My parents used to call me their million-dollar baby because it seemed like my life was a series of doctor’s appointments one after another with very little to show for them. It all made sense once I was diagnosed with my connective tissue disorder, but until then, it didn’t make sense why all of these random pains and issues were happening. Many people, including doctors, called me a hypochondriac or insinuated that I was just doing it for the attention. It was incredibly frustrating and demoralizing to constantly be in this position where I knew something was wrong, but we didn’t know what or how to fix it, and to constantly hear, “wow, I’ve never seen that before in all my years of practice.” And, unfortunately, this dismissal is a common experience still for many women when they go to the doctor.
It’s a similar situation for the woman in our Gospel today who spent 12 years of her life with this bleeding condition. “Now there was a woman who had suffered from hemorrhages for twelve years; after long and painful treatment from various doctors, she had spent all she had without getting better – in fact, she was getting worse” (Mark 5: 25-26). This woman when she approaches Jesus is filled with desperation. She tried everything and paid all that she had, only to keep getting worse. I can only imagine how hopeless she was feeling. Touching Jesus’ cloak was her Hail Mary pass, hoping beyond hope that this would work because nothing else had.
Today’s Gospel also features the story of Jairus’ daughter who is on the verge of death when Jairus finds Jesus. You have another person finding Jesus in his desperation to do anything to heal his daughter. It’s important to note that Jairus is one of the leaders of the synagogue, and while they don’t tell us details about him, it’s a relatively safe assumption that he is a part of the religious leaders who have been at odds with Jesus since the beginning of his ministry. But both of these people today feel like they had no other options left. Jesus was their only chance at healing themselves and their child.
When we talk about healing stories, especially today’s when the woman’s healing is attributed to her faith, it can be really easy to fall into the trap of believing that we don’t receive the healing we request because our faith isn’t strong enough. That’s often how these healing stories have been interpreted and how I’ve heard many people relate to them in my years of chaplaincy. It’s something that my friends who have experienced chronic illness and I have wrestled with too, because praying more isn’t the solution to taking away our pain. Nor are our ailments tests from God to determine our faithfulness. Sometimes pain is just pain; we can’t always explain why it impacts some more than others. Yet, when we look beyond the individual healings in today’s story, we see a deeper sense of the healing and restoration that Jesus is bringing into the world. He’s not just healing individuals, but restructuring how society functions.
Like other healing stories I’ve talked about, this one continues to be important because of the ways that Jesus is breaking from traditional religious laws in order to restore people to community. Because of the rules around what is religiously clean and unclean, men for example could not be in contact with a woman who was bleeding or the items that she had touched. This is difficult enough to do for a few days at a time, but this woman had been bleeding for twelve years. When she can’t really interact with the people around her, it’s no wonder that we see her strong desire for healing today. She would be excluded from almost everything because this cleanliness wasn’t just a matter of everyday life, but if you weren’t religiously clean, you weren’t able to go to the Temple; that’s a big risk to take for many and they didn’t feel they could risk becoming unclean by associating with her.
There were also cleanliness laws around corpses, and how one becomes religiously unclean if they come in contact with a corpse. Think about the Good Samaritan story and how people passed by on the other side, assuming that the injured person was dead. So, today, not only does Jesus go to heal the child, but he does so by touching her supposed corpse and calling her to get up (Mark 5: 41). Now, I don’t want this to turn into shaming the religious leaders and the ways that they practiced their faith because they were following what they knew to be true, but, at the same time, Jesus is changing the way that people are valued and treated in society by showing that the love of God extends beyond purity laws. That caring for the neighbor is more important to living out our faith than maintaining our supposed righteousness in the eyes of God because of who we have and have not been in contact with. It’s a healing of the community, not just the individuals, by recognizing too that healing is inherently a communal effort as it requires a shift in how society interacts with people who are deemed unworthy to be in contact with.
These stories are easy to relate to for many people because we too have had times of desperation where we wanted an illness or injury to go away quickly, we might have been anxiously awaiting test results, or watching someone we care about die while feeling powerless to stop it. This is a very real part of the experiences for both the woman and Jairus in today’s story. It sets the stage for these dramatic healing stories that remind us of the ways in which the world can be different if we help one another with our burdens instead of shunning people when they are in need. And, most importantly, it shows us that wholeness and restoration are such an important part of the healing stories because community remains at the center of what allows us to thrive and ultimately heal.
So, these healing stories are powerful to listen to today and give us a vision of what God is up to in the world. And, I again want to caution us from hearing that the moral of these stories is that if you have strong enough faith, God will heal you. We don’t know why some people experience physical healing while others do not, but healing in God’s kindom is about wholeness and being able to freely be who God created us to be, pain, frustration, and all. I would love it if I could snap my fingers and make my pain disappear, and I also don’t know if I would be here today as your pastor if that wasn’t a part of my story, so I hold that gently too. Because, I don’t think God desires us to be in pain, but unfortunately it is a part of being alive. Yet, we hear again today how Jesus is calling the whole community into care instead of exclusion, and imagine how much easier it would be to bear the pain if that’s how we lived too. So, may we treat our pain with tenderness, as we trust that God is seeking wholeness for us, even if that doesn’t look the way we want or expect.
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Sunday June 16th, 2024 Worship