Sermons

“Lord, When Did We See You—Sick?”

Matthew 25:31-46; Mark 11:1-10; Mark 3:7-12

Rev. Rebecca Littlejohn

March 29, 2015

Holy God, bless the speaking and the hearing of these words that we truly seek you in our weakness and serve you with all our strength. We pray in the name of Jesus, Amen.

Even as we celebrate Palm Sunday today, we are still in the season of Lent. Throughout these six weeks, we have been making our way through our theme scripture from Matthew 25, which you heard played out earlier by Jerry and his friends. Each week, we have considered one of the states of need that Jesus included in his call to us to serve the least of these. And so today, we finish up that list. “Lord, when did we see you?” “I was sick, and you took care of me.”

Except, except that feels backward, doesn’t it? There are lots of stories of sick people in the gospels, and none of them are Jesus. When there is sickness, Jesus is the one serving as healer. It turns out there are lots of contradictions in this tiny little portion of a verse. Let’s start with this one. We are used to thinking of Jesus as the healer, the Great Physician. We might not think that has a lot to do with Palm Sunday at first, but if we look a little deeper, we may find a connection. Did you catch the dramatic tension in those verses I just read from Mark 3? There are so many people seeking Jesus’ healing power, and they are so anxious to get it, that Jesus has to ask the disciples to put him in a boat, so that he’s not crushed by the throng of 2 people trying to touch him. Now that’s a crowd! Does it have anything in common with the Palm Sunday crowd? One is throng of desperate people seeking healing; the other is a jubilant crowd shouting praises, right? Except for this one little thing: the literal meaning of the word “Hosanna” is “Save us!” A crowd of people shouting “Save us!” doesn’t actually seem that far removed from a throng of people desperately trying to touch the hem of your garment, to me.

Some of the contradictions are inherent to the story of Palm Sunday. The crowd was seeking a human king, that is, one that would ride in on a white horse and overthrow the powers of the day and bring earthly liberation. What they got instead was a human king, a man riding on a donkey who knew well the difficulties of human weakness. We started this season by realizing that Jesus’ 40-day journey in the wilderness would have brought him face-to-face with his human weakness, the realities of hunger and thirst and loneliness, and his utter dependence on God. We, along with the crowd, think that we want an omnipotent King, but the Holy Week story has the power it does precisely because it’s a story of God being human, with everything that means, even, as Philippians 2 puts it, obedience to the point of death on a cross.

That is why this scripture from Matthew 25 works so well as a Lenten reflection. It is exactly because Jesus invites us to meet him in the midst of human weakness and need that we can count on him being present with us in the depth of our need. So, again, sickness. It’s a bit different than the other states of need we have 3 considered. Contradictory, as I said. On the one hand, you could argue that sickness is much easier to relate to, because any of us can get sick. Not many of us have been immigrants, or seriously food or water deprived. We’re not very likely to end up in prison, and we’ve mostly got plenty of clothes. But sickness, sickness we have firsthand experience of. We’ve both been sick and cared for others who are sick. It’s miserable, and we know it. So this situation is one we connect with. On the other hand, precisely because it could happen to any of us, sickness may be the most intimidating reality included in this passage. The other situations are so far removed from what’s likely to happen to us, it’s hard to imagine ourselves in the position of ‘the least of these.’ But sickness – and here we start to think of more serious illnesses like cancer and Alzheimer’s – sickness is something that could hit us at any moment. Sickness is scary because it is well within the realm of possibility.

And once we starting admitting that sickness can be a scary thing, we start to remember that there have been situations in which it truly took real Christians to care for the sick. Throughout history, it has often been Christians who have taken on the responsibility of caring for the ill, especially when no one else wanted to. Christians founded hospitals, and rest homes for the aged. Nuns and monks cared for victims of the plague, risking their own lives to care for the ill when their own families had abandoned them out of fear. In our own day, some of the first Americans to contract the Ebola virus were doctors and nurses serving with Christian missions in Africa.

It’s one thing to catch a cold because you were breathing the same air as your children who brought it home from school. It’s a whole other thing to leave your home and care for total strangers with an incredibly infectious disease, simply because Jesus told us to take care of the sick. But beyond the physical risk, there is an emotional burden to caring for the sick. There is an emotional contagion there, a reminder of our own mortality. Feeding the hungry might make us sympathetic and more grateful for the plenitude on our own tables, but it doesn’t make us hungry too. Visiting someone in prison isn’t contagious; you’re not going to get trapped in there. But spending serious time with the sick confronts us with the frailty of the human body, not just the other person’s but our own. Newbie doctors and nurses and even hospital chaplains, as I can tell you from my own experience, often go through an experience of heightened hypochondria, as they are exposed to the incredible spectrum of illness and the seeming innocence of preliminary symptoms of deadly diseases. Caring for the sick is tremendously exhausting, and a huge part of that is the emotional burden. Many of you don’t need me to tell you this, as you’ve experienced it in your own lives. We can even hear a little hint of it in Jesus’ request to the disciples to put him in a boat so he’s not crushed by the throng of people seeking healing.

So here he is, entering Jerusalem, and the crowd is shouting, “Hosanna! Save us!” He had to know they were looking for something different than what he was about to offer. Every time Jesus had tried to explain to his disciples what was going 5 to happen, they refused to hear, refused to understand. We are not interested in death. We don’t want to hear about death. We don’t want to hear about suffering. We don’t want to hear about weakness. How about some more about glory and power? We want to be on the winning team, so let’s hear your strategy for that.

But that is not what this holy week is about. The path to salvation that is offered by this Savior gets there by way of sacrificial love and humble servanthood. It’s great to be excited as we shout “Hosanna! Blessed is the One who comes in the name of the Lord!” But we need to be aware of where that One is going, of what it will mean to follow this particular King, who is unlike any other king we’ve come across.

“Lord, when did we see you?” “I was sick, and you took care of me.” Sometimes it can be as simple as a cup of cold water. Whether it’s our child, or our parent, or a lonely person with no family other than their church, we can meet Jesus there, the Jesus whose humanity is at the center of the story we will celebrate this week. An upside-down King, who rides on a donkey. We will gather here in a few days and remember Jesus’ vulnerability in ways we only contemplate fully once a year. It’s not easy, because if it can happen to him, it could happen to us. And we’re not nearly as brave or strong. But we, like Jesus, have God’s love to rely on, God’s love to put our hope in, God’s love to draw our strength from. Let us cry “Hosanna!” with all confidence and thanksgiving, for God’s love is the end of the story. Amen.