2022, 0904 Sermon Mark 5: 21-43 Rev. Peter Hofstra
Jairus saw Jesus come back in by boat
from the other side of the Sea of Galilee. The people are beginning to gather
around him once more but this official of the synagogue pushes through the
crowd. He falls at Jesus’ feet and begs our Lord repeatedly to come, lay hands
on his daughter and bring her back from the brink of death.
I know that story. I have walked
alongside a lot of people in this congregation and out who have been there.
Death is approaching, that is certain, and there is only one more power that
can turn things back from the brink.
So Jesus goes with the man, and a large
crowd followed, pressing in on him. I can only imagine the frustration that
Jairus must be feeling, pushing through the crowd to get Jesus to his little
girl. There are a lot of people who wish to be healed.
One is a woman whose menstrual flow was
unstopped for twelve years. We know a couple of other things. She has spent all
her money on doctors. But it was not helpful. “She had endured much under many
physicians.” She is broke, has only gotten worse, and has run out of options.
And, unlike Jairus, her affliction is a taboo subject in polite company. The
man can come out and beg Jesus to save his daughter. He can do that without
embarrassment.
But this is something different.
According to the law of Moses, she is ceremonially unclean. And she has been
for the last twelve years. There are elaborate laws concerning when a man may
have relations with his wife when she is undergoing menstruation. But there is
more.
Everything she lies on or sits on is
ceremonially unclean and needs special washing. She cannot participate in
Temple activities or worship prayers because she is unclean. One online
reference had the subtitle, “When you think unclean, don’t think ‘shame’. It
simply may mean you need to wash.” In her circumstances, after twelve years, I
would imagine there has been a lot of room for shaming her for what has
happened.
Irrespective, she is not going to come
out and call upon the name of Jesus to heal her. She is not going public with
what she is suffering. I bet there is a matter of personal shame, but there is
the legal matter that if Jesus touches her, he is ceremonially unclean. And if
we think that this might be a legal gray area, if he heals her, the Torah says she
is ceremonially unclean for seven days.
In her heart, she comes to believe that
if she but touches his cloak, the power of Jesus will heal her. “If I but touch
his clothes, I will be made well.” And she was right. Immediately her
hemorrhage stopped, she felt her body healed, and Jesus turned around to look
for her, because he felt the power go out from himself. How quickly did she try
to hide in the crowd?
So Jesus stops in his tracks and asks
what must seem to be a bizarre question. “Who touched my clothes?” His
disciples, who were probably trying to work to open a way for Jesus through the
crowd essentially ask, “You see the crowd, who didn’t touch you?” Meanwhile,
Mark does not record his reaction, but can you imagine Jairus spinning around
in an anger borne of desperation, wondering at the delay?
The woman, still embraced in belief, does
not hide, but comes into Jesus’ presence, and, as Jairus does, falls at Jesus’
feet. The whole story comes tumbling out in her fear and trembling. Then two
things happen at the same time. Jesus dismisses her in peace, her faith has
made her well, she is healed while people came from Jairus’ house to tell him
it was too late, his daughter was dead. “Why trouble the teacher any further?”
I have always treated these passages
separately in the past, for preaching and for personal study. But they are
intimately related. Jairus watches Jesus’ power healing this woman who stumbled
out of the crowd while losing what little hope he had that Jesus could heal his
little girl.
But Jesus is not done. “Do not fear, only
believe,” he says as he plows on toward the house of Jairus. Now, he seems to
shed the crowd. Only Peter, James, and John are permitted to follow him outside
of Jairus. He gets to the house and there is weeping and a wailing for the
death of this young woman. But how quickly the mood changes to the crowd
laughing at Jesus when he dares to say she is only asleep.
So Jesus throws them all out of the house
except for his three disciples, his inner circle, and the girl’s mother and
father. He takes her hand and says “Talitha cum”, which means “little girl, get
up!” And she did, risen from the dead. Their reaction feels like an
understatement, “they were overcome with amazement.” Then Jesus, as is his
practice, swears them to secrecy and tells them to give her something to eat.
In my life experience, I identify with
Jairus. His is the little girl (although I think there is some irony in that
statement. Historically, we are pretty certain that Mary was this age when she was
to marry Joseph and become the mother of Jesus) and he will do anything he can
to save her life. Who among us would not? I would walk through fire for my
children.
Taken together, the moral of this story
seems to me that God’s power is sufficient. That the healing power of God,
expressed in His Only Begotten Son, is sufficient for the healing of the woman
whose bleeding went on for twelve years and was sufficient for the healing of
the young woman whom even death claimed. That is the power we have celebrated
in the last stories of Jesus, of his casting out the demon called Legion, of
his stopping the storm with a word. This is the power of the one who I am
calling upon our family of faith to dream into. But this story raises an
interesting point.
Where are we? How are we feeling? What is
in our hearts and in our minds as we come to this call to dream in our Lord
Jesus? Jairus is in a place of immediate desperation. It is all or nothing
time. There is nothing left for him. Jesus will save her or she will die. To
remind us of His divine power, she dies and Jesus saves her anyway. The woman
is in a place of chronic desperation. She’s had this disease for twelve years.
There is no indication that it is going to kill her, but that hardly matters.
Another tenet of the law of Moses is that
the life is in the blood. So this disease is literally taking her life blood,
daily, for the last dozen years.
In the stories of faith, these two
circumstances are what might be seen as ‘typical’ reactions to Jesus. There is
the danger of immediate death and the power of Jesus is what offers salvation.
Or there is the life of sin and slow death, a life that seems without purpose
or hope, and into that hopelessness steps our Lord Jesus.
But what is constant is the power of
Jesus. What is constant is the presence of Jesus, His love, His compassion, the
gift of salvation we have in Him by His death and resurrection. The Son of God
is, as our Father in heaven, never absent.
Before his daughter was on the point of
death, I wonder what Jairus’ opinion of Jesus was. He is called a leader of the
synagogue. It very well may have been that Jesus came into his synagogue to
teach and to heal, as we have already read in Mark. And I wonder how the woman
would have felt about Jesus had she not suffered for those past twelve years?
Would she have sought him out? Would they have been in the crowds that gathered
around Jesus as he taught and healed and revealed the renewed covenant from
their God?
Or would their comfort in life. He was a
synagogue leader. She had money (before she spent it all on doctors). Would
their comfort in life have made less room for the need and the hope of the
Lord? The dangers of affluence are made clear in the Old Testament. The people
got comfortable, what did they need God for?
Or maybe I judge them too harshly. Maybe,
despite their relative affluence, despite the fixed patterns of legalism that
the leadership was imposing on the practices of the Jewish faith, despite the
political and religious merging that was going on, those very reasons that
Jesus had come in that time and that place to renew the true worship of God,
maybe they were waiting for something to happen. Maybe they were hoping that
something more was going to happen in their religious experience.
For the woman is healed of her disease
that has caused her menstrual flow for twelve years, Jesus foreshadows the
healing that we receive through God’s power. It is in the healing of our lives
from the ravages of sin, from the miracles we receive in this life, to the
healing we receive when we lose a loved one, the sure and certain knowledge
that Jesus is our only comfort in life and in death. With the Daughter of
Jairus, we come one step closer. The girl’s resurrection foreshadows our own
resurrection through the salvation in Jesus Christ. Her death and resurrection
point to the final death and resurrection of Jesus for our sakes, the death and
resurrection we will remember in the celebration of the Lord’s Supper, that
very means of grace by which Jesus offers hope to the whole world.
And it is the means of grace by which
Jesus offers hope to we who gather to worship. Yes, there are a few of us here
(fewer still with the holiday weekend), but Jesus is here. Jesus is with those
who come in virtual reality and in actuality. Our dreams for this church, our
hopes in the Lord, these rest upon the foundation of God’s promise of
salvation.
So when the crises come, and they will,
the grace of God will carry us through. So when the church endures, and it will
endure, the worship of the Lord will bring joy to our lips and hearts. The
movement right now is not to picture something, not to envision a place into
which our church will grow. That will come. The call right now is to take
ourselves out of the world’s message of comfort and diversion and obfuscation,
separating us from our Lord, and returning us into the true comfort of the
Everlasting Arms of Jesus. It is coming fresh to the Rock of our Salvation, and
on that Rock shall we build our church.
In Jesus’ name we pray. In Jesus’ name we
praise. In Jesus’ name we celebrate. In Jesus’ name we worship. Let all God’s
people say together. Amen.
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