Proper 18 B (9-10 September 2006)
Isaiah 35:4-7a
Pr. George L. Murphy
St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Akron OH

“DO NOT FEAR”

“Snakes on a Plane.”  What more do I need to say?  You may not have seen that popular movie that’s in theaters now but you can probably guess the basic plot line.  In fact, it’s a film built around that catchy title.  You can picture some movie people sitting around a table trying to think of a way to tap into people’s deepest fears in their next epic.  “A lot of people can’t stand snakes.”  “Yeah, and think how many people are afraid of flying.”  “Hey – let’s put ‘em together.  Snakes on a Plane!”  And if you don’t expect anything more than that, the movie isn’t all that bad.

Maybe snakes or flying aren’t your greatest fears – they don’t happen to be mine. But all of us have fears - spiders, high places, fire or whatever.  I’m not just talking about real dangers that sensible people want to avoid, but about those gut level terrors that make us shudder when we think of them.  Part of what makes them fearful is that we don’t want to face them.

George Orwell’s novel 1984 is a bleak story of a totalitarian regime in which any independent thought, anything disloyal to “Big Brother,” is forbidden.  Anyone suspected of what was called “crimethink” would be imprisoned and re-educated.  The last step in the process often was “Room 101.”  Everyone has some most terrible fear, something they couldn’t bear to face, and the regime knows all about it because the regime knows everything.  Your worst nightmare is in Room 101.

“Say to those who are of a fearful heart, ‘Be strong, do not fear!’”  Originally those words of our First Lesson were meant as reassurance to Jewish exiles in Babylon, promising them that they would return home safely.  And the prophet gave a reason for being reassured:  “Here is your God.  ... He will come to save you.”  It’s the kind of encouragement you’ve probably heard – perhaps when you were a child.  “Don’t be afraid.  God will take care of you.”

And to a certain extent words like those are reassuring.  That reading from Isaiah and our Gospel today speak of God’s healing of crippling illnesses, things that none of us want to have to deal with.  In our own lives we’ve had experiences in which we sense that God has acted to protect us from the things we fear and gotten us out of danger.  We can’t prove that God is the one who saved us but that’s consistent with our faith.

But phrases like “Don’t be afraid, God will take care of you” can be just stale platitudes.  Who are you to tell me not to be afraid?  You don’t know what’s waiting for me in Room 101.  For that matter, who is God to tell me not to be afraid?  Sure, God is supposed to know everything.  God knows that people are afraid of snakes or planes or whatever.  But God doesn’t know my fear from the inside.  God has never felt that fear.  How could he?  God is all-powerful and doesn’t have to fear anything.

Unless  - unless God is so all-powerful that he can condescend to our human condition, beset by all our fears.  Maybe it could happen if it’s actually true that, as John’s Gospel says, “The Word became flesh.”  Because that word “flesh” in the Bible points to the vulnerability of human nature – “All flesh is grass.”  To say “The Word became flesh” is to say that the Son of God took on completely our human condition, with all its strengths and weaknesses, with all its joys and fears.

When we hear that announcement “Here is your God” we are to look to the one in today’s Gospel who reaches out to heal someone who couldn’t hear or speak.  I’m sure he was glad to be able to help the man.  But already he is looking toward what will happen in Jerusalem and in the next chapter of Mark’s Gospel he tells his friends about it for the first time:  “The Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three day’s rise again.”

People have feared countless things down through the centuries but the really basic anxieties can be boiled down to three:  Death, guilt and lack of meaning.  We dread the idea that our existence will end and that we’ll be dissolved.  We know that we’ve thought and done things to be ashamed of, things we don’t want others to know about.  We can’t stand the idea that the world is empty of sense or purpose.  They are real fears about real things, for we do die, and we are guilty, and it’s hard to see any point to existence.  We can cover up those fears but only one who knows and confronts them can get rid of them.

When Jesus said in Gethsemane, “I am deeply grieved, even to death,” and prayed to be spared the suffering that lay ahead, he was not speaking lines in a passion play.  It was just a passion – what St. Ignatius called “The passion of my God.”  In taking on our humanity, the One who lives forever borrowed our death.  St. Paul says that “God made him to be sin who knew no sin.”  On the cross the Son of God knew what it for any sense of meaning to be taken away when he cried out “Why have you forsaken me?”  And he is the one who on the third day rose again.

“Be strong, do not fear!  Here is your God.”  That is not simply a pep talk.  It is a reminder that the one who confronted our deepest fears and overcame them is on our side.