The King is here

In teen church at the moment we're slowly making our way through Mark's Gospel. I'm enjoying Mark's pace and matter-of-fact way of communicating what he knows about Jesus. Tonight we're in Mark 1:40-2:17, and we'll see Mark help us to unpack what 'the Kingdom of God is at hand' means, and continue to drive us towards an answer to the question, 'who is Jesus?'

In tonight’s passage we see three different encounters Jesus has with people on the fringes of society. People that we might regard as ‘them.’ People on the outside, people who are different to us. The three people that Jesus meets tonight are not the elite of society, in fact they are the sort of people that you would cross the street to avoid. So how would you think Jesus deals with those people? The unpopular, the unclean, the ‘them,’ of society? It’s an interesting question isn’t it? How does God Himself deal with people like that? People who we don’t want to deal with?

While we’re answering those questions, we have to remember the questions that Mark asks and answers all the way through this Gospel. We have to keep asking what all this means in light of the Kingdom of God, what does all this mean for Jesus identity as the Christ, how does this demonstrate that all Heaven is breaking lose? How do these encounters that Jesus has shape our view of Him and our view of people?

There’s lots of questions we have to answer tonight, so let’s get to work, and look at verses 40-45, Jesus cleansing a leper. Being a leper in first century Palestine was about the most miserable life you can imagine. Leprosy was incurable and contagious, and that’s a bad combination. What makes it even worse is that the Jewish leaders of the day had decided the leprosy was the judgement of God against sin. Lepers weren’t allowed to live in a town, they basically had to make a living in the city trash dumps. They had to wear a bell around their neck and call out ‘unclean, unclean,’ when they walked around anywhere. Neither family, nor society nor religion offered them anything. You can understand the desperation of this leper as he approaches Jesus. If you will you can make me clean. Jesus touches him and he is clean. Here comes the Kingdom of God, in the healing of the sick, in bringing Heaven to Earth.

Jesus takes this man’s skin disease. He is clean, and He takes the dirt from this leper. He’ll take it all the way to the cross, and die under it’s weight. But there’s a problem isn’t there? Now Jesus has touched a leper, everyone thinks He is unclean, so He can no longer enter a town openly, but even though He was in desolate places, people still came to Him ‘from every quarter.’ This leper could not approach God. So God came to Him. He was cut off from a relationship with God by His skin disease, you and I are cut off by our heart disease. Mark doesn’t record a lot of Jesus’ preaching, but shows us Jesus in action. Just as the leper is brought close to God by Jesus, so we are. Until Jesus makes us clean, we are all spiritual lepers, none of us can approach God, but now, because of Jesus, we all can. The Kingdom of God is at hand.