| | | |  | Second Congregational Church, UCC*
Hillside Street, Bennington, Vermont (802) 442-2559
"resolutely inclusive, spiritually alive, and empowered for ministry in the world." |
|
|
|
| |
“Healing Along the Way”--June 28, 2009 Mark 5:21-43
Posted: June 28th, 2009 @ 11:14am
"Health care will be the story of the summer,” the roundtable of reporters on Friday night’s Washington Week in Review agreed, referring to the legislation being proposed and demanded in Congress. Once again, the numbers of dollars being talked about for various proposals is staggering, but the numbers we are already spending by not doing anything are even more staggering.
Health–“you don’t appreciate it until you don’t have it,” it is said. And, indeed this weekend at the Mt. Anthony track and field, hundreds of people have gathered and raised 100's of thousands of dollars to fight one disease that has touched just about everyone’s life–cancer. The big numbers, the complicated legislation, the maze of plans and treatments have a way of receding for at least a moment if the diagnosis, or the accident, or that shooting pain is in your body or someone you love. But then you want to have access to healthcare. Everybody does, but not everyone can get it.
These two stories that Mark tells us–the story of the woman with the 12-year hemorrhage nested in the story of the synagogue ruler and his daughter–are, I suppose you could say, stories about access to first-century healthcare. But unless our plan is simply to enlist gifted faith healers to take care of people, the stories are of limited value to us in solving our healthcare crisis, some two thousand years later. But what wisdom might we find here in these stories that could bring healing and life to us?
Mark begins these stories at the lakeshore, as Jesus and the disciples have returned from their stormy voyage across the lake and Jesus’ being asked to leave the Gentile Gerasene territory on the other side of the lake, where he had expelled a legion of demons from a man into a herd of swine, who subsequently threw themselves off a cliff. Power over the wind and sea, power over demons. Word about Jesus was definitely getting around.
“He was there by the sea,” Mark tells us, and “a great crowd gathered around him.” Making their way through the crowd are two people desperate to see Jesus because, they believe, he is their only hope. People might have made way for one of them, Jairus, the leader of the synagogue, whose name in Greek, iairos, one scholar notes, is “a clue to what is going to happen.” It means, she says, “he who will be awakened, or he is enlightened.” He comes to Jesus, begging him to come and lay hands on his young daughter who is at the point of death, “so that she may be made well and live.”
A couple notes about first century healthcare may give us a sense of just how desperate this ruler of the synagogue was to reach Jesus. Before the scientific age, parents didn’t allow themselves to get too attached to children, because so many didn’t survive. “In Jesus’ time,” one scholar says, “60% of live births usually died by their mid-teens.”(John Pilch, the Cultural World of Jesus, Year B, p. 105) On top of that, girls were usually valued less, and yet this father was obviously quite attached to his little girl and was willing to risk ridicule and scorn by going to this itinerant preacher and healer, whom a number of his colleagues were trying to get rid of. “Come and lay your hands on her,” he begged Jesus, “so that she may be made well, and live.”
Folk healers were willing to use their hands and touch people, in contrast to the professional healers and physicians who hesitated to treat patients, because if the patient died the physician could be put to death too. They preferred to discuss illness, and many were philosopher physicians. (Pilch, op cit., 103-4) It was the folk healers who were willing to use their hands who were more commonly available to peasants.
Jesus agrees to go with Jairus to his home, and it is at this point that the other figure heading toward Jesus in the crowd reaches him. It is an unnamed woman, who has been hemorrhaging for 12 years–as long as Jairus’ daughter has been alive–and who has “endured much”–financially and physically–at the hands of the professional physicians. Like Jairus, she sees Jesus as her only hope, though she is convinced that his power is so great she need only touch the fringe of his garment (probably the fringe of his prayer shawl) to be healed. She comes up from behind him in the crowd, touches his cloak, and immediately feels the flow of blood stop in her body. Jesus feels the touch as well, sensing the call on his power and its surging forth. “Who touched my clothes?” he asks, to everyone’s astonishment, for everyone has been jostled and touched in the crowd. It is only the woman who knows what he’s talking about, and she comes forth in fear and trembling, confessing her story–“the whole truth,” as Mark puts it. Jesus then seals and blesses the encounter–“Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.”
Not only is her physical disease cured, but she is healed–made whole–as she is restored to the community, from which she had been ritually isolated for all these years. This flow of blood would have made her unclean, and therefore unable to join in the community.
“Blood,” writes one commentator, “was the place that God’s first breath is understood to inhabit a human being, the place also from which we give life back.” (Richard Swanson, cited in Weekly Seeds, 6/28/09) Another writes that “blood was such a sacred, precious and dangerous force in Jewish belief and practice because it was what God said constituted the very life of being.. (Which [he adds] of course showers meaning on Jesus’ words ‘take, drink, this is my blood’.)” (Rick Morley, “To Be Touched and To Touch,” The Witness, 6/27/06)
So, in a very real sense, this woman had been cut off from life for the past 12 years, and now she is restored to life, resurrected, if you will. That is what is apparently needed for the other unnamed female in this story, Jairus’s daughter, for word reaches them that she has died. “Why trouble the teacher any further?” the messenger asks. “But overhearing what they said, Jesus said to the leader of the synagogue, ‘Do not fear, only believe,’” a sentence that Barbara Brown Taylor calls the shortest sermon in history–“Do not fear, only believe.” (Cited in Weekly Seeds, op cit.)
They arrive at the house, and, as Eugene Peterson translates it, “pushed their way through the gossips looking for a story and neighbors bringing in casseroles.” (The Message) Jesus takes only the girls’ parents and his inner circle of 3 disciples with him into the girl’s room, for this is too intimate and tender a place, the deathbed of a child. “He took her by the hand,” Mark tells us, “and said to her, ‘Talitha cum,’ which means, “little girl, get up!’” Mark has retained the Aramaic words, reflecting the belief that the power is in the original words, not the translation. “And immediately the girl got up and began to walk about....he strictly ordered them that no one should know this, and told them to give her something to eat.”
It is a wonderful story. We, like the others present, are filled with amazement; but of course it raises all sorts of questions–Why this child and not all the other children for whom their parents desperately pray to Jesus, to God, to anyone who will listen--for healing? What about all the others whose lives have been oozing out of them for years, where is the magic hem for them? Does Mark tell us these stories simply to show that Jesus was a miracle-worker, or does he have a broader purpose in mind? Again, Barbara Brown Taylor suggests that Mark tells us this story not to tell us how to get God to act, but to tell us who Jesus is.
Jesus is the One in whom the power of God is fully present, yet who is willing to interrupt an urgent mission to fully encounter and restore a nameless woman in need. Jesus is the One who, with this power, can perform miracles, but remember that even Jesus prayed for a miracle in the Garden of Gethsemane, that there might be some other way forward besides crucifixion, but that request was not granted. What did happen was that Jesus got into Godspace, and so was able to know and accept what God’s will and purpose were. “Do not fear, but believe.” He preaches that briefest of sermons to Mark’s community, in the midst of oppression and terror. He speaks those same words to us, in the midst of our fears, our feeling of being swept along by events out of our control, our experiences of the life being drained out of us, even in the midst of our experiences of death.
In both these stories, there is movement from death to life–the woman whose life had been draining out of her for years and who had been cut off from the life of the community and the literal movement from death to life of the little girl. In varying degrees, “while we live, we are always being given up to death,” as the apostle Paul writes to the Corinthians, but it is in our encounter with and openness to the God we know in Jesus Christ that life flows into our bodies and being. Pastor Rick Morley puts it this way–“What the end of the 5th chapter of Mark says is that all of us are left for dead, all of us are dying, all of us are having the life drained out of us like a toothpaste tube being viciously squeezed. All of us are limp, dead corpses waiting to be carried off–Until!–Until we encounter Jesus. Until we are touched and we touch....In that embrace, we discover our true identity, as beloved, redeemed, and holy children of God.” (Ibid.)
It is in that touching and being touched, in reaching out in love to others–not living to ourselves or clutching onto our own lives–that we are healed and made whole. Whether or not that means that we or our loved ones are always cured is another matter. In fact, we know that, on some level, at some point, what “ails” us will not be cured; but we can be healed, made whole. Our lives and even our deaths can be given meaning. They can be life-giving to others and they can be part of the very Source of all Life. For that is indeed our true identity–“beloved, redeemed, and holy children of God.” So may we claim that identity, so may we be healed. Amen and amen.
|
|
