A relational God

Mark 1: 29-39

29 As soon as they left the synagogue, they went with James and John to the home of Simon and Andrew. 30 Simon’s mother-in-law was in bed with a fever, and they immediately told Jesus about her. 31 So he went to her, took her hand and helped her up. The fever left her and she began to wait on them. 32 That evening after sunset the people brought to Jesus all the sick and demon-possessed. 33 The whole town gathered at the door, 34 and Jesus healed many who had various diseases. He also drove out many demons, but he would not let the demons speak because they knew who he was. 35 Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed. 36 Simon and his companions went to look for him, 37 and when they found him, they exclaimed: “Everyone is looking for you!” 38 Jesus replied, “Let us go somewhere else—to the nearby villages—so I can preach there also. That is why I have come.” 39 So he traveled throughout Galilee, preaching in their synagogues and driving out demons.

Human beings have been created for relations. The bible shows enough evidence about God’s intentions to establish relations with humanity. Human history is about relations, and the reality of sin reflects the broken relations of everything: broken relations with others human, broken relations with the creation, broken relations with himself, and broken relations with his creator. The only way to restore humanity is to get over the broken relations and move forward in direction to the God’s kingdom.
 
Dr. Bernie Siegel, in " Homemade, May 1989, says that single men are jailed more often, earn less, have more illnesses, and die at a younger age than married men. Married men with cancer live 20% longer than single men with the same cancer. Women, who often have more close friendships than men, survive longer with the same cancers. Married or not, relationships keep us alive. Let see the biblical perspective about relations.
 
Psalm 147: 1-12. This happened about 600 years before Jesus came to the earth, and this passage contains a good example of the complexity of human relations. The Babylonians destroyed the city of Jerusalem and took the people away to Babylon. Babylon was a country east of Jerusalem. They made them live there for 70 years. They were exiles (they lived away from their own country). This happened because God’s people did not love him nor obey him. So, God punished (or hurt) them. But after 70 years, God destroyed Babylon and brought his people home. He built Jerusalem again and made his people feel happy again. Some of them had broken hearts. This is a way to say that they felt very, very sad (or depressed). Other people had injuries. Perhaps someone had hit them or cut them with a knife. Really, God did not do these things himself. The psalm means that he made them happen through other people. Broken stories, destruction, but also restoration, all are included in the story of Israel's relations with God, with themselves as people, and with other countries.
 
In Isaiah 40: 21-31 we find the image contained in the text of Isaiah is a powerful metaphor about relations between God and his people; it’s a new chapter about tensions, disappointments, and struggles. God is in control of the universe, but also is closed to humanity. God is using his power in favor of Israel, keeping a relationship of care, love, and protection. God is a father, not a supranatural force, or a mystic essence, is a person, one who oversees a relation with Israel. He is open to care for His lovely people. On the contrary, Israel is going far from God’s will, taking their own decisions, and making their own mistakes. Isaiah appeals to references to Jacob because cit onsiders the importance of the incarnational understanding of the concepts, the Hebrew language usually refers to concrete expression of the reality more than theoretical ideas as the Greek does. That is an important thing to consider when we interpret the Old Testament in comparison with the New Testament. It means, from the Hebrew perspective, God is a concrete person, an incarnational reality, not a power or a force, is Someone who exists in relation to everything that He has created.
 
In 1 Corinthians 9: 16-23 the bible says that for the early church, the dynamic to settle down implied a challenge in terms of changes of attitudes, behaviors, and comprehension of piety, as well as a lot of gaps about how to assume the new life contained in the gospel. Apostle Paul exposed his own experience as a leader trying to build a consistent community but suffering for himself the implications of the religious tradition, the weight of the Roman cultures, and the influence of paganism on the church. Paul, in his First Letter to the Corinthians, describes the states of the leadership, including some characteristics such as a lack of commitment and comfort with the status Quo. He decided to incarnate a life’s projects capable of reflecting God’s Kingdom according to the teachings of Jesus. The relational derivatives of this project were a big change in favor of a more committed practice of community, not just as individuals but as people of God, spreading the good news with the word but also with the deeds, the signs of the Holy Spirit. Paul did exactly what he received from Jesus, and he incarnated this new understanding of the relations and taught it in this way to all the new churches established at the beginning of the early church.
 
In the gospel of Mark 1: 29-39, we find a powerful story that includes a lot of concrete relational expressions. We can check the interest of Jesus to keep His powerful connections with His disciples as Simon and Andres, even Jesus felt a deeper sympathy for the pain of Peter’s mother-in-law, and He healed her. Crowds came to Jesus to be healed and to be driven out of demons, but the main motivation for our Lord was to keep His close relation with His Father, the Eternal God, through prayer. Then His disciples came to Him, and Jesus decided to keep going on His mission, preaching the gospel and healing people. We can identify a strong commitment of Jesus with His disciples and with the people around him expressed and the way that He was every time attending their demands not to manipulate or take advantages of His popularity, moreover, Jesus was able to feel the vulnerability of the people around Him and He took concretes actions in favor of them as expression of His father’s love. The same God who loved his people in the Old Testament, the creator, the savior of Israel, was now walking with the crowds, sharing their needs, and being exposed to the worst of the human conditions, all in favor of God’s project to recreate everything in a new reality.
 
God is more than a concept, Jesus is beyond any theory, God is someone who loves us, and Jesus is the incarnational expression of God in our midst. Because of His love, we are saved, because of His attitudes of compassion and mercy, we can feel His presence amid the worst battles, spiritual or material. In a world where relations are destroyed frequently due to envy or evil, in the midst of wars or famines, in the midst of individualism and consumerism, we are called, as Jesus taught, as Paul wrote, to live to proclaim a new world, one where solidarity and peace are the expression of God’s kingdom. Sometimes it is too hard live new relations based in respect, love and compassion even into our families or into our churches because the weight of the sin is still affecting the God’s plan for our lives but we can resist every time that we can the temptation to destroy, to do harm and instead, to be instruments of love but not just through words rather deed, acts, and signs of the Holy Spirit.
 
The family matter, according to the General Social Survey (Families), of the 11 million people aged 55 and older in Canada in 2017, 7.5 million were part of a couple. Five million, or 7 in 10, aged 55 and older, were in a long-lasting relationship of 30 years or more. Long-lasting relationships were more common among married couples than among those who lived common-law. People in long-lasting relationships were, on average, 68 years of age. Long-lasting couples were likely to have at least one child. 92% of persons in unions of 30 years or longer had at least one child. 76% of persons in unions of less than 30 years had at least one child. Half of adults aged 75 and older who were part of a couple had been in that relationship for 55 years or more.
 
Our evangelism must be relational, as God is. The Bible tells us about our God keeping a longer relationship with the human being, a relation based on His faithfulness, His mercy, and His promises. Jesus incarnates the relational project of God being a friend for His disciples, being a healer for the vulnerable, and being our savior on the cross. How can we be aware enough about our call to be relational? keeping each other and loving not just our friends but the entire humanity. Especially in this time where love is frozen for indifference, individualism, and vanity, we must come back to the simplicity of the gospel, keeping relations of transparency, authenticity,y and truth. If we adopt these concrete actions in our personal circle, we can affect others and provoke in our people questions for which the gospel is the answer.
 
Love doesn’t exist just as a concept; whoever uses the word in this way is just evading the concretion of the real love expressed in actions, in deeds, in signs. All Christians must come as ambassadors of transformed relations, creating opportunities to build a new understanding of what it means to be a friend, family, and a Christian as closely as Jesus did.