Making House Calls--June 11, 2020

Making House-Calls--June 11, 2020

“When the scribes of the Pharisees saw that he was eating with sinners and tax collectors, they said to his disciples, ‘Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?’ When Jesus heard this, he said to them, ‘Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.’”  [Mark 2:16-17]

To hear Jesus describe himself, he is like a doctor for our deepest needs—a healer not just of scrapes and skinned knees or even stomach pains, but of spirit and soul. But if he is like a physician, Jesus is like one of those old-fashioned doctors we remember from decades past—the kind that made house-calls. 

This is really what irks the official religious crowds about Jesus—that he goes to the “sinners” on his own terms without making them go through admission or jump through any hoops first. The Pharisees were not evil—they were all in favor of seeing sinners get their lives turned around. They just couldn’t imagine someone like Jesus—a good, religious, pious rabbi—going out to the sin-sick folks. They can’t imagine a healer of the soul making house calls; they expect the sinners to get their act together with right law-keeping and rule-following. In the mind of the Pharisees, the sin-sick are welcome to be healed—if they’ll only get themselves to the hospital first. It’s a “you-come-to-us” picture, and Jesus has turned that upside-down by crashing a party at Levi’s house and eating with the sell-outs and sinners there. 

This is the real scandal of Jesus: he keeps going out to where the sickness is to draw out the infection, rather than making his patients come to him during appointed office hours. 

We are going to have to get used to this if we are going to take our identity as Jesus’ followers very seriously at all. Because, truth be told, where Jesus is, his followers are going to be found, too. So we had better learn to deal with the fact that Jesus is not the kind of doctor who has a respectable practice in a nice office park with fake trees in the waiting room and a brass name-plaque on the door. Jesus is the old-fashioned kind of doctor, the kind we can scarcely imagine was real at one time, who makes house calls. Jesus is the one who comes to where the sickness is, in order to make us well. He is the one who goes to the leper colony to heal our wounds even though it means being in the constant present, not only of the sick, but of the sickness. And of course, Jesus has it in mind to make his patients into his physician’s assistants, too. So the moment we find ourselves triumphantly praising God that Jesus has “saved” us or “given us the victory” or “taken our sin” or “healed our souls” or whatever religious language you want to use, we had better also be aware that we are still headed for the leper colony with Jesus, now to be alongside him healing, touching, and loving the same people Jesus heals, touches, and loves. And we had also better be aware that he continues to do the same for us in our ongoing treatment. 

In other words, being a follower of Jesus means admitting we are—at our best—in recovery ourselves, having been healed first by Jesus, the Great Physician, and that we will be sent out along with Jesus to love, eat with, and throw our lot in with a whole lot of other sin-sick souls like us. The church is, as the old saying goes, not a museum for saints, but a hospital for sinners. It’s just that the hospital staff is made up entirely of patients, too, the whole lot of us. Or maybe to tweak the image just a hair in order to be faithful to Jesus’ own actions, the church is an ambulance for sinners, and we are all his EMTs, constantly on the go with him outward to where the hurt people are. 

This is probably the part about the Christian Good News that rubs most people the wrong way: the fact that Jesus does not simply set up a booth like Lucy from Peanuts and wait for people to get their act together enough to come to him first. That we could handle. That sounds like respectable religion: “If you can get yourself to the hospital, treatment will be available for you—but first, you must get yourself well enough to drive yourself to the keeper of the medicine. You move first.” That the Pharisees could allow. 

But Jesus upset the religious folk there in the first century, the same way he upsets a lot of religious folk in the twenty-first century, by being the one who makes the first move. He makes house-calls. He comes to us in our mess, contaminated and contagious as we surely are, because that is how divine love works. Jesus hasn’t come to judge a beauty contest and crown a pageant-winner. He has come to bring us to life--to mend our broken places, and that means coming to where we are, as we are. And it means, too, that for those of us who are striving to be his followers, we are going to be sent out the same way, healed and healing all at once. Be ready: both will happen in your midst today if your ears are open to hear the call coming in. 

O Christ, our Physician and our Leader, make us well and use us in your work of healing others this day.