Listen to the audio of today’s Reflection:
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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.
I can’t think of another story in the gospels that has the same form as this one. What we have here is two stories that are linked together – one story happens in the middle of the other. Either story could stand on its own — either could be the basis of a Reflection or a sermon. But the fact that these two stories are interlinked in the gospels seems to indicate that we’re meant to think of them together. And when you look closely, there are certain themes that connect them.
The obvious connection is that both stories are healing stories, and both of the people who are healed are female.
And there’s also the matter of the numbers. The synagogue leader’s little girl is twelve years old and the bleeding woman had suffered from her condition 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 something we’re meant to notice.
I took the step of consulting commentaries to see what the scholars said about why the two stories were linked. But strangely, the scholars don’t help much. The commentaries 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 point out 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 become more and more convinced that the common element of the two stories is the desperation of the people in them.
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.
And there’s another aspect to this woman’s story that might escape those of us who live in 21st century America. For a Hebrew woman, to be bleeding meant she was ritually unclean. She would be forbidden to enter a synagogue or the temple, and anyone who touched her would also be ritually unclean. So she would suffer the isolation of being an outcast in her world.
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 for a member of the Hebrew establishment, 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 human 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 tap into the divine power within 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.
Maybe these intertwined stories are meant 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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