes of other people. But there is a price that we pay for doing that.

Have you found Jesus?

I believe that it is fair to say that people are far more likely to look for God when something bad happens in their life. For example, rarely does someone say: “I just got a promotion at work. I better run over to the church and pray about that." Nor do people usually say: “I'm feeling really great today. I think I better call the minister up and let him know."

What we should look for from God is not just a cure for a particular problem that we have right now, because a cure is just temporary. When we ask God to cure just a piece of our life, we fail to recognize that our real need is much deeper.

What we really need from God is to be healed, to be made whole. But being made whole requires more than just giving God our wish list, telling God how we wish things would be different. What we need to realize is that the problems in our lives are more than we can solve by ourselves, yet we trust God to do what is needed. And when we trust in God that way, that is when we are truly healed.

Have you found Jesus?

At around 4:00 or 4:30 A.M., without disturbing anybody else in the house, Jesus got up, pulled some extra clothing around him for warmth, and went out beyond the edge of town to what the NRSV calls “a deserted place.”

That translation, however, does not do full justice to the word ĕrēmŏs (er-ay-mos). The ĕrēmŏs is not simply an isolated place; it is a place where crucial decisions are made. It is the word often translated “wilderness,” and “wilderness” catches something of the atmosphere of danger and crisis which ĕrēmŏs contains.

It is out in the ĕrēmŏs that John the Baptist calls people to repentance, a turning around, a radical change in direction. He is the one whom the prophet Isaiah had described as “a voice crying in the ĕrēmŏs.”

It was out in the ĕrēmŏs that Jesus had done battle with the Tempter at the outset of his ministry. He had been enticed with three forms of ministry, all of which held more promise of success than the one to which he concluded that the Father was calling him.

It was a battle, which he had to fight over and over. On the last night of his life, he fought it until sweat poured down his face. If there was ever a place that could be called heramos, it was the Garden of Gethsemane where the final cost of the ministry he had accepted was clear. “Father if it be possible, let this cup pass from me,” he prayed. “Yet, not my will, but yours be done.”

Between the beginning and the end, he had to fight the battle again at 4:00 o’clock in the morning in the lonely place, a wilderness, the ĕrēmŏs outside Capernaum.

Get into his situation. The whole town was in a state of excited enthusiasm over him. He had preached like no one they had ever heard. He had brought a resurgence of health and wholeness to people who were crippled up by a variety of physical and mental illnesses. He was the talk of the town and the toast of the town, and they wanted him to stay there and be their teacher and preacher and pastor.

That is how most rabbis lived. They settled down and had a place and a people to whom they were committed. And they developed friendships and a lifestyle closely interwoven with the lives of others, and their ministries permeated the lives of people with the passage of time. But Jesus found an alternative there in the wilderness outside Capernaum. The alternative was a very different kind of life, an uncertain life, and it was the one, which he believed God meant for him. It was the one he chose.

More often than not the ĕrēmŏs is a place where decisions are made which are less dramatic than the ones I have described. They are crucial, nevertheless, because in the making of them we move toward or away from God’s will. In the making of them we make progress or we regress. We gain strength, or we lose strength.

When we are standing in the interval between the calling of the question and the taking of the vote on the complicated or controversial issue, and we are trying to decide which way to vote, we are in a lonely place where it is often very difficult to know which way to go.

When you are trying to keep peace in your family, but you feel that God is leading you to express a feeling or raise a question, which is likely to ignite anger, you are in that wilderness place where battles are won and lost.

When you hold the cup to your lips and tip it back, you are in the ĕrēmŏs. You cannot avoid, except by mindless participation, the making of a decision. You either let the sweet refreshment take you into joyful reflection upon the victory of our risen Lord, or you let it take you to something more dynamic – new life in the power of that victory. And by that I mean specific things: speech that has more hope in it and less despair, work that is accompanied more by deep breaths and less by long sighs, physical expression of affection which arises more out of love and less out of duty, courses of action on all fronts which are influenced more by God and less by the Tempter.

in the ĕrēmŏs outside Capernaum: …the secret of Jesus’ ministry is hidden in that lonely place where he went to pray…. In the lonely place Jesus finds courage to follow God’s will and not his own; to speak God’s words and not his own; to do God’s work and not his own.

You do not really have that option, because you are not Jesus. Your words and your deeds will always be your own. But you can accept that fact and still live with decisiveness and courage if you believe that in every ĕrēmŏs of life, in every lonely and tempting place . . . you are, in fact, not alone, then and only then have you found Jesus.