Lectionary readings
2 Samuel 1:1, 17-27 Psalm 130 2 Corinthians 8:7-15 Mark 5:21-43
My daughter recently got a new passport, ready for when restrictions to travel eased. Her old passport has all kinds of stamps and visas attached; mine, I am afraid, looks a little more prosaic with just one set of custom stamps inside. This particular stamp reminds me of the study trip I took to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem. Here we were to undertake an in-depth course one how prejudice was used to build barriers of such monstrous proportions that whole communities were wiped out.
Despite the reminders of such dangers, genocide has occurred again and again, and the world seems to be waking slowly to the fact that prejudices and value judgements constantly bubble to the surface. Sometimes, aware of issues of equality and diversity in working environments, it is still possible to carry unconscious bias towards people who are not like us. So, we meet in Scripture two very different women in Mark’s gospel today.
I sometimes like to imagine the characters who met Jesus in the Gospel stories using the Psalms as hymns or prayers, and Psalm 130 seems just the kind of prayer the ‘impure woman’ might have used. Her ailment would have left her physically tired, emotionally drained, and financially ruined, with no health care system in place. Of greater difficulty was that – according to Leviticus 15:25-30 – she was ceremonially impure and could not attend the Synagogue, the Temple or family gatherings; she was outcast and shunned by polite society. And we have all had a taste of that recently, albeit for different reasons.
What was she doing on a crowded street where she couldn’t help but come into physical contact with other people? Perhaps she felt she had nothing more to lose? Perhaps she had heard about the great healer and was willing to risk everything to be put right? Whatever the answer, she thought that if she could just touch the tassels on Christ’s robes, all would be well. And so she bent low and stretched out to touch the hem of his garment.
And Jesus said, ‘who touched me?’ The disciples were a bit nonplussed by this, they were hemmed in with a boisterous crowd. But the woman knew she had been called out. As so often happens in scripture, this woman is not named, unlike the man whose home Jesus was on his way to see. Nevertheless, Jesus calls her ‘daughter’ and it is the only story in which this familiar term is used. For here was a child of God in need of freedom for misery, pain and exclusion who needs to hear the word of grace: Go in peace and be healed of your disease. This short conversation restores the woman to her place in the community of faith, and mirrors something of the story which surrounds this beautiful image of complete wholeness and freedom from being brought into a relationship with God and with others.
That other story tells of a man who is a prominent layman with responsibilities in the local synagogue. His daughter was far from well, and he rushed out to find Jesus. This man jettisoned his pride and dignity to fall at the feet of Jesus in the middle of a busy street. In that moment he placed his reputation and standing in the community ahead of his desperation for a sick child. Which is odd, when you think about a society in which women were of little consequence at that time, and a daughter was an absolute drain on the family’s finances, requiring a good dowry for her marriage in the not too distant future.
With all the distractions in the street, by the time Jairus and Jesus came near to the house, the child had died. By stopping to take care of the troubled daughter of Israel, when Jesus revealed the depth of God’s love and grace, Jairus believed his daughter to be beyond help. Yet Jesus declared the child not dead but sleeping; for in the presence of Jesus, death has no more power than sleep. I love that powerful line in Dylan Thomas’ poem: and death shall have no dominion; and if you know your scripture well, you will know it is a line from Romans 6:9. I’ve often wondered whether St Paul, in turn drew on this text:
God did not make death…he created all things that they might have being. The creative forces of this world make for life; … death has no sovereignty on earth.
Wisdom of Solomon 1:13-14 REB
In both these tales, Jesus interrupted the known social order to create new community; by restoring the woman, and raising the child. I love to know where these stories take place (once a geographer, always a geographer) and the opening lines of chapter five tell us that Jesus had crossed the lake to the region of the Gerasenes, where he had an encounter with another troubled soul. And then he returned across the lake. In all these stories, Jesus shattered conventional social expectations and broke down barriers between ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’, clean and unclean.
Charles Campbell put it this way:
By the end of the drama Jesus has raised/healed the daughter of Jairus, a man at the top of the social and religious ladder, and Jesus has raised (socially) and healed (physically) the bleeding woman, a social and religious outcast. The two are forever held together in one story and community (as the number 12, symbolic of the Jewish community, suggests; vv 25 and 42).As the drama began with Jesus having crossed the barrier between Gentile and Jew, the drama concludes with Jesus having crossed the social and religious barriers within the Jewish community
Charles L Campbell (6 Sun after Pentecost) The Lectionary Commentary vol 3 (Eerdmans 2001), 212
Which begs the question for our own communities of faith – which borders are we prepared to cross and which barriers are we prepared to remove in order to build God’s kingdom?
Worship at home 