Sunday Sermon: Mark 5.21-43 Jairus' daughter and the woman with the haemorrhage

Mark 5:21-43

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. Then one of the synagogue leaders, named Jairus, came, and when he saw Jesus, he fell at his feet. He 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.” So Jesus went with him. A large crowd followed and pressed around him.  And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years. 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. When she heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, because she thought, “If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed.” Immediately her bleeding stopped and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering. At once Jesus realized that power had gone out from him. He turned around in the crowd and asked, “Who touched my clothes?” “You see the people crowding against you,” his disciples answered, “and yet you can ask, ‘Who touched me?’ ” But Jesus kept looking around to see who had done it. Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell at his feet and, trembling with fear, told him the whole truth. He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.” While Jesus was still speaking, some people came from the house of Jairus, the synagogue leader. “Your daughter is dead,” they said. “Why bother the teacher anymore?” Overhearing what they said, Jesus told him, “Don’t be afraid; just believe.” He did not let anyone follow him except Peter, James and John the brother of James. When they came to the home of the synagogue leader, Jesus saw a commotion, with people crying and wailing loudly. He went in and said to them, “Why all this commotion and wailing? The child is not dead but asleep.” 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. He took her by the hand and said to her, “Talitha koum!” (which means “Little girl, I say to you, get up!”) Immediately the girl stood up and began to walk around (she was twelve years old). At this they were completely astonished. He gave strict orders not to let anyone know about this, and told them to give her something to eat.

Mark’s Gospel reads like a whirlwind: when I was a student, Mark’s Gospel was one of our set texts and one of the things that sticks in my mind from those lectures is Mark’s sense of urgency. His frequent use of the word “immediately” sets up an almost frantic pace. Immediately such and such happened and then immediately Jesus said or did this or that. And that sense of constant activity is underlined at the start of this morning’s passage which tells us that Jesus “again” crossed the lake: he’s been backwards and forwards across the Sea of Galilee, teaching, preaching and healing and when I looked back at the events that precede this passage I found the story of the man with the unclean spirits who, when they came out possessed a herd of pigs. Before that we have Jesus calming a storm at sea, having had to be woken first from a deep sleep, both events suggesting huge emotional and physical effort. Then we have Jesus teaching through parables and everywhere being mobbed by the crowds. Add to that the relentless heat of Palestine which this week we’ve had a bit of taster of and we have a picture of a man who must have lived on the edge of constant exhaustion. Perhaps that’s why he so frequently took to boats: away from the crowds, gently rocked by the waves he could rest at last and maybe his fishermen disciples kept the boat in open water longer to allow more sleep rather than crossing immediately to the other side.  And what does Jesus find when they get to the other side? “A great crowd gathered around him.” and he’s off again in that frantic round of teaching, healing and preaching with people grabbing at him, shouting and imploring him for help, pressing in on him at every side and we can picture the disciples trying to carve a way through the crowd like bodyguards – and all this, still quite early on in his ministry.

In this public chaos a woman is waiting her chance to approach Jesus by stealth, but before she manages to pluck up her courage, she’s beaten to it by an anxious father – presumably only two of many clamouring for Jesus’ attention. Jairus, a man of faith as made clear by Mark in his description of him as a leader of the synagogue, literally falls in Jesus’ path and apart from the clear hint of supplication and worship in someone throwing themselves down in front of you, Jesus can’t ignore the man: he can’t get past him. He has to respond. “My little daughter is at the point of death. Come and lay your hands on her, so that she may be made well and live.” Isn’t that an amazingly strong statement of faith in Jesus? There’s no preamble, no sense that the man has doubts. He’s straight in: “You can do this. Please.”

And now, just to show both the nature of Jesus’ appeal and growing reputation and the melee that surrounds him, Mark reintroduces the second supplicant, the woman who’d been quietly waiting: not waiting to speak to Jesus, though, just waiting to get close enough to touch him. She couldn’t possibly have approached him directly because she was a woman alone, and social norms would have prevented her from speaking to Jesus and because of the nature of her illness, a longstanding gynaecological problem, she would have been deemed to have been unclean and shouldn’t even have left her home to go out in public. In spite of the invisible role in which society had placed her, she summonses the courage to approach Jesus. 

This woman’s faith may not be so obvious at first glance, but subtle as it is, given what she’d been prepared to overcome to be there, her faith must rank with that of the desperate father. Refusing to be powerless any longer, she breaks through the social, cultural and religious barriers that have relegated her to isolation.

In the midst of a hundred grasping hands, Jesus feels a powerful connection with one person. The woman believes that if she simply touches his cloak she’ll be healed. With everyone milling about, Jesus asks, "Who touched me?" And in effect, the disciples respond, "Really? Are you serious? Just look around.” The woman, however, instinctively knows that something has changed and, nervous as she is, makes herself known to find no condemnation, only compassion and healing. Reaching through the gender barrier, stretching across the ritual purity boundaries, this woman displays extraordinary faith, and Jesus recognizes it.  Unlike the other miracle stories, Jesus doesn’t pronounce any healing words.  He also doesn’t recoil or regard himself as contaminated.  Jesus does nothing to bring the attention back to Him.  Instead, he overwhelms her with gentleness.  He does nothing but acknowledge her.  He simply calls her "daughter;" and in so doing, he not only gives her the blessing that no one else was willing to give, he acknowledges the power of female faith.  In seeking the source of the healing, he cites it as being her own faith.  Her courage to break through the conditioning of a lifetime, brings her a condition she can barely remember: peace.

This whole incident must have taken mere minutes but in the meantime Jairus’ daughter has died and Jesus is interrupted again, this time by mourners who come to tell Jairus that his daughter has died and that there is now no point in having Jesus come to heal her. When Jesus tells the crowd that she’s not dead but sleeping, they laugh at him. In spite of their seeing his miracles, in spite of the teachings they had heard, when Jesus tells them that their mourning is premature, they laugh in his face.  This is the nature of the crowd: a crowd is easily swayed between extremes, in this case between adoration and ridicule and perhaps this’ll help us to realise that Jesus was not always safe in the crowd and that very often his very being with the crowd was not just motivated by compassion but was a bravery motivated by compassion.  Jesus may be a healer, but the girl is dead. What can he do about death, the mourners scoffed? Well, they soon see because Jesus goes to the house and restores the child to life.

At first glance, we might think that these two stories, lumped together as one, are really unrelated until Mark adds at the end of the story a kind of afterthought: oh, yes, by the way, the little girl was twelve years old. Perhaps we might sense something more is going on here than two stories simply sandwiched together. The woman had been sick for twelve years so maybe there are other connections. Jesus addresses the woman, who would have been considered unclean, as "daughter." By touching Jesus, the woman threatens to spread her ritual uncleanliness to Jesus. When Jesus takes the dead girl by the hand, he dares to make himself unclean because he transgresses another boundary by touching the dead. The healing touch of Jesus makes them well instead of making him unclean and he restores these two women to abundant life. Two needy outsiders become daughters of God.

Both the woman and the father of the little girl take Jesus seriously. Both believe that Jesus can restore their lives. Both kneel before him. This two-part story shows us that Jesus is active in the world with divine power to restore life, abundant life for everyone.

But this isn’t just a story about healing as you may well have been picking up as we’ve gone along. In many respects the healing elements are almost incidental: they’re simply the hook to hang a deeper understanding on and what a shame it would have been, I think, if we’d concentrated on the healing and missed the more subtle depths of these stories because if they’re about anything, these stories are about faith and God’s grace challenging and breaking through cultural and religious norms to reveal a new and deeper aspect of that same grace.

The crowds weren’t expecting it; they weren’t really open to it and all but a few probably didn’t even notice it. In that light, I think we have to ask to what extent we’re truly open to God’s grace breaking through in ways we didn’t expect; whether we’d be open to it – or would we stick with what we’re used to and are familiar with? Would we be numbered amongst the few that even recognise it or would we be with those who laugh and ridicule?

 

A sermon about seeds Mark 4.26-34

Mark 4:26-34

 

He also said, “This is what the kingdom of God is like. A man scatters seed on the ground. Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how. All by itself the soil produces grain—first the stalk, then the head, then the full kernel in the head. As soon as the grain is ripe, he puts the sickle to it, because the harvest has come.”

Again he said, “What shall we say the kingdom of God is like, or what parable shall we use to describe it? It is like a mustard seed, which is the smallest of all seeds on earth. Yet when planted, it grows and becomes the largest of all garden plants, with such big branches that the birds can perch in its shade.”

With many similar parables Jesus spoke the word to them, as much as they could understand. He did not say anything to them without using a parable. But when he was alone with his own disciples, he explained everything.

I posed a question to my friends on Facebeook recently: how often have you used a quadratic equation since you left school? I got a few positive responses from maths teachers and from parents helping with homework but in the main the response was that the quadratic equation was something that most of us were very happy to leave at the school gates and promptly forget.

I wasn’t very good at Maths at school and once got into trouble for writing “who cares?” as an answer to a question that went something like, “If a train leaves York at 9.45, travelling south at an average speed of 57 mph and a car leaves Penzance at 13.27, travelling east at an average speed at 42 miles per hour, how many sweets does Susan have left after she’s given Peter 9 oranges?”

It’s a mindset, I know, but I’m not one for puzzles of any sort: if someone starts that sort of conversation I just glaze over. “I’m not even trying. Just give me the answer and then I’ll tell you how much I care.” Catherine Tate’s wonderful comedy character Lauren Cooper, the gobby schoolgirl, sums it up for me:

“Lauren, you have to try, it’s important.”

“Not to me it’s not!”

I sometimes wonder if any of the disciples had this same feeling when Jesus told parables. I like to imagine a couple of the more recalcitrant ones sat in the back row muttering, “Oh here we go again. Just tell us the answer. Life’s too short!”

The parable, Jesus’ favourite teaching aid: some short and pithy, like today’s examples and others long and complex, like The Good Samaritan or The Sower. Now the parable of the Sower really sums up all of Jesus’ teaching: there are those who hear the word gladly but get side-tracked by other distractions. They’re the ones who have shallow roots. Others are the stony ground where the teaching has no impact whatsoever and still others are the ones where the seed takes root and they bear great fruit. (I over summarise, but you get the idea. You know the parable well.) That this parable is the key to all of Jesus’ teaching is clear when he rebukes the disciples, “Do you not understand this parable? Then how will you understand all the parables?”

The point is that Jesus only occasionally explained the meaning of the parables straight off. He liked to leave the ideas hanging in the air for people to think about and struggle with. Sometimes he would relent and explain the meaning to his immediate group of disciples, generally frustrated that they hadn’t worked the meaning out for themselves – the disciples get a pretty bad press in Mark‘s Gospel for being a bit slow. As Victoria Wood once noted, “There wasn’t dyslexia in my day. You just sat at the back with raffia.”

Unlike the Parable of the Sower which Jesus had just told and explained in detail, the two parables we’re given today are (mercifully) short: perhaps, like any good teacher, Jesus recognised that his listeners had limited concentration spans. There are no long narratives and no deeply hidden meanings here. It’s as if Jesus is saying, “We’ve done the hard stuff. This is by way of consolidation.”

Yes, they are simple stories but they’re not just about how little things turn in to big things.  They’re more about how the Kingdom of God takes over everything around it.  So, yes, more of, “The Kingdom of God is like this” stories.

The seeds take over the field.  They’re small and seem insignificant, but they change everything around them.  That's how the Kingdom of God works. It’s good to be reminded about that because sometimes we simply fail to see that sort of change. Perhaps we aren’t looking for it. Perhaps we don’t recognise it when it happens. Perhaps it takes us by surprise when it does happen.

I’ll give you a simple example: I started to work in a prison three years ago now and it’s busy. It’s don’t-have-time-to-think busy and that means that it’s really easy to miss signs of the Kingdom on a daily basis.

Just before Easter last year, I ran a Lent group on one wing. Twenty-two men opted to attend and they took part with great enthusiasm and showed some real perception and evidence of spiritual depth. A couple of weeks later, the Bishop came in and confirmed eight of them. Now it’s not easy being a man of faith in a prison: but these men, regardless of their crimes, had come to a point in their faith journeys where they wished to make a public declaration of that faith; to show true penitence and to strive to live a changed life for the remainder of their sentences and to seek to live as better role models to those around them - and many have noticed the change in these men’s lives, other men who are not generally easily impressed.

There’s a strong belief amongst the regular chapel-goers in the prison that you can move on from the shame that lead so many into mental health problems and a downward spiral of self-loathing; that you can be released from all of that to start afresh even if you know you’ll never leave prison. For these men, coming to a deeper understanding of God was also, inevitably, to come to a deeper understanding of themselves. At some time in the past – and I take no personal credit for this – something started to work in the lives of these men: something initially as tiny as a mustard seed set in motion something that would grow and flourish and, to borrow from the parable of the sower, to “bear fruit thirty-fold, sixty-fold, a hundred-fold.”

I think the point is that often we don’t see the wood for the trees and because things don’t always work out in church life in the ways we expect, we lose heart and fail to recognise that something is happening but it’s something different, or it’s happening to someone we don’t see any more because of something that we said or did some time ago which set in motion a chain of events which has taken time to come to fruition. We may never know, but because we don’t see it, doesn’t mean it’s not happening.

There is, though, another meaning in these parables for those of us who have been on our own pilgrimages of faith for some time: there is a theme of growth and maturity to be discerned at the heart of these short stories. To what extent has “the harvest come”, in the words of the first parable in each of our lives? Have we “put forth large branches” in the words of the second parable? The Kingdom of God is like this: we have to make room for the Kingdom in our lives. We must allow it to take over our lives in a big way. When we allow God to be significant in our lives, we create a path for him to be significant in the lives of other people too.

Spiritual growth and maturity: in his first letter to the Corinthians, St. Paul talks about the mother’s milk of spirituality and notes that his listeners were not yet ready for solid food. How many years have you been on your pilgrimage of faith? Where are you in relation to the solid food of spirituality? One way to assess this is to take an honest look back to your early years of Christian faith. In which ways have you moved on? What ideas and attitudes have you left behind and which have replaced them? What have been the shifts in your spiritual awareness and understanding and what – or who – have been the influences for those changes? How has your faith matured? What’s the evidence?  – and it’s a personal inventory: you’ve no need to tell anyone your conclusions. For some, it’s the difference between accepting and questioning, for others it’s the espousal of the justice issues we find in the Gospels, for others a growing awareness, perhaps, of God’s transcendence and the realisation that the God you first met is much bigger than you ever dared to think. Could it, perhaps, have something to do with the way you now express your faith to others? Is about a greater sense of confidence or assuredness? Is it about a growing recognition that the Kingdom of God is something for the wider world and not just the individual convert? Does it lie in your recognition that the way you live your life needs to reflect kingdom values? Is it linked to being willing to engage with the big theological questions in ways you’d never have imagined yourself engaging in the past?

I can’t answer those questions for you, but they – and a hundred and one similar questions – are part of the inventory of spiritual maturity. Are we asking those questions? Has the harvest come? Are we putting forth large branches? Or are we still at the stage of refusing to engage with the depth of the puzzle that is the Kingdom?

Amen