Sermons
Trinity 3
In the two interleaved stories of today’s gospel Jesus is approached by two characters with very different social status, each of whom turns to him in desperation. Jairus, the respected synagogue leader who should be suspicious of Jesus seeks the healing of his deparately ill daughter whilst the woman in the crowd whose illness makes her ritually unclean makes her way to touch Jesus’ clothing having faith that this merest brush with the divine, will make her well. This section of Mark’s gospel explores the tension between the hidden and the revealed aspects of Jesus’ power and these two stories say a great deal about the way that power operates outside and in contradiction to established patterns of social interaction.
These two petitioners of Jesus, in many ways, could not be more different. Jairus is the last person you might expect to see falling at Jesus’ feet. In Mark’s gospel as in the others the leaders of Hebraic religion get a very bad press, they are often seen as the opponents of the proclamation being revealed in Jesus’ ministry, they deny and mock jesus’ divine pretensions, and they pursue him to the cross with charges that reveal how much they fear what Jesus is bringing to light. But despite all of this, when Jesus is approached in an attitude of incipient faith by Jairus one of the leaders of the synagogue, he immediately responds and the crowd set off to Jairus’ house to see the young girl who is ill.
And the person who interrupts this procession to Jairus’ house is from the other end of the scale of religious respectability. The nature of her illness would have meant that she would have been declared perpetually unclean, and Jairus is the very sort of person who would have condemned her. She would have been seen as being at fault for being unable to have children, which is nearly always seen as the woman’s fault in OT literature, and she would have been utterly cast out of religious society and possibly most other forms of society. And as this outcast of a woman scorned by all for being ill, pushes her way through the crowd she of course - by touching them all - makes them all unclean, defiles them all. Imagine how much courage she must have had to fight her way through to Jesus and imagine the crowds shock when Jesus perceives that power has gone out of him and to whom! The woman by touching Jesus’ clothing breaks down the barrier between clean and unclean and between men and women, the woman’s action destroys the carefully designed religious systems that exclude women and associate their sexuality with danger.
And as this point in the story is reached with one woman restored to the possibilities of life-bearing health, restored to health through faith and restored to the community with a story that should transform that community, at this point Jesus continues his journey to the other woman in the story, a young woman just on the verge of life-bearing age, marrying age for the time. And despite all that has happened when he arrives at Jairus’ house he is mocked, ‘they laughed at him’, before he goes in to break down more expectations and barriers. To the assembled mockers the girl is already dead and to touch a corpse is to break yet another religious taboo but just as the barrier between the unclean woman and the community of faith which had abandoned her had to be broken down, so the final barrier or boundary between life and death needs to be trampled upon. The resurrection hope that Mark’s Christian community was preserving against the mocking of those around about needs publicly to be given expression. The Christiana hope that those who sleep in Christ will in the fullness of time rise to share in the life of God is expressed and brought forward in time in this type of Christian resurrection. Jesus says Rise, little girl, little girl get up. A second woman is restored to the possibilities of adult life, the parallels with the woman in the crowd are very strong, both women are given the gifts of life-bearing once again. In both stories barriers fall down at the divine touch and wholeness of life is restored.
As often with the gospel stories, the characters in these two stories are worth pondering deeply and I would point us in one particular direction for further thought.
Jairus is accepted almost despite who he is, he is accepted despite being the most religiously respectable person around, the leader of the synagogue no less, the person with knowledge and power; whilst the woman in the crowd has to push her way through the barriers of religious intolerance and ignorance that have condemned her. We do not need to look far in religious circles to find oppression of women practised by supposedly religious men, men who often have well thought out theological theories which back up their prejudice. Jesus’ ctions in these two stories shatter the idea that women can be seen as a second sex, a weaker sex. But we learn so slowly from Jesus. Women are still having to push through the crowds, still having to put up with being excluded by men who should know better. Tay’s gospel says that this is nothing more than pernicious nonsense and it is a nonsense you will find alive and well in the Church, when you come across it remember the woman in the crowd and challenge it.