Summary: What is it like to experience a story of healing? When does healing happen and how do we recognize it? Does healing require a recognizable change in the body to count, or is it really about something else? The healing of the man with the withered hand in today's gospel from Mark is one that happens so quickly that it is almost lost in the greater drama that surrounds it. The scene is a synagogue, a place of teaching and worship. The attention-grabbing characters - the law-loving Pharisees and the power-craving Herodians - have been trailing Jesus and his disciples, a chorus of judges waiting for Jesus to make a mistake that they would be most happy to hold against him. These strange bedfellows - usually political opponents - found it expedient to work together when it came to undermining the authority and credibility of the one they both perceived as a threat: the One called the Messiah. The prelude to the healing involves these enemies of Jesus trailing after his followers through the fields and the town to get to the synagogue. The Pharisees had caught the disciples plucking the heads off the grain as they walked through the fields - probably more an absent-minded reflex like chewing on a blade of grass than a deliberate attempt to glean the fields for a meal. This did not keep the Pharisees from accusing them of harvesting on the Sabbath - a gotcha they wasted no time laying on Jesus. Neither the Pharisees nor the Herodians cared much about people, about the human condition. The Pharisees reveled in righteous indignation at this itinerant preacher with his crazy ideas about loving enemies and blessing the ragtag army of the unclean who followed him around. The power hungry Herodians merely capitalized on an opportunity to use one enemy to combat another. From Jesus, with his inner radar set to detect manipulation, and to care about every sheep in the pasture, every lamb in the fold, came exasperation in facing community leaders behaving badly - their hardness of heart breaking his own.
