A Hemorrhaging Woman & Jairus' Daughter

"A Hemorrhaging Woman & Jairus' Daughter"

Mark 5:21-45 (Part 2 of Back To The Well Sermon Series)
June 27, 2010

When Jesus had crossed again in the boat to the other side, a great crowd gathered
around him; and he was by the sea. Then one of the leaders of the synagogue named
Jairus came and, when he saw him, fell at his feet and begged him repeatedly, “My little
daughter is at the point of death. Come and lay your hands on her, so that she may be
made well, and live.”
So he went with him. And a large crowd followed him and pressed in on him. Now, there
was a woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years. She had
endured much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had; and she was no
better, but rather grew worse. She had heard about Jesus, and came up behind him in
the crowd and touched his cloak, for she said, “If I but touch his clothes, I will be made
well.” Immediately her hemorrhage stopped; and she felt in her body that she was
healed of her disease. Immediately aware that power had gone forth from him, Jesus
turned about in the crowd and said, “Who touched my clothes?” And his disciples said
to him, “You see the crowd pressing in on you; how can you say, ‘Who touched me?’”
He looked all around to see who had done it. But the woman, knowing what had
happened to her, came in fear and trembling, fell down before him, and told him the
whole truth. He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and
be healed of your disease.”
While he was still speaking, some people came from the leader’s house to say, “Your
daughter is dead. Why trouble the teacher any further?” But overhearing what they
said, Jesus said to the leader of the synagogue, “Do not fear, only believe.” He allowed
no one to follow him except Peter, James, and John, the brother of James. When they
came to the house of the leader of the synagogue, he saw a commotion, people
weeping and wailing loudly. When he had entered, he said to them, “Why do you make
a commotion and weep? The child is not dead but sleeping.” And they laughed at him.
Then he put them all outside, and took the child’s father and mother and those who
were with him, and went in where the child was. He took her by the hand and said to
her, “Talitha cum,” which means, “Little girl, get up!” And immediately the girl got up and
began to walk about (she was twelve years of age). At thi,s they were overcome with
amazement. He strictly ordered them that no one should know this, and told them to
give her something to eat.

Today’s text, the second in our sermon series entitled Back To the Well, is focused on
yet another story of healing—well, actually, it is the story of two healings, with one
request for healing being interrupted by the healing of another. It’s a long periscope, a
long text, but it’s worth hearing in its entirety, because there is a lot here, a lot to
grapple with, as Jesus has two encounters with women, a young woman, and someone
older, someone plagued by an illness that had left her with few options. The thing
about preaching for some twelve years now is that you tend to approach things the way
you’ve always approached them, and I had approached this text with a set of
assumptions that I think I learned in seminary, if not heard in a thousand sermons
before today. What so wonderful about Frances Taylor Gench and others who bring
different eyes to the Bible is that they remind people like me, and you, that we bring
particular lenses to the story that are not always correct.

And one of those lenses that I brought to the text was around what is called the purity
laws of the Old Testament, or the Tanak, which is the Jewish name for what we call the
Old Testament. I had always assumed that one of the most amazing things about this
story is Jesus’ willingness to broach the supposedly inviolate purity laws, those laws
that were set down in order to preserve the holiness of the Temple in Jerusalem, that
place that was the symbolic dwelling place of God and the center of Israelite life for so
long. These laws were codified so as to give clear conditions about how to approach
the divine presence, and almost all of those laws were focused on contacts with human
corpses, certain unclean animals, and certain genital discharges. Usually, these laws
didn’t have much to do with the actual lives of people, because people were rarely in
daily contact with the Temple, unlike the priests who serviced the Temple, but certain
groups, including the Pharisees, sought to make the case that all of the people of Israel
were priests, in some spiritual way, and thus all these laws should apply to every part of
Jewish life, beyond those professional priests in Jerusalem. But something else is
important to point out: if you were a non-Jewish listener to this story in the first century,
the concepts behind the purity laws—clean and unclean, polluted and unpolluted--
would not have seemed foreign to you, because Roman culture had some of those
same type of ideas about purity that the Jewish people had, though with different
emphases here and there. They would have gotten it, in ways that we non-Jews
listeners nowadays still struggle with—the idea that any genital discharge, whether from
a man or a woman, would have made it impossible to approach the Temple, approach
church, something just seems foreign and remote and maybe a bit silly to our modern
ears. Their world, their lenses are not our lenses, it must be said over and over again,
something that makes this text sometimes difficult to interpret.

Still, one must not overstate how broadly these purity laws were actually practiced in
that time, despite the growing demand that they be expanded beyond the Temple and
the priests by the Pharisees. No where are the purity laws mentioned in this text
today—this woman is never said to be ostracized from her community, and others
seemingly have no problems with her presence in that hurly burly crowd on their way to
Jarius’ home. What we mustn’t do is to fall into the practice of someone setting up the
false dichotomy between the supposed superiority of Jesus against the Judaism of his
time, because it simply feeds into the deep sin of anti-Semitism that has plagued the
church since almost the beginning. The reality is that the purity laws were gender
blind—both women and men were equally found to be unclean, during certain times of
the month, or after sexual activity—and the purity laws were never about sin—being
impure was not about being sinful or committing some kind of sin. And, frankly, it doesn’
t fit what we actually know of how Jews in Jesus’ time actually practiced their religion.

And yet that is still the world that Jesus lives in, one in which there are purity laws that
have expanded beyond the Temple, laws that were affirmed by the larger non-Jewish
culture, though only peripherally, all of this has made life difficult for those like this
hemorrhaging woman, this woman who interrupts Jesus’ journey toward the house of
Jarius, whose daughter is dying. Jesus had been approached by the someone who
was at the other end of the social spectrum for help—Jarius, who was a man, a leader
of the synagogue, someone who was an insider, not an outsider—and what he asks for
is what anyone would want for a child in trouble—help, healing, hope. The crowd is
following Jairus and Jesus, on the way to the daughter, to help her, and so the pace is
quick, the pace is hurried, because of the nature of the situation—a child is dying, the
child of this desperate father beside Jesus.

But in the midst of the chaos and bustle, a hand reaches out and touches Jesus, the
hand of a woman in need of healing as well, though she never bothers to ask Jesus for
that healing, and she doesn’t get in his way, like the Canaanite woman from last week’s
sermon, stopping him, making him confront her, and some of his own patriarchal
prejudices. No, this hemorrhaging woman, this bleeding that has caused her so much
pain, some of which has been caused by the purity laws that have not only stopped her
from worshipping in the Temple, but now have been used to call into question of
whether she is eternally an outsider by the Pharisees, and like-minded groups. What
has also caused her suffering is the “cures” of the male physicians that have probably
robbed her blind financially, promising something they could never deliver, and
probably knew they could never deliver. With all that history behind her, with all the
disappointment of the past twelve years haunting her, she makes the bold decision to
wade into the crowd and get her healing, get her deliverance, get her hope, one way or
another. This boldness must not be overlooked, must not be dismissed—here she is,
someone that some—only some—in her culture saw as literally untouchable, plunging
into the lunging crowd with Jesus, amidst the men, and touching Jesus’ robe, as if he
was some sort of walking magic amulet, healing all who touch him.

And yet, the amazing thing is that her boldness gets her exactly what she wants, which
is an end to her suffering, which is an end to the bleeding, that kept her from the
Temple, and from some who would have nothing to do with her because of it, those
serious religious people who knew all the rules and did them all, doggone it! Jesus
knows something has happened, even though he was surely being touched all the time
in the hurrying crowd around him. He wants to know who touched him, looking for who
did it, and I wonder what that power felt like, the power that was drained from him—
somehow, someway, he knew that someone with a profound and bold faith had touched
his clothes, and that this touch was different from all the other accidental moments of
human contact that had happened seconds earlier. The woman, stunned to be found
out, surely afraid that Jesus was one of those men who had decided that purity laws
were meant for everyone, not just the priests and those entering the Temple in
Jerusalem, even for those like herself, she must have been terrified that perhaps he
was like so many of these preachers, these teachers, so many of them ready to push
her to the outside of Israeli life.

But the amazing thing, the amazing thing is that she doesn’t just slink away, she doesn’t
intentionally get lost in the crowd, and frankly, it doesn’t seem automatic that Jesus
knew it was her who had one the touching, and so surely she could have just blended
in, gone away, gone with the miracle she had been seeking. She doesn’t do that, and
even though she is fearful, even though she is expecting to be dressed down by the
man she has received her miracle from, she comes forward, and owns what she has
done, the boldness of what she has done, and she tells him of the boundaries she has
crossed—the purity laws that some said applied to her, the line between men and
women—a line no one was allowed to cross—and the simple truth that she took what
she did not ask for, nor was it even offered to her, this healing. She tells the whole
truth, even though she didn’t have to, even though it would have been easier and less
traumatizing for her, because somehow and in some way, she needed to do that as
well—she needed to name aloud what she actually needed, as a human being, as a
person of faith, and as a woman.

Now, the reaction that Jesus has to her truth is almost as fascinating and inspiring as
her act of boldness and audacity—he doesn’t criticize her, he doesn’t complain that she
shouldn’t have been so bold, that she should have asked for his healing power instead
of taking that power without asking. Instead, what he sees is a woman of incredible
faith, so much so that he names her as his daughter, as part of the family, perhaps
because some had been wanting to write her out of the religious family, something they
had no right to do, that no has the right to do even now. It is her faith that has made
her well, her trust that has given her wholeness, her boldness that has opened the
door to the future. What this moment should say to us is that this is also what faith
looks like: it is bold and powerful and it does what needs to be done for the sake of
wholeness, the wholeness for one self and for the wholeness of others. So often faith
is seen as simply an submission, a surrender to the way things are—and that surely a
part of faith and what it means to have trust in God at certain particular moments—but
there is another side to faith, something exemplified most beautifully by this woman.
Faith, trust, is also a bold act, one that seeks wholeness in one’s life, and, if one has to,
faith is also willing to go out on a limb in order to do what needs to be done to survive,
to get what must be gotten. And that is just what this woman did—she broke the rules,
she let go of the shame that some had tried to impose on her, and she went out and
got what she needed from Christ.

And it must be pointed out again that Jesus himself gives her the credit for her own
healing—“your faith has made you well” and he sends her forth with a blessing and a
command to continue her healing, knowing perhaps that it was going to be ongoing, as
it is for all of us who are recovering from physical and even emotional wounds. Unlike
the Gospel of Matthew, in which it is often implied that Jesus would not do miraculous
deeds because there was no faith in a particularly hostile community, the Gospel of
Mark seems to make Jesus powerless without the faith of others, which says something
powerful about our participation in the healing process. In Matthew, Jesus wouldn’t do
deeds of healing because they were not a people of faith—but in Mark, Jesus couldn’t
do deeds of healing, because there was no faith in the people. Don’t get me wrong—I
am not implying, along with some misguided televangelists, that we do not get our
healing, emotional or otherwise, because we have no faith—after all, God can always
tell us no, or not yet, or yes, but not in the way you want it—and God often does, at
least God does with me. What is important to note here in this story is that there seems
to be some powerful understanding of shared power between the believer and the one
believed in, and that part of the credit for our healing, however that healing comes, lays
with us, with our boldness, with our willingness to do what needs to be done in order to
get what we need in order to survive and thrive.

And yet, the supreme irony here is that her boldness, her willingness to step out and do
what needs to be done for her own health and wholeness, has likely caused the death
of another, it seems. Jairus’ daughter dies because of this interruption to the Jesus’
journey to his house, and the healing of one seemingly causes the death of another,
because of Jesus’ delay in getting to the daughter in time. But, of course, how could
Jesus have not stopped and interacted with this woman, how could he not found out
who it was that he shared his healing power with? He is on his way to heal the
daughter of someone of note, a leader of the synagogue, and he gets interrupted on
that journey by a woman of no note, no importance, someone with no power, who is
likely destitute, and yet, he shows her as much compassion as he soon will with the
daughter he is about to bring to life—the corpse of this young woman he is about to
touch, another barrier that he breaks down. But that is who Jesus is—compassion
given flesh and bone—and so there was no choice for him but to stop and investigate
this woman with such great faith, a faith that is in contrast to those who would laugh at
him minutes later when he arrived at Jairus’ house, telling them the daughter was
simply asleep, awaiting him to awaken her. These folks who thought it was all a
pathetic joke on Jesus’ part didn’t realize that they had a part in the healing of this man’
s daughter, and in their own healings as well, in some mysterious way.

The writers of the book Defenseless Flower: A New Reading of the Bible so
eloquently put it this way: A Dutch missionary and Carmelite priest in Brazil, Carlos
Mesters, distinguishes between two strategies for helping people: the stork and the
midwife. The stork "presents the child to the parents - as if the child came from outside
the parents, as if there is no need for gestation and painful birth. [But] The midwife
helps in the painful birthing of the child who has been gestating in the mother's womb,
and the experienced and skilled midwife knows when to intervene in the birth and when,
in the best of circumstances, to stand back and let the birthing occur with little
intervention." It is so simple to see that we must function as midwives, assisting people
in bringing forth healing in their lives, "stirring up the gift of God" that is within them (2
Tim. 6: 1). It is no simple matter to function this way. It is much easier to be a stork.
(Maryknoll: Orbis, 1989), 133.

Indeed, it is much easier to think that what we need always come from outside of us, but
in this moment, Jesus shows us that we have a part in our own healing, that it also
comes from the inside of us, and that part has to do with our boldness, with our
willingness to seek what others are trying to deny us, what some were trying to deny
this woman, whether implicitly or explicitly. We forget that the path to emotional and
sometimes even physical healing begins with us, and doesn’t simply and always come
from outside of us. This woman knows that truth, and she boldly and powerfully seeks
that which will make her well, and make her whole—may we do that as well! Amen.