25 A woman was there who had been bleeding for twelve years. 26 She had suffered a lot under the care of many doctors, and had spent everything she had without getting any better. In fact, she had gotten worse. 27 Because she had heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his clothes. 28 She was thinking, If I can just touch his clothes, I’ll be healed. 29 Her bleeding stopped immediately, and she sensed in her body that her illness had been healed. 30 At that very moment, Jesus recognized that power had gone out from him. He turned around in the crowd and said, “Who touched my clothes?” 31 His disciples said to him, “Don’t you see the crowd pressing against you? Yet you ask, ‘Who touched me?’” 32 But Jesus looked around carefully to see who had done it. 33 The woman, full of fear and trembling, came forward. Knowing what had happened to her, she fell down in front of Jesus and told him the whole truth. 34 He responded, “Daughter, your faith has healed you; go in peace, healed from your disease.” (Common English Bible)
“I Say to You, Arise: The Gospels’ Least-Known
Resurrection Story,” Week Two
The
buildings that slope down Mount Herzl in Jerusalem that make up Yad Vashem are
many. There is a history museum, an art
museum, a hall of remembrance, a children’s memorial, a research institute, a
synagogue, a library, a publishing house, an educational center, and more, all
nestled in right next to the Jerusalem forest of pine trees. Together, these buildings are Israel’s
official memorial to the victims of the Jewish Holocaust during World War II,
known as Yad Vashem.
In around
those buildings lies the Garden of the Righteous Among the Nations—the primary
memorial for commemorating the “Righteous Gentiles” who, courageously and at
great personal risk, aided the survival of European Jews during the
Holocaust. In the Garden stands a Wall
of Honor with all of the known Righteous listed—all except for one group…the
Danish resistance to Adolf Hitler. The
Danes were able to successfully evacuate nearly 93% of Denmark’s Jewish
population after Hitler ordered the Danish Jews to be arrested and deported in
1943.
But
rather than be listed each by name, the Danish resistance insisted that they be
honored anonymously and collectively as Righteous Among the Nations. And so to date, only a bare handful of the
hundreds or (likely) thousands of names are known to us.
They
remain anonymous, but the miracle with which they are associated has reverberated
throughout the decades, because out of their anonymity came the renewal of life
for, quite literally, thousands of souls who were marginalized simply for who
they were. And so too, then, does this
woman who is called Daughter by Jesus—and healed by Him—experience her own
unexpected miracle of renewal, forged in the twin crucibles of anonymity and
marginalization for who she was: a stricken woman with no cure in sight.
Easter is
not just a day on the calendar for the church—it is a season on the
calendar. After all, according to Luke
in Acts of the Apostles, Jesus walked the earth for forty days after His
resurrection. All forty of those days
were about the victory of God over death, not just the first day. And so the church traditionally has kept
those 40 (to 50) days after Easter as a season called, appropriately enough,
Eastertide. And so as part of our
ongoing celebration of Easter and of the empty tomb, I typically elect to
create a sermon series for those Sundays specific to the themes of resurrection
and new life. Two years ago, if you’ll
recall, we went through probably the second most-famous resurrection (after
that of Jesus Himself) in the Gospels—the raising of Lazarus as depicted in
John 11. One year ago, we spent a Sunday
apiece on the reactions to the news of the empty tomb by the different
disciples—Mary Magdalene, Peter, Thomas, and so on. This year, we’re returning more to the mold
of two years ago in that we are going through another resurrection story,
except this one is probably the least renowned of them all: the raising of
Jairus’s daughter in Mark 5. Why that is
probably has to do with a variety of reasons, but we’ll be trying to increase
our knowledge, appreciation, and love of this story as we go through it verse-by-verse
through the month of May (and Sunday, June 1).
We began this series last week by digging into the details Mark offers
in his exposition of this scene—details that might escape us in a 21st-century
American context as opposed to a 1st-century Israelite context—and
now this week, Mark takes what appears to be a digression from the plot at hand
to tell us the story of a woman being miraculously healed—and subsequently
blessed—by Jesus.
The
anonymous woman—whom Jesus styles “Daughter” at the conclusion of this
story—stands in stark contrast to the wealthy and prominent Jairus, father and
synagogue leader, who throws himself at Jesus’ feet in a show of humility far
beyond the bounds of his rigid and stratospheric social class. What Jairus did was, in all honesty, probably
wholly unexpected. What our anonymous
woman does, though—essentially trying to sneak in and out unnoticed and
undetected—is very much expected when you consider that, (a) women were
essentially considered economic property in most ancient societies, with
marriage being an economic transaction, not a sacrament, and that ancient
Israel was no exception, and (b) she is visibly afflicted by way of her
hemorrhaging. According to custom, she
is verboten, she is completely untouchable, she is utterly and wholly
distasteful.
Except to
Jesus. Yes, Jesus is taken by surprise
because, oddly enough, this is an involuntary healing—Jesus does not will it or
command it, yet still it takes place.
And we learn why—the healing happened because of this woman’s
faith. And while Jesus has not yet
actually spoken to Jairus to this point in the passage—He merely consents to go
with Jairus—He is moved to bless her.
And the
gravity of that juxtaposition between wealthy synagogue leader and social
outcast is difficult to understate. To
borrow from New Testament scholar Douglas Hare:
A major feature of the double story, whether
conscious to the Gospel writer or not, is the contrast between Jairus on the
one hand and the woman and the girl on the other. Whereas the male is named, the females are not. The man’s social status as a synagogue ruler
(“president”) is stressed, but the fact that the woman has had significant
wealth is merely implicit; it must be inferred from the fact that only
well-to-do persons could afford physicians, and she has paid extensively,
perhaps for ten years or more. Whereas
the man comes to see Jesus directly and boldly requests help, the woman timidly
approaches Him from behind, wanting only to touch His clothing.
As
shocking as Jairus’s gesture of humility likely was to the sensibilities of
many an Israelite, this woman’s own actions would have been beyond the
pale. She is unaccompanied by a male
figure, and deigns to lay her hands on another man, even if only out of
desperation to be healed. It is not an
exaggeration to say that she was risking her life by doing this. Jairus, quite simply, was not.
The flip
side of this coin, though, is that this woman likely did not have much of a
life left to lose. As Hare’s notes
indicate, she has likely plowed through all of her savings paying for
physicians for years to no avail, and since she is not only a woman but an
unclean woman, any sort of independent moneymaking venture (even prostitution)
was likely unavailable to her. Her
medical condition had probably driven her close to bankruptcy, not unlike
(sadly) the plurality of Americans who file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection
every year. Medical bills could be as
onerous then as they are now.
So, in a
way, what this woman is seeking is what we would think of as the bare
minimum. She’s not asking Jesus for her
old life back, with her wealth and the means available to her. At this point, she is only seeking her health
back. She simply wants to be made clean
again.
But part
of why we take Jesus as the Christ, the Messiah, is because He has this
tendency to utterly confound our expectations.
Despite His prophecies saying as such, He wasn’t expected to resurrect
on the third day. He fed five thousand
men and untold numbers of women and children despite His disciples saying that
it couldn’t be done. And when confronted
with this woman who basically tries to pickpocket a healing out of Him, He not
only lets her be healed, but He blesses her as well. Jairus, for all his devotion to his daughter,
receives no such blessing, and He never does in this story.
Perhaps
the eventual resuscitation of his daughter would prove to be blessing enough. But even if Jairus’s daughter had remained
dead, his high status in society would have remained. In contrast, you could imagine Jesus seeing
that the woman needed some sign of approval or endorsement in order to be accepted
back into society. As New Testament
scholar Ralph Martin puts her probable expectations, “she expected to be cured
and to slip back into the anonymity of the faceless crowd she had left. Instead, she is singled out and given a
personalized miracle all to herself.”
It
humanizes her. Jesus humanizes this
anonymous, faceless, nameless woman by giving her a name, perhaps the most
intimate and apropos name possible in the confines of this story: Daughter. Jesus is off to resurrect another man’s daughter
from the dead. But before He does, He
takes the time to make clear that this woman, who has experienced a
resurrection not only of health but now almost certainly of soul as well, is
HIS daughter. It is not patronizing, it
is not paternalistic. It is an
expression of profound love that confounded this woman’s expectations of this
itinerant Savior.
And that’s
the magic bullet with so much that has gone awry in the world. Never has humanity had a time in our history
when we have viewed one another completely and entirely as people, not as
objects of ridicule or hate, of scorn or of prejudice. Even as I am preaching about this daughter of
Jesus Christ, other daughters of Him still experience abuse and domestic
violence at an endemic rate. Even as I
am speaking of a daughter of God who has been made whole, other daughters of
God are torn apart every day in the diabolical realms of human trafficking and
sexual slavery. And even as I am telling
you about a daughter told by the Son of God to go in peace, other daughters of
Christ are spending their days as terrorized captives of Boko Haram in the
forests of central Africa, waiting for the day when we are able to do that which
we have pleaded with our leaders on social media to do: to #bringbackourgirls.
Out of
the depths of marginalization, violence, prejudice, and even genocide, a
miracle still occurs for over 7,000 Danish Jews, a miracle planned and executed
by men and women who are largely anonymous to us today. And out of the depths of marginalization and
prejudice, a miracle still occurs for one Israelite woman who is largely still
anonymous to us today.
And today,
out of the depths of marginalization, violence, and hate, we can still pray for
and plan miracles. We can still call out
the daughters and sons of God by name and tell them, as Jesus did, to go in
peace…not as a formality, or in place of any other standard Hallmark type
greeting, but as a statement of intent, as a declaration of belief, that when
this person goes from me, that they do so in a greater sense of peace and in a
greater security of peace then when they first came to me.
That is
what Jesus did for the woman He calls as His daughter. That is what, if we are to be Christians, to
be little Christs, to be Jesus followers, to do as well in His image and in His
stead.
And in
that way, may we too confound the expectations of a world that has perhaps come
to expect less and less of us and from us as Christians. Let us be the ones next to rise above the sea
of hurt and pain that wracks humanity, and to be the ones who lift others up
out of that raging tumult of ill.
May it be
so. Amen.
Rev. Eric
Atcheson
Longview, Washington
Longview, Washington
May 11,
2014
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