“A Commercial Miracle?”
Luke 5:17-26
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
2/21/16
One of the
cultural phenomena surrounding a Super Bowl is the Super Bowl commercial. This
year, advertisers willingly paid $5 million per 30-second spot. That’s
$166,666.67 per second to hawk beer,
cell phones, insurance, or corn chips. Not only are advertisers willing to pay any
price, they are willing to exploit just about anyone or anything in the
process.
Fifteen years
ago, they tapped into national mourning by having their draft horses kneel
before a forever-changed Manhattan skyline.
This year they
hit us with a parade of faces of American veterans – faces that bear the scars
of bullets and bombs, flames and fear. They used
these faces to suggest that their SUVs can endure similar violence and still
keep going. They want us to believe that there is heart and soul beneath those
metal hoods to equal the heart and soul behind those war-ravaged, human faces.
In one of
those “Super Bowl Ads You Didn’t See,” a little girl holds a corn chip. She is
in a gym watching several men exercise. As in the SUV commercial, all of these
men are physically scarred. Each lacks at least one limb, but they are rugged,
determined, and driven. The little girl offers a single corn chip to one of the
men. He receives it and takes a bite. He stares at the girl with fierce,
humorless eyes. The commercial ends with a shot of the child, her face bright
and eager. She begins to run – on one crooked leg and one artificial leg.
All
compensation aside, do we comprehend the extent of our economic exploitation of
human suffering? Do not battle scars and birth defects mean more than SUVs and
snack foods?
While working
with the story of Jesus healing the paralyzed man in Luke 5, I began to wonder
how the man himself might feel. He seems to get kind of forgotten. He goes from
being a burden carried by friends, to the beneficiary of their efforts, to a
source of conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees. I suppose the man, when back
on his feet, does not care what we think. Still, we never hear his voice. The story never asks us to
empathize with his brokenness. He
becomes a kind of commercial for Jesus’ authority over sin and suffering. Or
maybe he is a PSA encouraging determined hope. Or maybe a negative ad condemning
petty legalism.
Is this just a commercial miracle?
Last week, I came across an
interesting voice in the conversation on suffering and purpose. In 2013, Dr.
Kate Bowler of Duke Divinity School published a book entitled Blessed: A History of the American
Prosperity Gospel. A week ago, in a NY Times opinion piece entitled Death, the Prosperity Gospel and Me, Dr.
Bowler reflects on her recent, stage 4 cancer diagnosis.
“Blessed,” says Kate Bowler has
become a mantra in American religious culture, a culture, she says, “where
there are no setbacks, just setups. [And where] Tragedies are simply tests of
character.”1
Shortly after Bowler’s news broke,
a neighbor knocked on the door. She had come to say, “Everything happens for a
reason.”
“I’d love to hear it,” said
Bowler’s husband.
“Pardon?” said the neighbor.
“I’d love to hear the reason my
wife is dying,” he said.2
Everything
happens for a reason becomes the beer, the cell phone, the SUV, and the bag
of life-changing corn chips for sale. It becomes the product we have all been
waiting for. And the individual’s suffering becomes the advertisement.
“One of the most endearing and
saddest things about being sick,” writes Dr. Bowler, “is watching people’s
attempts to make sense of your problem. My academic friends did what
researchers do and Googled the hell out of it. When did you start noticing
pain? What exactly were the symptoms, again? Is it hereditary? I can out-know
my cancer using the Mayo Clinic website. Buried in all their concern is the
unspoken question: Do I have any control?
“I can also hear it,” she says, “in
all my hippie friends’ attempts to find the most healing kale salad for me. I
can eat my way out of cancer. Or, if I were to follow my prosperity gospel
friends’ advice, I can positively declare that it has no power over me and set
myself free.”3
Like the friends and the Pharisees
in Luke 5, Kate Bowler’s friends are trying to manipulate someone else’s
narrative by trying to
control perceptions and to force outcomes. One of our
favorite means of manipulating control is trying to sell to ourselves and
others some reasonable and palatable narrative to make sense of suffering. But
such bargaining only distances us from healing.
In today’s
story, I hear Jesus saying, Look, if
there is purpose to this man’s condition, it has nothing to do with his
friends’ noble efforts or the Pharisees’ theological judgments. It has to do
with recognizing God in the midst of suffering.
Walter Bruggemann says that
suffering bestows unique authority on those who suffer. This spiritual
authority claims the wounds and brokenness and offers them to the world as
sources of healing. Jesus embodies authoritative suffering. In Jesus, God does more
than suffer for us. God eternally
enters human suffering, not to end it, but to redeem it by suffering with us. Shared suffering – com-passion – is God’s healing narrative
in, with, and for the creation. And we understand that narrative only to the
extent that we enter each other’s suffering – with com-passion.
When viewed
individualistically, suffering becomes a kind of currency. We use it to
purchase advantage or to leverage guilt. (Think of how we use words like
“heroes” and “martyrs.”) We also use suffering to sell corn chips. When reduced
to currency, suffering loses its spiritual and moral authority. It loses its
power to heal.
“If one member
[of the body] suffers,” writes Paul, “all suffer with it; [and] if one member
is honored, all rejoice together with it.” (1Corinthians 12:26)
Isn’t that
what Jesus is after?
“The power of the Lord was with him
to heal,” says Luke. And the story truly becomes a healing story not when one man celebrates, but when “amazement”
overcomes “all of them, and they glorified God and were filled with awe.”
I wish I could
wave a magic wand and cure cancer, mental illness, bigotry, and poverty. But no
one can do that. And even when someone boldly declares that God can, it is hard
to argue with someone else who says, “Well, apparently God just doesn’t want
to.”
We are not advertisers selling admission
to some mythical Shangri-La. We are living witnesses to the paradox of God’s kingdom,
that realm where God continually overwhelms us with presence and grace even in
the turmoil of the creation’s ongoing suffering.
According to
the prosperity gospel, I am blessed when I have wealth, health, and first-world
freedoms. The Gospel of Jesus says we
are blessed when no one suffers alone anymore.
Preachers like
to end sermons leaving congregations awestruck at God’s grace. But this story
necessarily leaves us thinking, “We have seen strange things today.”
2Ibid.
3Ibid.
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