The Rev. Virginia W. Nagel
Episcopal Diocese of Central NY (Retired)
If you often read the Gospel of Mark, you may have noticed that he has a
habit of putting one story about Jesus' miracles or teachings in the middle of
another story. He does this with the hope that the two stories will shed light
on each other and give us additional insights to the ones we might get from each
story separately. Today's Gospel reading involves one of these "doublets", so
let's see what we reflective insights we can come up with from the interaction
of these stories.
The first story is about a twelve-year-old girl who was deathly ill. Her dad,
Jarius, was the ruler of a synagogue...pretty much like the senior warden of a
congregation in our church. He was a man of importance, and since he was
distraught with the prospect of his little girl's approaching death, he came to
Jesus and pretty much demanded that he come now! at once! to lay his hands on
the little girl and heal her. And Jesus, whom we know always had compassion for
the suffering, went with him, headed for his home.
Here the second story breaks in. Apparently quite a large number of people
had heard Jarius' plea, and so they accompanied the two men. Crowds love
excitement. They will flock to a fire, an accident, anything where there's a lot
of noise or a lot of people or something unusual. This crowd apparently was
eager to see Jesus perform one of his miracles, to be able to tell their friends
and neighbors, "I saw it with my own eyes...I was there!" It was such a large
crowd that people were pressed together, shoving one another, trying to get a
good place so they could see what might happen.
Now in that crowd there was a woman who had been hemorrhaging for 12 years.
Her idea wasn't so much to go see a miracle as to get a miracle
for herself. And, you know, no decent Jewish man would talk to a woman, not even
his wife or sister or daughter or mother, in public; it simply was not done. So
the lady knew that she should not approach Jesus directly and ask to be cured.
What's more, the Holiness Code in the Old Testament book of Leviticus says that
anybody who has some sort of bodily fluid escaping their body was ritually
unclean, not fit to worship in the Temple, not fit to associate with other
people until they were purified. So she did not want to be seen in the crowd or
noticed associating with anyone else. But, she reasoned, if she could touch him,
or even touch the edge of his robe, that might cure her. After all, he was a
holy man, and so anything that he touched should be holy too. Maybe the holiness
of him and his clothing might purify her and cure her. It was worth trying.
She'd tried everything else, doctors, magicians, herbs, everything. This was her
last hope.
And so she elbowed and shoved her way through the crowd until she could just
barely touch the hem of his garment...maybe a sleeve, maybe the bottom hem. We
don't know which. And, instantly, she felt the flow stop, felt herself filled
with new strength and peace. She began to ease herself out of the crowd, ready
to head home again.
But Jesus had felt the power going out of him, and looked around, asking who
had touched him.
The disciples were puzzled. In such a packed throng, all pushing and shoving,
dozens of people must have been touching Jesus. What could he be talking about?
The woman fell on her face before him, and admitted that it had been she who
touched him, breaking all the rules of proper social conduct and ritual
cleanness and purity. She probably expected a heavy scolding or even worse
punishment, because her touch would have made Jesus ritually unclean, too. She
must have cowered in amazement as she heard his comforting words, telling her
that it was all right, that she was again clean and pure, and that it was all
because of her faith...which, it seems, was really her hope...that
he could somehow cure her. And then Jesus sent her on her way, rejoicing, as he
and Jarius resumed their way to the house where Jarius' daughter lay near death.
As they approached the house, the mourners...elderly women who were paid to
mourn and sing laments at funerals...had already gathered at the door of the
house, proclaiming that the young girl had already died. How Jarius must have
grieved at hearing that! But Jesus insisted, She is not dead, only
sleeping. Ignoring the shouts and the laughter of people at the door who
thought it hilarious that Jesus was too stupid to recognize death, or to take
their word for the fact of the death, Jesus took a few of his disciples and went
in, with Jarius and his wife.
Touching a dead body would also make Jesus ceremonially unclean. But he went
straight to the bed, took the dead child's hand in his own, and ordered her to
get up. Immediately the girl arose from her bed, looked around her, and ran to
her parents' arms. With a gentle smile, Jesus told them to give her something to
eat, and took his disciples, and left the family to themselves, to rejoice and
give thanks to God.
These two miracles of Jesus show us that Jesus had the power of God...not
only the power to heal, but also the power to do away with the barriers that
divide people from one another. Ceremonially clean or unclean...dead or
alive...well or ailing...male or female...trusting in God's (or Jesus') power or
laughing at his refusal to accept worldly verdicts...Jesus did away with these
boundaries, and showed God's love for everyone, equally, no matter what the
characteristics of their individual selves, no matter the situations of their
existence or lack of existence. He showed that God loves everyone, saint or
sinner (and remember that Paul tells us that EVERYONE has sin, nobody is
perfect, no, not one!), male or female, old or young, regardless of the color of
their skin, their handicaps or lack of them, their beauty or ugliness, their
compliance with the laws of the Temple...or not.
Paul's second letter to the church in Corinth echoes this lesson. The first
six verses of chapter 8 of this letter tells us that the people of this
congregation were very poor. Most were slaves or laborers. Yet, Paul exhorts
them to give as much as they can, to give generously, to assist the Jewish
Christians in Israel, who were being shunned by the more orthodox Jews, losing
their jobs because of their faith, and suffering, like everyone else in Israel,
from famine. Paul strove to tear down the boundaries between people: Jewish
Christian, Jew or pagan; male or female; slave or free citizen; hungry or
comfortably off. He collected funds to take to Israel to erase the handicap and
stigma of poverty, and his hope was that in contributing to the welfare of
others, the emotional and mental boundaries would also be erased, and all
Christians would see themselves as brothers and sisters, and feel the
responsibility of caring for each other, no matter where they lived.
We need, I think, to take some time to consider the boundaries in our own
culture and our own thinking. It is not long, only about 50 years, since my
divorced mother was denied the Sacraments of the church...because she was
divorced. Handicapped people today still are discriminated against in many ways.
Unwed mothers used to be looked down at and treated like dirt, and so were their
children. The uneducated and illiterate are often treated badly by more
fortunate people. Racial differences or skin color often lead to dirty looks and
discriminatory actions on the part of so-called "regular" or "normal" people.
The sick and helpless are often ignored and left to suffer. Gay people, people
suffering from substance abuse, and people who are simply poor and
unsophisticated get rather nasty treatment at all levels of society, and as for
the homeless, their misfortune is seen as deliberate sin by many. We might think
about who were the people whom Jesus mostly helped? Who were the people for whom
Paul was collecting funds? How can we, like Jesus and Paul, pull down the
boundaries between people, and help meld all people into one family of God? One
of the things we are doing in this regard is support the Millennium Development
Goals, and that is good; but each of us should stand before God, in our hearts,
today and every day, and ask, Lord, what more would you have me do?
Amen.
