They Laughed at Him
30 June 2024 -- Fourth after Pentecost (Proper 8B)
Homily Preached at The Mission Church of the Holy Spirit
Sutherlin, Oregon
10:00 a.m. Sung Mass
Lamentations 3:21-33; Psalm 30; 2 Corinthians 8:7-15; Mark 5:21-43
God, take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.
One of my children’s favorite books when they were very young was a clever little text called Would You Rather by John Burningham. It took a regular game beloved of 4-5 year oldsand
pushed it beyond their comfort zone. “Would you rather have supper in a
castle, breakfast in a balloon, or tea on the river?” rapidly became
“Would you rather be made to eat spider stew, taste slug dumplings, chew
mashed worms, or drink a snail shake?” How about spider squish? The
mental exercise of “would you rather” is an important step in learning
prioritizing and setting in order competing desires or aversions.
We often hear today the question “What would Jesus do?” as a guide for our behavior. Today’s Gospel provides an example of what Jesus actually did do when he was confronted with a game of “Would you rather?”
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. Jesus heals her, and then proceeds to Jairus’ home.
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. 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 (probably the blue and white tzitzit—tassels of fringes of his prayer shawl) 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.
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, or even was close enough to have their shadow touch hers.
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 fashion for Asian cultures,
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.
Jesus,
would you rather follow purity commandments in scripture, or help
people? Purity or compassion, Jesus, which is it? To underscore the
contrast, in this story Jesus is asked to help people with disgustingly
contaminated, virulently contagious impurity.
Love,
not purity, is Jesus’ consistent answer. 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 faithful Jewish man,
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.
