Until Everyone Is Healed
“Until Everyone Is Healed” Lamentations 3:22-33; Psalm 30; 2 Corinthians 8:7-15; Mark 5:21-43
In today’s psalm we pray: “While I felt secure, I said, ‘I shall never be disturbed – you, Lord, with your favor, have made me as strong as a mountain.’ Then you hid your face, and I was filled with fear.”
In today’s gospel passage we have two stories of people who were filled with fear, who felt that God was hidden from them, who were overwhelmed and powerless to help themselves, who were healed and restored by Jesus. Two stories of people who trusted in God when they had nowhere else to turn who find healing and wholeness. And yet these two stories come down to us as a single narrative, one story healing coming as an interruption to another story of healing. And I want to propose that the connection between these two stories is important – that this connection tells us something we would not get from either story separately, about God and about the project of healing and restoration that Jesus comes to begin.
The first story begins as Jesus returns from his trip across the sea that we read about last week, when the storm was stilled. No sooner has Jesus returned that a large crowd gathers to meet Jesus on the beach. And out of the crowd comes a man named Jairus, a leader of the synagogue, whose 12-year-old daughter is on the verge of death.
Many of us can probably relate to Jairus. He is a leader in the synagogue, the father of a good churchgoing family, perhaps he’s on the Council. A successful person, someone who has done everything right, someone others look up to, someone others automatically pay attention to. And he is beside himself because his daughter is desperately ill and he doesn’t know what to do.
How many of us are familiar with the story of Jairus! You try to do things right, you provide for your children and your family as best you can, you can point to so many blessings that you and your family have received. And yet, something happens to your child, to your grandchild, to someone you love deeply. A physical illness. Or an addiction, or depression, or who knows what else. Many of you do know. And there is nothing you can do to fix it. Nothing you can do. If there were something you could do about it, you would move mountains to make it happen, but there is nothing you can do.
This is Jairus, joining the crowd welcoming Jesus back home on the beach. He steps up, falls at the feet of Jesus, saying, “Jesus, please, my daughter is dying. I know you can make her well again, I know you can save her life. Come, Jesus. Please. I’m begging you. Please come.”
And Jesus does come. Now, not everyone in the gospels who comes to Jesus for healing is necessary healed, and even when they are it’s not always in the way that they had expected. Perhaps Jairus thought Jesus would heal his daughter the way Jesus healed Simon Peter’s mother-in-law, in bed with a fever – Jesus took her by the hand, raised her up, and she went about her business. But on the way, the word comes: Jairus, your daughter is dead. It’s too late. Tell the teacher not to bother. And before Jairus can speak Jesus tells him what he has just told the disciples in the boat during the storm: Do not fear, keep on trusting.
Keep on trusting. Keep on trusting that God loves all of God’s children even more than we do – if that were possible. That as passionately as Jairus wanted to save his daughter, God wants to save her even more – and that as final as death seems to us, our deaths are no obstacle to the living God accomplishing the healing and salvation that God has set out to bring. And even if events are not unfolding the way we wanted to, in the end nothing can stop the power of God to raise us to life.
In the middle of this beautiful and powerful story, Mark tells us another story. About a very different person, but someone that many of us also can relate to. As the crowd is making its way with Jesus to the house of Jairus, a woman in the crowd touches Jesus. For twelve years this woman has been suffering from hemorrhages; the older translations refer to her as the woman “with an issue of blood.” And did she have issues! Not just her physical illness – which, as many of you who deal with chronic illnesses know very well, is difficult enough. The physical pain of an unpleasant illness that just goes on and on for twelve years, that just drains your energy and your eagerness to jump out of bed in the morning. But in her culture, an illness that involves the uncontrolled flow of blood also makes her socially and religiously unclean. Someone everyone has to stay away from, lest they also become unclean – and so she is shunned and isolated for twelve years. Twelve years quarantined from family and friends, unable to have a family of her own (which was so important for women’s place in the society of that time). Even the doctors wouldn’t have anything to do with her once they had taken all of her money for one failed cure after another.
This woman knows she is not supposed to touch anyone – lest she pass her uncleanness on to them. And yet she reaches out to touch Jesus. As if she somehow knew that she would not pass her uncleanness on to Jesus, but that Jesus would pass his health and righteousness and life to her. And this is exactly what happens – the simple act of reaching out and touching Jesus immediately stops the issue of blood, immediately brings her a feeling of healing and wholeness. Immediately everything that has broken her relationships and her ability to connect with others is removed, and her life is restored to her.
She has reached out to Jesus, when all the rules said she should not touch anyone – but she has done so under the cover of a bustling crowd. But Jesus senses what has happened. And it is important for him to find the woman and to name what has happened. The woman comes forward, “in fear and trembling,” and confesses her breaking of the rules. And Jesus says to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well. Go in peace and be healed.” Jesus names that it is her faith, her trust that God could provide for her healing and restoration beyond what the rules say, that has made her well. And Jesus names her, “Daughter.” She is no longer an outcast, no longer a social leper, no longer a nameless face in the crowd. She is a daughter. She is a beloved child of God and it is her faith in her status as a beloved daughter that brings her healing.
Both of these are beautiful stories of healing and faith. Of trust that God can and will bring healing and new life, even when we don’t know what else to do, even when the rules tell us we can’t hope for God’s love, even when by all appearances God is silent and far away. Whether like Jairus and his family we’ve done everything right and received countless blessings, or like the woman with an issue we’ve broken all the rules and carried unimaginable burdens, in the end what matters is faith in the God who can solve what we are powerless to fix and who can bring life and hope out of anything and even out of nothing.
But in giving these two stories together to us as a single story of Jesus working to make the kingdom of God alive in the world, the gospel writers show us something even more. There are so many dimensions to this combined story that I could go on all day, but let me briefly just mention a couple.
The first is that there is no competition here for who can get healed and who can’t. You could imagine Jairus and his family getting upset with Jesus when he stops his urgent mission to save Jairus’s daughter to talk with this outsider. This woman who is rightly shunned from polite society, this woman who shouldn’t have even been in a crowd where people are jostling and touching each other – why is Jesus wasting his time with her? My daughter is dying! Come on, let’s get moving! And you could just as easily imagine the woman thinking, Oh, sure, when the rich girl is sick everybody rushes to help her. And here I am for twelve years – this girl’s whole lifetime – sick with this God-awful disease and who’s going to care about me?
You could totally imagine either – or both – of those responses, and yet there’s not a hint of either one in the story. Because in Jesus there is enough healing for everybody. It’s not like if someone else gets healing or love or attention from Jesus there won’t be enough for me. There is plenty of grace for everybody and it’s not a competition.
And even more. I do not believe that it is a coincidence that Jesus does not heal the daughter of Jairus until he has first healed the outcast woman, the woman with the hemorrhage. It is easy for us to understand the concern Jairus has for his daughter. Especially in the moment of crisis I’m sure the last thing on the mind of Jairus was the homeless woman with the untouchable disease who had been there his daughter’s whole life. But Jesus will not come to heal the daughter of Jairus until this other daughter is also healed.
I want to be careful about saying this, because it’s not a competition, right? There’s enough healing and grace for everyone. But if the healing that comes from God is for everybody, then God does not heal anyone unless and until God has healed everyone. Yes, you are concerned above all with your daughter, with the one you love, and that’s normal and natural and completely understandable. But God loves all the daughters, the one you care about more than you care about your own life, and the one you never even stop to think about. And until all the daughters are healed, none of them are going to be healed. So if all we care about is whether our daughters are healed, and we are indifferent to or even getting in the way of the healing of other daughters, we may have to wait a long time for God’s healing to become manifest to us.
This is why it’s so important for us as a congregation, as a community of disciples of Jesus, to pay special attention to the people we would otherwise overlook. To make a conscious choice to include LGBTQ people, who are so often treated as outcasts and rule-breakers who don’t deserve anything. Just this week a school board meeting in the next county dissolves into violence, with injuries and arrests – why? Because those daughters might get to play on their school’s sports teams! This is the world that we live in, all of us, our daughters and those daughters alike.
To stand for inclusion, to be actively working against racial injustice, to provide assistance to communities impacted much more severely by Covid than our own community has been – these are things we are compelled to do. Not because it’s politically correct, or “woke,” or whatever – but because it’s the gospel. God’s grace and God’s healing are for everybody, and if there is anyone being left outside of the grace and the healing of God then that grace and healing have not arrived yet for us either. The God to whom we come for healing and salvation is a God who loves all the daughters, and we cannot pray and ask this God for our own healing and the healing of those we love, unless our vision and our prayer is for the healing of all the beloved children of God.