They Laughed at Him (Proper 8 B)

They Laughed at Him
Fourth after Pentecost (Proper 8 B)
28th June 2009
Cathedral Church of St. John the Evangelist, Hong Kong
Lamentations 3. 22 – 33; Psalm 30; 2 Corinthians 8. 7 – end; Mark 5. 21 - 43

God, breathe into us a desire to change— take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

Today’s gospel reading is a sandwich: the main story--the two pieces of bread--is about how Jesus was asked by the synagogue leader Jairus to heal his 12-year old daughter, and how Jesus did that. Embedded in the middle of the bread--the filling, as it were--is the story of Jesus and the woman with a long-standing hemorrhage.

Modern readers usually understand the basic drama of the combined story—Jesus is asked to heal the girl, but on the way is followed by crowds who press in on him. Among the crowd is the woman, desperate for healing after losing all she has to try to remedy her condition. She secretly touches Jesus’ robe and is instantly healed. He, however, notices that something has happened and turns to ask who touched him. After an exchange with the disciples and the woman, he returns on his way to Jairus’ house. But the time it has taken to sort things out in the crowd was too long—the girl has died. Jesus nevertheless proceeds and heals the girl.

There are, however, a couple of matters in the story that are not readily apparent to the modern reader, and these are key to understanding what the story is trying to tell us.

First of all-- the crowds around Jesus are like the crowds of any peasant culture (or any culture that is just one or two generations removed from the life of peasants). They are crowding around him because they want to see something interesting, something worth telling.

Having grown up in North America, I didn’t really understand what was going on in the story until I moved to China and saw crowd behavior there. The Chinese term coù rènao (pile on to the heat and the noise) aptly describes a phenomenon you often see in Mainland China, especially in the provinces. After every traffic accident, or minor altercation or disagreement between people, you see a crowd gather quickly to watch. They press in to get a better view. They start cheering on their favorite or making comments of their own. You see, these people haven’t seen anything interesting in a long time, and the incident provides entertainment and variety to their somewhat monotonous lives. A similar thing on a usually much reduced scale occurs in schools in North America when young students gather around two of their classmates in an argument and they begin chanting “fight, fight.” The people following Jesus are pressing in to get a better view, to get a better chance of hearing what he is saying. Once it becomes clear that he actually is healing people, the crowds increase—we read in Mark 6:56, “And wherever he went—into villages, towns or countryside—they placed the sick in the marketplaces. They begged him to let them touch even the edge of his cloak, and all who touched him were healed.”

So when the woman touches his clothes and he turns and asks who touched him, the disciples are understandably a bit perplexed at why he should even ask such a silly question.

Another item in the story that is more central to its meaning is this: the woman with the issue of blood won’t dare ask Jesus to help her because she is ritually impure. Under the religious laws of the day, she was unclean and conveyed that uncleanness to anyone who touched her or things she had had touched.

The rules to prevent ritual contamination were a central part of the religion that Jesus had been raised in, the varied Judaism of the period of the Second Temple. Just after the rules about dealing with women with unusual flows of blood, we read this in Leviticus 15: “You must keep the Israelites separate from things that make them unclean, so they will not die in their uncleanness for defiling my dwelling place, which is among them.”

The woman is an outcast because of her disability. She wonders how a religious teacher like Jesus could be expected to pay her any attention, let alone touch her to heal her. So she takes things into her own hands and secretly touches his robe. She is cured, but he feels that some power has gone out of him, and he asks who touched him.

It is the woman’s uncleanness that makes her reluctant to ask for help, or even expect a reply.


Similarly, when Jesus finally arrives at the house of Jairus, the question of ritual impurity again intrudes in this complicated sandwich of a story. Coming into close proximity to, or touching, a corpse also transmitted ritual uncleanness. When the crowd tells Jairus that his daughter is dead, Jesus persists in going to try to heal her, and tells him, “Don’t be afraid, just believe.”

He is not asking Jairus to sign on to a doctrinal program, or to intellectually assent to a set of propositions about the universe, morals, or society. He is asking Jairus to trust him. Remember that the Latin word credo, "I believe," from which we get the word "creed" originally came from cordem dare, "to give one's heart."

They leave the crowd behind, and come to the house, where professional mourners are already at work, ululating, weeping, and tearing their clothes. Their presence underscores the high social status enjoyed by Jairus. When Jesus announces that the girl is not dead, just asleep, and says he will go and wake her up, the crowd laughs at him.

Some probably laugh at what they see as Jesus’ stubbornness in not listening to their announcement that the girl is dead. Some laugh at his foolishness in thinking that he can 'heal' a dead person. Most are probably laughing, in typical Asian fashion, out of nervousness—this guy is not only going to cause a great scene involving a corpse, but is also going to break, right there in public, a great taboo.

For corpses, too, were a source of ritual contamination. By going to the corpse and touching it, he would become unclean, and then come out and transmit the ritual impurity to all present as well.

Despite the privileged position the little girl had in life as the daughter of a religious leader, in death she is just another corpse, just another source of ritual contamination, like the woman with the flow of blood earlier in the story.

After he puts the onlookers all out, he takes the child's father and mother and his accompanying disciples, and goes in to where the corpse is. He then takes her by the hand and says, “Little girl, get up!” (Talitha qumi! It is recorded in the words he probably actually used in his own native language, Aramaic.)

We read, “Immediately the girl stood up and walked around (she was twelve years old). At this they were completely astonished.”

You see, in both cases, the woman with the flow of blood and Jairus’ young daughter, compassion and service took precedence over a desire to remain pure.

This really marks just how radical Jesus was. The religion of the day declared, with the full authority of scripture literally cited and interpreted through authoritative tradition, that impurity was contagious. It spread from the unclean to the clean. People who want to please God must avoid it if at all possible, lest they commit sacrilege against the Temple of God. If impurity is inadvertently contracted, they need to purge it away through rituals.

As a Jew, Jesus respected the rituals. But he taught that goodness was different from purity, and far more important. In his view, moral goodness was spread to others by compassion and service. And the need for compassion and service trumped the need to avoid contamination at all times.

The theme is a subtext of almost all of Jesus’ public acts and teaching. He practiced open table fellowship with people that his religion labeled as the worst of the worst. And according to the Law, the table where one ate was one of the easiest places to contract impurity. He taught that it was what one said and did, rather than what one ate, that counted. He tended to discount ritual washings as a core issue and said they did not necessarily touch what really mattered—the heart. He told stories of religious men avoiding contamination with what they thought was a corpse in contrast to a heretic and illegitimate man (a Samaritan) who, despite the same religious rules about corpses, still showed compassion and thus made himself the fellow countryman ("the neighbor") of the man who was near death.

In so doing, Jesus was following the very best of the Jewish prophetic tradition, which itself had consistently criticized the religious establishment’s concern with purity rather than justice.

Ultimately, it would be Jesus’ uncompromising insistence on this that so alienated the religious authorities that they conspired to turn him over to the hated Roman occupiers.

We need never think that our uncleanness or impurity is a barrier keeping us from Jesus. We need not fear that a disability we may have can keep us from the love of Jesus. Jesus loves us regardless, and wants to heal us and help us understand that we are forgiven all.

What keeps us from Jesus is our fear itself. Our fear may make us so nervous that we , like the professional mourners outside Jairus' house, end up laughing at God. But the woman with the flow of blood was so desperate that she overcame her fear. Taking things into her own hands she reaches out to touch his robes. We too need to reach out to touch his robes.

When Jairus learns his daughter is dead, Jesus tells him "Don't be afraid, just trust in me."

Jesus is saying this today, to each of us, "Don't be afraid. Just trust in me."

In the name of God, Amen.