When Jesus had crossed again in the boat to the other side, a great crowd gathered around him; and he was by the sea. Then one of the leaders of the synagogue named Jairus came and, when he saw him, fell at his feet and begged him repeatedly, “My little daughter is at the point of death. Come and lay your hands on her, so that she may be made well, and live.”
Mark 5:21-43
So he went with him. And a large crowd followed him and pressed in on him. Now there was a woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years. She had endured much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had; and she was no better, but rather grew worse. She had heard about Jesus, and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, for she said, “If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well.” Immediately her hemorrhage stopped; and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease. Immediately aware that power had gone forth from him, Jesus turned about in the crowd and said, “Who touched my clothes?” And his disciples said to him, “You see the crowd pressing in on you; how can you say, ‘Who touched me?’” He looked all around to see who had done it. But the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came in fear and trembling, fell down before him, and told him the whole truth. He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.”
While he was still speaking, some people came from the leader’s house to say, “Your daughter is dead. Why trouble the teacher any further?” But overhearing what they said, Jesus said to the leader of the synagogue, “Do not fear, only believe.” He allowed no one to follow him except Peter, James, and John, the brother of James. When they came to the house of the leader of the synagogue, he saw a commotion, people weeping and wailing loudly. When he had entered, he said to them, “Why do you make a commotion and weep? The child is not dead but sleeping.” And they laughed at him. Then he put them all outside, and took the child’s father and mother and those who were with him, and went in where the child was. He took her by the hand and said to her, “Talitha cum,” which means, “Little girl, get up!” And immediately the girl got up and began to walk about (she was twelve years of age). At this they were overcome with amazement. He strictly ordered them that no one should know this, and told them to give her something to eat.
My sermon from the 6th Sunday after Pentecost (June 30, 2024) on Mark 5:21-43.
*****
Our reading today from the gospel according to Mark includes a story within a story which is Mark’s favorite way to showcase who Jesus is. Jesus rarely ever went from point A to point B according to plan because life always got in the way. So after returning from his journey across the Sea of Galilee, Jesus was met on the shore by a man named Jarius. At that time, though, Jesus was surrounded by a crowd full of people with their own requests and needs too. From what I can tell, there was no real effort to organize the process by which Jesus decided who received help and when. Instead, people showed up and what happened next could be pretty chaotic. Jairus’ own request was a bit much since it would require Jesus to get up and leave everyone else behind. He had to repeat it several times but, after a while, Jesus listened. The crowd around him was full of people who waited all day to receive some kind of healing. But before he could reach everyone, Jesus decided to move – and someone in the crowd chose to move too. An unnamed woman had, for the last twelve years, lived with hemorrhages her doctors couldn’t cure. Mark doesn’t go into details about what, exactly, her medical condition might be. It’s possible she had some kind of menstrual disorder or she had suffered some kind of injury during pregnancy. It’s also possible her condition was entirely treatable but since medical care tends to focus its research on the bodies of men from certain wealthy and privileged backgrounds, she ended up spending all she had to live a life with a pain that gradually grew worse. She suffered – and I imagine her faith, her identity, and her relationships with others – and with her God – suffered too. Now she was in the crowd because, at some point, she had heard about Jesus. What she heard, Mark doesn’t say. But it was enough to bring her to that place by the sea. She arrived there unknown and unseen, just one more person in the crowd. Yet when Jesus began to move, she moved too. She reached out, touched Jesus’ cloak, and the healing – from what we’re told – happened quickly. She knew immediately that something changed. And while coming to terms with a body that no longer worked the way it had, Jesus looked around and said: “who?”
Now “who” is a pronoun in English that does a lot of work. It can point to an individual, a community, an entire people, a sci-fi time traveling time lord, and an English Rock Band all at the same time. That flexibility is why the word “who” can be sort of mystical when it shows up in certain songs, speeches, and poems. Yet the word “who” in the language of ancient Greek – the language the gospel according to Mark was written in – doesn’t have that same kind of flexibility. Ancient Greek, like many of the world’s languages, attaches grammatical gender to nouns and pronouns. What gender might apply to what word varies from language to language but we can roughly expect anywhere from two to four different genders being applied to things like chairs, mountains, or a cloud. When a group of mixed genders are together – say, a group of people – ancient Greek defaulted to the “male” version of the noun or pronoun even if there was only 1 dude in a group of 1000. Since Jesus was, at that moment, surrounded by all kinds of people seeking health and wholeness – we’d expect his “who” to be male and plural. Yet the who he uttered was very specific – a who that was feminine and singular. While he was on the move among a crowd full of religious leaders, disciples, men, women, seekers, believers, doubters, the old, the young, the healed, those in need of healing, and every other flavor of humanity drawn to Jesus – Jesus knew who had reached out to him. The people around Jesus were oblivious, even sort of shocked that Jesus would say what he said. But there was one person in the crowd who knew exactly what he was talking about. The unnamed woman realized that Jesus saw her and she took the chance to share with him everything that had happened over the last twelve years. Her hemorrhages had already been cured but her true healing began when Jesus used one little word to let her know she was never alone. And after publicly commending her, he named her daughter since she was – and always would be – a part of God’s holy family.
Now the power of “who” does more than reveal Jesus’ power; it also serves as a corrective for our tendency to twist what Jesus meant when he said “your faith has made you well.” It’s a phrase used to blame others – or ourselves – when our prayers go unanswered. It’s a kind of blame we’re especially good at leveraging against those who we don’t like and it’s a blame we internalize since Jesus’ miracles in the Bible don’t always appear to us in the same way. Life has a habit of making us wonder why Jesus raised Jairus’ daughter but not our own parent or friend or spouse or even our own child. I’ll admit I don’t really have a good answer to that very hard question but I do know that the amount of faith you have doesn’t determine your grief, your sorrow, or your pain. Faith doesn’t always look like patience or kindness or goodness or something that is always quiet and stable. There’s also a different kind of faith – of trust – that we live through too. In the words of Rev. Brad Roth, “[that] faith… [is when we] reach out and take hold of Jesus however [we] can—not an arm or a fistful of robe but just the barest little knot of tassel on the corner of his cloak. This sort of faith isn’t entirely explainable—not because it’s ridiculous, an impossible abstraction, but because in faith we’re responding to an overture that we don’t entirely understand from a place that is often heaving and doing something strange in us. [At that moment], there’s no knowing Zen smile [across our face because] we don’t have it [all] together, and our stomachs are knotted up like a wet dish rag. [It’s a faith that knows we’ve been bleeding for years] but there he is [, right there,] in the crowd.” This kind of faith is “a stretching through to something, to someone;” a faith that lives out Mark 5:27 on [an] everlasting loop.” It’s a faith that hears Jesus, comes to Jesus, touches Jesus, reaches out – a faith that can hold every emotion, every sorrow, every joy, every tear, every question, every wonder, and every moment of desperation. It’s a faith that has done everything it’s supposed to do – and yet still wonders where God is. And while that isn’t the faith we often prefer, it is the faith that helps us – when we have nothing left – to just come. And when we do, we sometimes receive a word that reminds us how God already sees us; that God already knows what we’re going through; and that our God is living with us through whatever we’re going through. That is a part of Jesus’ promise – that even our worst moments won’t be the final moment that defines us. Rather, we are – through baptism and in faith – a part of God’s holy family and God’s love, God’s hope, and God’s peace is something we can trust – because it will carry us through today and into a more holy tomorrow.
Amen.