Sermon for Sunday, June 30, 2024

June 30, 2024
By Kristin Berkey-Abbott


Mark 5:21-43


If you’ve been following the thread that the writer of the Gospel of Mark spools out in the early part of the Gospel, you might realize that we’ve seen the power of Jesus in different contexts. In the first chapter of the book of Mark, we Jesus exercise power over demons; in fact, casting a demon out of a man is the first miracle he performs. Last week we saw Jesus exercise power over the storm and the sea; he tells them to calm down, and they do. This week, Jesus exercises his power over disease and even death. We might be so used to healing stories that we fail to see how miraculous they really are.

First a word about faith and healing. In both of these stories, in most translations, Jesus seems to say that the healing happens because of the faith of the ones who need healing. You’ve heard me say it before, and it bears repeating—we are at risk of dangerous theology here. If we are in need of a miracle—and who isn’t?—and we pray and believe and pray some more, what happens if the miracle doesn’t happen? We might assume it’s because our faith is lacking. Today’s Gospel does tempt us to this theology, especially if we’re the ones that got the miracle we wanted. But I think Jesus has a different theology on display.

Note the differences in the two that come to Jesus in today’s Gospel. On the one hand, we have Jairus. He’s a leader in the synagogue, which means that in Jewish society, he’s one of the most powerful people in the community. We can assume just from that one piece of information that he has money and status; he can make things happen just by saying the word. But what he can’t do is heal his daughter, and so he comes to Jesus.

In the middle of Jairus’ story, we have the story of the bleeding woman, who is in so many ways the exact opposite of Jairus. She’s female and bleeding, and she’s been this way for 12 years—12 years! We’re told that she “had endured much under many physicians”—if we’ve ever had a chronic condition that didn’t clear out of the body, many of us can relate. And after 12 years and spending all of her money, she’s gotten worse. She’s female and broke and bleeding—in some ways, the opposite of Jairus. But in their desperation, they are the same. Jairos, with all his wealth and prestige, is powerless without Jesus. The bleeding woman, with no wealth and prestige, is powerless without Jesus.

But then the story takes another turn. The little girl has died while Jesus has been busy making a connection with the bleeding woman who seized a bit of the miraculous healing power for herself. We might expect the story to end here, if we didn’t know Jesus better. The girl is dead. As the household says, no need to trouble the teacher further.

No matter how much faith Jairus has, he can’t believe that Jesus will raise his daughter from the dead. The yoking of this story with the story of the bleeding woman makes me think that the story is about so much more than the quality of our faith. The bleeding woman has tried everything and run out of options. The man with a dead daughter also has no options. But there’s something about Jesus that makes them want to be open to the possibility that he might offer something different.

Christians have focused on the resurrection of Jesus, and rightly so. But here in the fifth chapter of Mark, we hear the message that we will hear again on Easter, the message that we proclaim every Sunday: God has the ultimate power over the forces of death. Death does not have the final word.

In both of these stories, Jesus doesn’t test the faith of the ones who come to him. They don’t have to pass a test. We don’t see him turn away some people and tell them to come back later when they’ve developed a more robust faith. With the bleeding woman, the miracle happens before Jesus realizes that it’s happened. Both the woman and Jesus feel the healing happen in their bodies first.

In important ways, the miracles in today’s Gospel are not just miracles of healing. They are also miracles of community restored. One Bible scholar points out that in Mark’s Gospel, 9 of 12 people healed throughout the Gospel had conditions that would have led to them being excluded from the larger community--the bleeding woman is one of these people. And the dead daughter has been severed from her community, but Jesus heals her and then asks for some food for her.

We have glommed onto the miraculous when we talk about Jesus, but we tend to focus on the splashier miracles, particularly the ones that vanquish disease and death. But the larger miracle is the way that Jesus restores community wherever he goes. Jesus shows us that restoring community doesn’t have to be hard. In the story of the bleeding woman, Jesus heals effortlessly by his presence, not by a command. As we look for ways to heal our communities, our presence may be just what is needed.

We may not have the ability to raise the dead, but we do have the ability to stop the bleeding. Maybe we do that by visiting the sick or praying for them or sending a card. Maybe we do that by preparing food for those who need food. I could go on and on, but I want to make one last point about faith—or fidelity, as is one way to translate the Greek word.

When we focus on the need for a miracle, whether that miracle be in the form of a cure or some other answer to a prayer, we may need to wait quietly, as the writer of Lamentations observes. But we need to remember the power of the hope that we have, the hope that we have in abundance. The world may seem to be crumbling to pieces, but we are told in so many ways, that God is making all things new. This quality of hope and this firm belief in the assurance of things to come is one of the most important qualities that believers can offer to a world in ruins. We don’t know exactly what the end result will be, but we know that God is not done yet.

We may need to wait, and we may need to exhibit the kind of hope that both Jairus and the bleeding women offer, along with their despair. Without hope, we don’t have a chance of a miracle. We’ll forget to ask for what we need, like Jairus did. We won’t have the courage to move forward on our belief that Jesus has power over all that ails us, the courage shown by the bleeding woman. Without hope, we stay mired in despair.

Let us remember that we are in community with a God who can overcome the powers of death. Let us be faithful to that theology, to a God that loves us so much that we are not left abandoned to the powers of slow bleeding or quick death. As the Psalmist reminds us, joy will come after weeping and wailing will give way to dance.