First Presbyterian Church
June 30, 2024, Pentecost 6B
Grab the Hem
Healing. You would think this would be one thing we humans would unanimously agree is a good thing.
Working my way through the halls of the local VA hospital to see my father when I was a child, it wasn’t hard to see examples of why any of us would be downright jubilant if Jesus were to show up in the flesh and run rampant through the halls, healing patients left and right.
You would think this would be one thing we humans would unanimously agree is a good thing. But somehow, it isn’t always so.
One thing that sometimes gets in the way of this longing for healing, something that many of us fall prey to at times, is the slight problem that in order truly to desire healing, one needs to be able to admit that one is sick. And we’re not always good at that.
“Oh, it’s just a sniffle. It’s nothing.”
“I just didn’t get enough sleep last night.”
“It’s only a tickle in my throat, no big deal.”
Of course, before you know it, you’re in bed wiped out with the flu or something worse. We don’t admit we’re sick – maybe we feel like we have too much to do, or it’s too late to get someone to sub for us, or who knows what excuse we use, but the illness fells us in the end because we refused to admit it was upon us.
This isn’t a problem for either of the protagonists in today’s scripture. Jairus, the local synagogue leader, has seen his daughter’s condition worsen steadily until she is on the brink of death. While the religious authorities in Jerusalem might have disparaged Jesus’s healings as the “devil’s work,” Jairus evidently didn’t care; if there was any chance this itinerant rabbi could heal his beloved daughter, he would do whatever it took to get it to happen. In a scene that must have shocked the locals, Jairus threw himself before Jesus and begged him to come to his home and heal his daughter. Jesus agreed and the two, and Jesus’s disciples, began to make their way through the ever-present crowds around Jesus towards Jairus’s house.
It is in the midst of this travel that our second seeker enters and even interrupts the story. This is another of those “sandwiches” of which Mark is so fond, in which one story is inserted into the midst of a similar or related story, allowing us to see the two in tandem and perhaps compare them to one another. While in this case both are stories of people seeking healing, the contrasts are at least as notable as the similarities.
Jairus, a significant person in the community, comes to Jesus on behalf of his daughter. It turns out she’s all of twelve years old. While infant or childhood mortality was certainly more prevalent then and there than here and now, rhia parent was not willing to let his child go without a fight. We can certainly understand Jairus’s determination to do anything he could to bring his daughter back to health.
Our second seeker, though, is about as different as possible. She gets no name in the story, not a surprise given that in the context of the time she would have been about as insignificant as it was possible for an adult to be. She is apparently a widow, with no family to care for her or to speak on her behalf, and such a woman had no legal or societal status; while the lawgivers and prophets of the Old Testament implored the people of Israel to care for and deal justly with the widows and orphans among them, the Roman Empire held no such scruples.
At one point she apparently had some resources, but they were evidently consumed in the struggle to find treatment for her malady, one which the old King James Version called an “issue of blood.” It was constant, it was debilitating, and it was sufficient to render the woman ritually impure, unable to participate in the rituals of Judaism at the time.
Having no one to advocate for her, she had to take matters into her own hands, and she been trying to do so for twelve excruciating years. A cavalcade of physics had done their worst, apparently, while bringing her no relief and possibly leaving her in worse condition. Also, the woman had been relieved of what resources she had, leaving her destitute as well as sick.
No one had to tell her she was ill and in need of healing. Still, she didn’t choose to approach Jesus directly for a cure. We aren’t told exactly why; Mark tells us that she believed she would be made well if she simply touched his clothing, but doesn’t tell us why she didn’t simply come to Jesus directly. The culture of ancient Israel offers a few possibilities. She might have feared that if he knew her condition, Jesus might refuse to heal her for fear of being made ritually unclean himself. It’s also possible she feared that he would refuse to hear her, a poor widow with no man to speak on her behalf, simply because that’s what men typically did. She might have felt that in her condition she would simply be unable to get through the crowd enough to speak to Jesus directly.
Whatever the reason, you’ve heard the story; she somehow gets through the crowd and touches some part of his garment, maybe the hem, and is healed of her long, debilitating illness. Somehow Jesus knows that something has happened, even in the midst of the jostling crowd, and in the end the woman does meet Jesus after all, and she hears Jesus speak to her as a “Daughter,” and she hears him say that “your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.”
Did you catch that? “Your faith has healed you…be freed from your suffering.” Now, a lot of theological discussions of this passage will get deeply involved in explaining or understanding the idea of the first phrase – “your faith has healed…” and I’m not saying that it is not a challenging thing to most theologies to read a statement that seems to attribute the healing to the woman’s faith. I think, though, that part of the answer to this lies in the way Jesus is dividing two phrases that we tend to read as meaning the same thing.
When we peer into the Greek, it gets more challenging; the word that the NIV translates as “healed you” is more often translated when it appears in other verses as having to do something with saving. That leads a lot of preachers off on an unprofitable rabbit trail about how “salvation” comes – whether by human faith or God’s work – when the more challenging and on-point question here is, “You mean there’s a difference between being healed of illness and being saved, or made well, or made whole?”
There’s more to being well than just not being sick.
I can’t help but wonder sometimes if we know that, subconsciously at least, when we pray. We pray for healing for our own sicknesses or the illnesses of those we love, but there are things that we need to be truly whole, to be truly saved from harm, to be truly well, that we don’t always recognize about ourselves, and that if we’re honest there are some things we would just as soon not submit to the full-fledged healing of Jesus.
However, there is still one more healing to be addressed here. Evidently Jairus has been waiting while this impromptu healing incident has happened, but that waiting was crushed by the appearance of messengers from his house with the worst possible news: his daughter was dead.
That news was followed by the question "Why bother the teacher anymore?" Perhaps it was an innocent question, or perhaps (given that Jairus was an important figure in the local synagogue, and that Jesus was not in favor with religious authorities) it was meant to discourage Jairus from continuing to cling to this teacher.
We might also consider how this news might have hit Jairus in this particular situation. As the woman with the blood issue took up Jesus's time, his own daughter had died. It's not hard to imagine a reaction of impatience or even anger with that woman for taking up the healer's time and thereby leaving his own daughter to die.
Before either of those possible, very human reactions had a chance to set in, Jesus tells Jairus "don't be afraid; just believe." They continue on, though most of the disciples were left behind, to Jairus's house. The cavalcade of theatrical mourners is dismissed, Jesus takes the child's hand and gives the word, and the daughter is up and about like any twelve-year-old. Then comes one of the strange features of some healings in this gospel; Jesus tells them not to tell anybody what happened. That's going to be a challenge, since by the time the theatrical mourners had done their work virtually the entire town knew that Jairus's daughter was dead. ("Theatrical mourners," by the way, is an actual thing; in the case of the death of important people professional mourners would in fact be present to perform public and overt acts of mourning, perhaps to cover for the grief of those directly affected by the loss.)
Two healings, done for two very different people; one of status (in the eyes of society), one all alone and unimportant (in the eyes of society). Jesus's healing grace does its work anyway, for both.
There's a message in that. It isn't up to us where Christ's healing and restoration goes. The status and importance and wealth and influence of one doesn't get to interrupt the healing of the one with none of those things. Anyone who calls on the name of the Lord can and will be saved, healed, restored, repaired, renewed. It isn't up to us to decide whom God can heal.
For that, Thanks be to God. Amen.
Hymns (from Glory to God: The Presbyterian Hymnal unless otherwise indicated):
#837 What a Fellowship, What a Joy Divine
Hymn sing:
#793 O Christ, the Healer
#178 The Woman Hiding in the Crowd
#792 There Is a Balm in Gilead
#--- See two who came for healing
#800 Sometimes a Light Surprises
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