Grace Presbyterian Church
June 28, 2015, Ordinary 13B
Mark 5:21-43
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 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, Jaiurs 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.
Mark is fond of these “sandwiches” 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 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, no parent was
willing to let their 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 seems to be 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, now matter how often 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.
At one point she
apparently had some resources, but they were 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 the Jewish religion.
Having no one to
advocate for her, she had to take matters into her own hands. And she had been
trying to do so for twelve excruciating years. A cavalcade of doctors had done
their worst, apparently, while bringing her no relief and possibly leaving her
in worse condition.
Perhaps
surprisingly, historical scholarship has actually given us a few of the
possible remedies that might have been inflicted upon a woman in this
condition. Charles Powell notes a few of these:
§
Carrying on her person the ash of an ostrich egg
wrapped in a cloth;
§
A sudden shock;
§
Drinking wine mixed with a power of rubber,
alum, and garden crocus;
§
Or, eating a batch of Persian onions cooked in
wine while the doctor intoned, “arise out of your flow of blood.”
For possibly these
or other remedies, from a virtual cavalcade of doctors, the woman had been
relieved of all her money, 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, 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 hears Jesus speak to her as a “Daughter,” and hears him say that “your faith has made you well; go in peace,
and be healed of your disease.”
Did you catch
that? “Your faith has made you well…be
healed of your disease.” Now, I lot of theological discussions of this
passage will get deeply involved in explaining or understanding the idea of the
first phrase – “your faith has made you well…” 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 NRSV translates as “made
you well” 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 bunny 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 we would just as soon not submit to the full-fledged healing of
Jesus.
If nothing else,
our country has had demonstrated in the last couple of weeks just how much
un-wellness still remains in society, particularly white society in relation to
black society. The murder of nine members of an AME church in Charleston, by a
young man fond of wrapping himself in the old Confederate battle flag, ripped
open old wounds that remained present and raw for many, many blacks in the
United States, while many whites had allowed themselves to be convinced that
such wounds no longer existed – that there was no more racism in American
culture.
Even as the
following days seemed to offer some miniscule signs of hope; when whites and
blacks came together to pray and to weep; when cities and statehouses removed
from their grounds the flag in which Dylann Roof so loved to wrap himself – not
only did voices of hatred continue to be raised; in the past week six primarily
African-American churches in the South have been burned in acts officially
reckoned as arson. The plague of racism will not go quietly, and not without a
great deal of baring of souls and shedding of tears. And we shouldn’t pretend
that racial hatred is the only such wound on our society that will require
restoration in order for us to be made well, or made whole, or saved from harm.
And it’s an open question just how much of our society, and even how much of
the church, is really willing to put forward the faith needed to be made well.
It upsets the
order of things, truly being made whole. It takes us out of our comfortable
places and the ways things have always been. It might just set us against our
friends. It might be inconvenient.
But if we truly
want to claim our faith to be real, to be faith in and towards Jesus, our
salvation to be in Christ alone, then we will inevitably be drawn to this, to
giving up on and walking away from these comfortable failings. We will inevitably
have to confront these ongoing brokennesses in us, whether they be lodged in
our own attitudes and beliefs or whether simply in our unwillingness or fear to
confront them in the world around us.
Yes, it is easy to
ask for physical healing, and we are toldd to do so. But that can’t be the only
healing we seek. Being healed of our illnesses can never be mistaken for being
made whole or well or even for being saved. Until we can look around the whole
word, until we can see all of the men and women out there as sisters and
brothers, people Christ calls us to love; we are clinging to brokenness. We are
not seeing just how sick we really are, and are not bringing all our sickness
and brokenness to Jesus.
Until we are ready
not just to reach out and touch the cloak – until we are ready to grab hold of
the hem of that cloak and never let go until we know full, real, complete
healing – until we are willing to give it all up, perhaps we shouldn’t
interrupt the Master. Perhaps we should let him move on to that sick girl.
But when we are
ready, when we know our brokenness and our sickness and can no longer stand
that brokenness and sickness, then let us reach out and grab the hem of that
cloak and never let go, until we are made well.
For total healing,
not just the physical kind, Thanks be to
God. Amen.
Hymns
(PH ’90): “Christ, Whose Glory Fills
the Skies” (462), “Come Sing to God” (181), “O Christ, the Healer” (380),
“There Is a Balm In Gilead” (394)
Credit: agnusday.org (it's generally very funny, and on point as well)
