‘We will heal together’ said Gareth Southgate on Monday morning following Sunday’s defeat of England’s men’s football team by Italy. The same day saw graphic illustration in the Telegraph of Southgate’s capacity as a healer with two pictures side by side. One showed England’s manager being comforted 25 years ago by Terry Venables at Euro96 after he himself missed at a penalty shoot out for England. The other came from Sunday with Gareth Southgate embracing the distressed player, Bukayo Saka, who had the same fate. Southgate seemed well equipped to comfort Saka as a wounded healer, someone who had been in the same pain a quarter of a century ago.
Those pictures are a window into this Sunday’s scripture linked to healing. We read in the Gospel from Mark 6 of Jesus showing compassion for the crowd around him, seeing them as ‘sheep without a shepherd’. That phrase echoes the first reading from Jeremiah 23 prophesying a future shepherding and healing for God’s people. With the coming of Christ that healing begins, as we read at the end of today’s Gospel: ‘Wherever Jesus went…they laid the sick in the market places, and begged him that they might touch even the fringe of his cloak; and all who touched it were healed’ Mark 6:56.
We take the counsel of people who have suffered more into our hearts. The remarkable scene just described surrounds one who was approaching his passion, already bearing rejection with nowhere to lay his head, yet releasing power to heal even through his clothes. The second reading from Ephesians lays out the basis of divine healing in the extraordinary consequences of the rejection and crucifixion of Christ. God is no longer to be seen as God who embraces just the Jews but as God who embraces all, Gentiles - that is non-Jews - and Jews. I quote again this extraordinary passage: ‘In Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us… reconcil(ing) both groups to God in one body through the cross, thus putting to death that hostility (between Jews and Gentiles) through it. So he came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near; for through him both of us have access in one Spirit to the Father’. (Ephesians 2:13-18)
The main issue for the church today is – how much of a vision of God do we have? Do we believe in the power of the Cross conveyed to us this morning in the eucharist? Do we see and take heart from passages like Ephesians 2 in the face of the dividing walls in the world today? These are made more evident through social media as last weekend proved. Social media brough 32 million of us to Sunday’s game but the consequence of that was in part to reveal a sorry amount of racial prejudice flowing through the same media. When Gareth Southgate said ‘we will heal together’ he spoke for us all since facing up to the truth together is the bottom line for healing under God. The England team are giving a powerful lead on inclusion and collaborative working. As Christians we can’t but see the invitation to repent of racial prejudice as a laying hold of the divine initiative that has impacted, that potentially breaks all walls between us, through the incarnation, death and resurrection of Christ. As we read in St John’s Gospel Chapter 11 verse 52, ‘Jesus died not for the Jewish nation only, but to gather into one the dispersed children of God’.
How big is your God? How real? As real as to engineer through history such a gathering of his dispersed children? Real enough to take your life and mine and lives like Gareth Southgate to be witnesses and instruments of divine healing
You can be sure of this – however magnificent and real God is to you today there’ll be a greater magnificence and reality in store for you!
On a few occasions in my ministry I have been on the scene when the glory of Jesus evidently illuminated and healed someone.
I think of Bernard who came stumbling around to the Clergy House of my Curacy beaming all over his face. Was he drunk? I thought. No. Jesus had come real to him. The Holy Spirit had opened his inner eyes.
I think of an older man to whose troubled deathbed I’d been summoned. As I read the 23rd Psalm deep peace descended upon him. It was as if Jesus appeared and just took him away. He died joyfully as I prayed.
Or some time back when a young man described to me how for several months he had helped his wife cope with a spiritual problem, Jesus made himself known. James started a confirmation course. A short meeting opened my eyes with his to God’s wonder and magnificence.
Over my time at St Giles, Horsted Keynes I saw eyes opening to the heart and mind expanding vision of God that’s at the heart of this eucharist, people testifying to transformation of their lives in some degree or other.
What a difference it makes to someone when they see Jesus! They see glory – glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.
To see Jesus is to catch hold of a radiant beauty quite out of this world, a beauty that is compelling and extraordinary in its attractiveness, that makes human divisions pale into insignificance.
Could we wish anything more wonderful for anyone than a personal revelation of the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ?
It can be ours this morning at the Eucharist. With St John we are to call out: Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God, the Almighty; he was, he is and he is to come.
In this celebration earth is joined to heaven. There steals on the ear the distant triumph song as our words of praise find echo and amplification from angels and archangels, and all the company of heaven.
God grant us a vision of himself more to his dimension and less to ours as we come before him this morning to thank him for his goodness and healing!
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