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Wallingford Presbyterian Church November 26, 2006 |
Rev. Ken Sunoo |
Barbara Brown Taylor sometimes wonders if the miracle stories in the Bible do more harm than good: “They are spectacular stories, most of them, and there is a lot of comfort to be had from watching Jesus still the storm, heal the sick, and raise the dead. His miracles remind us that the way things are is not the way they will always be, and that there is great power available to us through our kinship with him…The problem with miracles is that it is hard to witness them without wanting one of your own.” (Barbara Brown Taylor, Bread of Angels, 136-37).
Every one of us knows someone who is suffering, or who has suffered in the past. Every one of us knows someone who could use a miracle, but miracles are hard to come by. Not everyone who prays for one gets one, not by a long shot, and meanwhile there are people who get them without asking for them at all. It was eight Thanksgivings ago when my father was diagnosed with inoperable stomach cancer. We had a whole army of people praying for him around the clock, begging God for a healing miracle. However, two months later, my father lost his battle against cancer.
Why this apparent randomness? Why do some people experience miraculous healing, while others who are just as worthy do not? We wonder if perhaps there’s a formula – “Two parts prayer, three parts faith, one part good works” (BBT, 137). The problem is that God rarely does anything the same way twice. For instance, we have two very different miracle stories in today’s passage from Mark.
First, there’s the story of Jairus and his daughter. Jairus was a leader of the synagogue, an important man, but he doesn’t behave like an important man. Frederick Buechner notes that instead, “He behaves like a desperate man, a man close to hysteria with fear, grief, horror, God knows what. The reason is that his daughter is on the point of death, Jairus says, only he doesn’t say ‘my daughter,’ he says ‘my little daughter.’ She is twelve years old, so she wasn’t all that little really, but to Jairus she would presumably always be his little daughter the way even when they’ve grown up and moved away long since, we keep on speaking of our sons and daughters as children because that is what they were when we knew them first and loved them first.” (Frederick Buechner, Secrets in the Dark, 274-5).
Jesus agrees to go with Jairus to his house, but on the way, a woman who has bled for 12 years interrupts the scene. She desperately touches the hem of Jesus’ garment in order to be healed.
Barbara Lundblad believes it makes a great difference that the woman is allowed to intrude, or that she insists on this intrusion into the story. Often, these stories are torn apart. But this intrusion should be allowed to stand, because it’s very important. Mark wants us to see these stories together. This woman has been bleeding for 12 years, the exact same amount of time that this little girl has been alive. These stories clearly go together.
One commentator notes that “Jesus insists on personal contact with the healed woman. The woman, who could have slipped away in the crowd, shows integrity and courage” (Lamar Williamson, Jr., Interpretation, 109). But she engages with Jesus, and Jesus heals and blesses her.
Meanwhile, we can imagine the desperate impatience of Jairus when Jesus stops to see who had touched him. His little girl is dying, yet Jesus stops to ask a question which even his disciples thought was absurd. “Jesus, sensitive to the father’s anguish, might have pressed on. He might have been content with the knowledge that the woman was healed, but he took time out for the personal touch” (Lamar Williamson, Jr., Interpretation, 109).
The interruption offers food for thought to busy people in the 21st century. Our church now has a Long Range Planning Team working on determining where we see God leading us in the future. One issue that constantly comes up is the fact that we’re all so busy and overextended. We’re pressured by overwork, harried by the demands of raising children, and distracted by the problems of the world.
Yet we learn from Jesus in this passage that intrusions can be just as important as what you think you’re supposed to be doing. Henri Nouwen once remarked, “You know…my whole life I have been complaining that my work was constantly interrupted, until I discovered that my interruptions were my work” (Henri J.M. Nouwen, Reaching Out, p. 36). Jesus is interrupted repeatedly in Mark.” (Lamar Williamson, Jr., Interpretation, 112) Intrusions can be important.
Barbara Lundblad tells a story of a friend of hers who officiated at a wedding in the Netherlands some years ago, and the people getting married both worked at a shelter, a halfway house for mentally retarded adults. And they wanted to make sure that all the people from the halfway house were invited to come.
Her friend thought that it might be a little bit of an interruption, maybe even an intrusion, but they all came, and they all sat toward the front, and when it was time for communion, they ran up to the front, and they laughed, and they giggled, and they squealed when they got the bread, and they were so delighted when they received the cup. It was a wonderful intrusion, connecting people who weren’t usually even in church with that community. The canon begs us to see the power of intrusion. (Barbara Lundblad, Lecture at 2006 Festival of Homiletics)
“Intrusions can make connections, intrusions can often connect people that may not have been connected before. The intrusion in Mark 5 connects a bleeding woman and a young woman that’s about to be of childbearing age” (Lundblad). That’s significant - “Because of her constant bleeding, this woman is ritually unclearn (Lev. 15:25-33) and not allowed human touch.” (Tom Long, Matthew, 109) Once she touches Jesus, then according to the law he should have gone off to purify himself. Until he does, he’s in a state of defilement.
But Jesus does not take time off to purify himself. He sends the woman on her way and follows Jairus again. Remember, Jairus is a leader of the synagogue, one respected for his obedience to the law. For someone like him to seek help from an unclean person was scandalous.
But Jairus is not only a leader in the synagogue, he’s also a desperate father who’s willing to break every rule he knows in order to save his daughter’s life. However, it’s not enough. Word reaches them that it’s too late, that his precious child was dead and there was no reason to trouble Jesus any further.
This is as bad as it gets. You humiliate yourself, break every rule you love, grab at any possible chance to save your child, and the help comes too late. As the darkness of despair starts to envelope you, you hear a voice, “do not fear; only believe.” Certainly sounds like a formula, doesn’t it? Maybe that’s the answer – if we just believe hard enough, our prayers will be answered. If we just have enough faith, things will turn out all right. That’s how it seemed to work for Jairus, anyhow. His daughter is saved, brought back to life by Jesus.
The problem, of course, is that it simply does not happen that way every time. Believe me, my family believed, we prayed hard, we had faith. It wasn’t enough to save my father.
Most people don’t get a miracle like that, and one of the meanest and inappropriate things religious people can do is to blame it on a lack of faith. I believe that most people who do this are well-intentioned, but they’re also misguided. Our faith does not cause miracles – if that was true, that would mean that God’s miracles are something we could control. “Faith does not work miracles. God does.” (BBT, 139)
That’s clear in today’s passage. Did Jairus’ daughter have faith? I don’t think so – she was close to death. Did Jairus have faith? Mark doesn’t say. He simply followed Jesus to his home.
Taylor notes that, “either way, the high point was not then but earlier, when Jesus told him, ‘do not fear, only believe.’ If Jairus was able to do that, then he would have survived whatever happened next, even if Jesus had walked into his daughter’s room, closed her eyes with his fingertips, and pulled the sheet over her head. Her father’s belief would have become the miracle at that point, his willingness to believe that she was still in God’s good hands even though she had slipped out of his.” (Taylor, 140)
It helps me to remember that Jesus prayed for a miracle in the Garden of Gethsemane, asking God to remove the cup from him. Only when he opened his eyes, the cup was still there. Did Jesus himself lack faith? Absolutely not. “The miracle was that he drank the cup, believing in the power of God more than he believed in his own. It is always a miracle, isn’t it, when we understand that God is God and we are not?” (Taylor, 140).
I don’t expect any of us to stop praying for miracles. After all, the world needs all the miracles it can get. “There’s no secret formula for success, which is a real relief for those of us who cannot seem to ring the bell. Maybe we cannot do it because it is not our job. ‘Do not fear; only believe.’ That is our job. The rest is up to God” (Taylor, 140)