6th Sunday after Pentecost

Mark 5:21-43

In the first half of Mark’s gospel, Jesus is a healer. He heals a leper, a paralytic, a man with a withered hand, and in today’s reading, a bleeding woman and a dead girl. Three-quarters of the people Jesus heals in this gospel are social outcasts. Afflicted by conditions that make them ritually unclean, they were banned from society, excluded from relationship and isolated from community.[i]

In today’s gospel, the writer employs what’s known as a Markan sandwich, where he begins telling one story and then interrupts to tell another story before returning to conclude the original story. This structure is used at least nine times in Mark’s gospel, and when we encounter it, we must identify the toothpick, that is, the idea that holds the “sandwich” together. Here the story of a wealthy, influential leader and his dying daughter “sandwiches” that of the bleeding woman hiding in plain sight, yearning for healing. “The [older] woman’s faith forms the center of the sandwich and is the key to its interpretation. Through her Mark shows how faith in Jesus can transform fear and despair into hope and salvation.”[ii]

More than 20 years ago, Becca Stevens, an Episcopal priest in Nashville, Tennessee, founded Thistle Farms, a place of sanctuary for women who have experienced trafficking, violence and addiction. Women are in residence for two years and receive housing, medical care, therapy, education and job training at no cost to them. Through Thistle Farms, the women experience life giving relationships and a healing community where they learn that God’s love is unfolding in their lives.[iii]

Just as Stevens has met hundreds of women whose “first memories are trauma and [whose] horror stories never seem to end,” in Mark’s gospel, “Jesus encounters human crisis upon crisis.”[iv] 

With their stories set side by side, we can see how different the characters in this story are:

The man named Jairus is a synagogue leader who has wealth and influence and publicly approaches Jesus to advocate for his twelve-year old daughter.

The woman, whose name we never learn, has been hemorrhaging for as long as the girl has been alive. She doesn’t have anyone there to speak on her behalf. Alone and cast out from religious life and living in poverty because she has spent all of her money searching for a cure, she reaches out to Jesus from the obscurity of the crowd.

But then their stories converge because both Jairus and the woman “share a common desperate need” for healing.[v] And because they are both children of God, neither his privilege nor her status matter to Jesus.

Last week we witnessed Jesus’ power over creation when he subdued the waves and the wind on the Sea of Galilee, and now we see that He is also Lord of Law and Life.[vi] By law, the ritually unclean and the dead were out of bounds and off-limits, but Jesus prioritizes relationships over rules to restore life to both the woman and the girl. 

Even as we celebrate these healing stories, it’s important to say that there are no adequate answers to the unanswered questions this gospel provokes: “Why is there suffering in the world?” and “What does healing look like when it doesn’t come in the way, or at the time, that we think it should?” and all the other questions that are cried out in anguished tears at bedsides and gravesides.

Powerfully, these stories link the healing power of Jesus and the saving power of faith. Not in the way that the connection between faith and healing has been corrupted over centuries — where illness and even death were mis-understood as a shameful editorial on the morality or worth of a person or their family.

But here, the word used throughout this passage for “being made well” and “being healed” is the same word for “salvation” which we understand as being “from something bad… for something good, and … accomplished by God.” We are not only saved from death – separation from God – but we are saved for abundant life with God and with each other, for the sake of the world.[vii] As Paul writes in his letter to the Ephesians, “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God.” (Ephesians 2:8)

Again and again in Mark’s healing stories, Jesus saves people from death, healing them physically and restoring them to their roles and relationships within their communities. In Jesus, they experience the incarnational love of God that manifests itself as “God’s commitment to be present with us in the world.”[viii]

Present with us at those bedsides and gravesides,
Present with us when we are cast out or disregarded by others,
Present with us when we are hopeless and hurting,
And desperate for healing.

Healed and restored, the woman is now called “Daughter” by Jesus, and the girl, on the cusp of adulthood in the first century, takes her place in the gathered community, too. In joining their stories, Mark demonstrates the social and communal nature of healing; this is what it looks like to be God’s children and live in relationship with each other as brothers and sisters in Christ.

For the last four nights, I have been watching the livestream of the ELCA Youth Gathering that has been happening in Houston since Wednesday. More than 30,000 youth from across the country, including more than 800 from North Carolina, are gathered there for worship, learning and service and every night they are all together in a stadium where they are hearing transformative stories of how people have experienced God’s call, love, grace and hope in their lives.

One common thread that is woven through all of their stories is that our faith is rooted in relationship, with God and with each other, and even with our enemies.

Because when we believe that,
then we can share our suffering,
confess our brokenness and our inability to fix ourselves, and
surrender the foolish and false ideas that masquerade as truth about who we are and who God is,
and, like the bleeding woman,
we can realize that
we are seen and known by God, and we are loved.

And that is only the beginning; we learn like one of the speakers said Friday night, that in sharing our [brokenness], we find healing in the grace that finds us. Every one of us is recovering from something, carrying some burden too weighty for us alone, and in community, we find we are freed from those burdens and, in turn, we can offer healing and reconciliation to the people we encounter, confident that “God uses us when we touch the wounds of others in Christlike ways.”[ix]

Let us pray…[x]
Holy God,
We give thanks for your Son, Jesus,
for no matter how deep we sink in despair,
or how broken we are,
he comes to us and at the touch of his hand
the outcasts are healed and reconciled
and we awake to fullness of life.
Lift us up to new life each day as we experience your healing mercy, and by your Spirit,
help us to love others as we are loved by You.
Amen.

[i] Matthew S. Rindge. “Mark’s Gospel, Social Outcasts, and Modern Slavery.” Journal of Lutheran Ethics. Vol. 10, Issue 6. June 2010.
[ii] James R. Edwards. “Markan Sandwiches: The Significance of Interpolations in Markan Narratives.” Novum Testamentum XXXI, 3 (1989) 193-216.
[iii] Becca Stevens. Snake Oil. 7.
[iv] Feasting on the Gospels—Mark, Location 5524.
[v] Feasting on the Gospels—Mark, Location 5842.
[vi] Feasting on the Gospels—Mark, Locations 6725-6726.
[vii] Crazy Talk. Rolf A. Jacobson, Ed. 154-155.
[viii] Feasting on the Gospels—Mark, Locations 5537-5539.
[ix] Feasting on the Gospels—Mark, Locations 5548-5549.
[x] Adapted from Laughing Bird Liturgy, http://laughingbird.net/ComingWeeks.html.