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Mark 5:21-43
A Dead Girl and a Sick Woman
21 When Jesus had again crossed over by boat to the other side of the lake, a large crowd gathered around him while he was by the lake. 22 Then one of the synagogue rulers, named Jairus, came there. Seeing Jesus, he fell at his feet 23 and pleaded earnestly with him, “My little daughter is dying. Please come and put your hands on her so that she will be healed and live.” 24 So Jesus went with him.
A large crowd followed and pressed around him. 25 And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years.26 She had suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors and had spent all she had, yet instead of getting better she grew worse. 27 When she heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, 28 because she thought, “If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed.” 29 Immediately her bleeding stopped and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering.
30 At once Jesus realized that power had gone out from him. He turned around in the crowd and asked, “Who touched my clothes?”
31 “You see the people crowding against you,” his disciples answered, “and yet you can ask, ‘Who touched me?’ ”
32 But Jesus kept looking around to see who had done it.33 Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell at his feet and, trembling with fear, told him the whole truth. 34 He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.”
35 While Jesus was still speaking, some people came from the house of Jairus, the synagogue ruler. “Your daughter is dead,” they said. “Why bother the teacher any more?”
36 Ignoring what they said, Jesus told the synagogue ruler, “Don’t be afraid; just believe.”
37 He did not let anyone follow him except Peter, James and John the brother of James. 38 When they came to the home of the synagogue ruler, Jesus saw a commotion, with people crying and wailing loudly. 39 He went in and said to them, “Why all this commotion and wailing? The child is not dead but asleep.” 40 But they laughed at him.
After he put them all out, he took the child’s father and mother and the disciples who were with him, and went in where the child was.41 He took her by the hand and said to her, “Talitha koum!” (which means “Little girl, I say to you, get up!”). 42 Immediately the girl stood up and began to walk around (she was twelve years old). At this they were completely astonished. 43 He gave strict orders not to let anyone know about this, and told them to give her something to eat.
This reading is a little unusual in that it’s really two stories that overlap – one story happens in the middle of the other. You could separate the two stories and write a Reflection about one or other of them – or a sermon, for that matter – and it would be just fine. Each story has lessons that are important in their own right. But when you look closely, it’s hard to escape the notion that they’re meant to be considered together. There are certain themes that connect them.
To start with, they’re both healing stories. And both of the people who get healed are female. That probably means something, although it’s not clear what.
But then there’s the matter of the numbers. The synagogue leader’s little girl is twelve years old and the woman had been plagued by bleeding for twelve years. Numbers have symbolic significance in the Bible, and the number twelve was considered especially significant in the ancient Hebrew culture. There were twelve tribes of Israel, twelve sons of Jacob, twelve loaves of ‘show bread’ on the temple altar to signify God’s care for the people, and so on. So the fact that the same number shows up in both of the connected stories is almost certainly significant.
But aside from those things, what connection are we meant to see?
Strangely, the scholars don’t seem to help much. I usually consult respected Bible scholars before I preach or write about a passage, but the scholars I have the most confidence in don’t seem to provide much insight about why these two stories are connected, or about the significance of the twelve years in each person’s case. Some say we’re just supposed to notice that the woman had been bleeding for as long as the girl had been alive. Others suggest that we’re supposed to understand that the young girl was just about to reach adulthood. The scholars seem to agree that the connection between the stories isn’t just a coincidence, but they don’t seem to agree on what that connection is supposed to mean.
Which leaves us to figure out what else the stories have in common. And as I’ve read and thought about this reading over the years, I’ve been struck more and more by the thought that the common element of the two stories is desperation.
The bleeding woman, we’re told, had “suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors and had spent all she had, yet instead of getting better she grew worse.” It seems that the woman had invested all of her hope – not to mention all of her money – in seeking a cure through human wisdom and skill. Now she turned to Jesus when she had no other hope.
In the case of the young girl, it’s a desperate father who approaches Jesus. We’re told that the father was a leader in the Jewish establishment – the ruler of a synagogue. Now, as we know, Jesus was out of favor with the Jewish leadership, so presumably the father would have tried all the traditional prayers and rituals of his tradition before coming to an ‘outlaw rabbi’ like Jesus. So that suggests desperation on his part, too.
Our default approach – even for those of us who think of ourselves as “people of God” – is to put our trust in human solutions, or in religious rituals that have more to do with us than with God. So maybe we’re supposed to see ourselves in these characters, turning to Jesus as a last resort only when our own powers and practices have failed us.
Look how much that woman suffered before turning to Jesus – 12 years of sickness and increasing poverty. And look at the panic and desperation the little girl’s father went through because he didn’t come to Jesus first. In both cases, people exhausted all their other options, and then came to him when they were truly desperate – as a last resort.
But I can’t help noticing that these two stories are also connected by the fact that there are crowds of people in each story who miss what’s happening in their midst. The people around the woman with the bleeding disorder are apparently jostling Jesus and pressing in on him, but it’s only the desperate woman who is able to draw divine energy out of him. And at the house of Jairus, the crowd misses the significance of what Jesus says and actually laughs at him when he says the girl will awaken.
So maybe we’re meant to see that the mere presence of a crowd doesn’t mean those in that crowd actually get the point of what Jesus is saying and doing. We have the tendency to assume that the churches or the movements with the biggest attendance are where the Holy Spirit is most at work. But maybe it doesn’t work that way – maybe those churches or movements are just the most effective at appealing to human tastes.
These intertwined stories seem to urge us to begin deepening our relationship with Jesus today – not to wait until all else fails. To recognize that placing our trust anywhere but him is a sure path to desperation.
And maybe the two stories also warn us against thinking that a big crowd indicates powerful workings of the Spirit. After all, Jesus did one of these healings in the midst of a crowd that missed it entirely, and he did the other behind closed doors to shut out the mockers who thought they understood how things worked.
Let’s pray. Lord, open our hearts today, and fill us with a hunger to grow closer and closer to you. Protect us from our foolish tendency to wait until our suffering becomes more than we can bear before we cry out to you as a last resort. And protect us also from ‘following the crowd’ in our life of faith – from applying human standards that may mislead us about where your Spirit is most powerfully at work. Amen.
Grace and Peace,
Henry
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