Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne and on Poulshot Village Green
Mark 5. 21-43
“your faith has made you well”
We’ve all been in situations where what people don’t say is more important than what they do. That’s certainly true of Jesus in this morning’s Bible reading. But to understand why, let’s look first at exactly where today’s reading sits in the overall story of Mark’s Gospel.
Ilya Repin, Raising of Jairus Daughter (1870), hangs in the Mikhailovsky Palace, St Petersburg.
Today’s reading consists of the last two miracle stories in a run of four, all set in Galilee early in Jesus’ mission, that Mark uses to establish Jesus’ power. Between them they establish Jesus’ power over the forces of nature, over disease, over demons, and over death. Last week in church, we heard one of the other of these stories, the stilling of the storm on the Sea of Galilee; the other story, the casting out of demons into a herd of pigs from the poor tormented madman who self-harms constantly, is also one of the most familiar of Jesus’ healing miracles.
The supernatural elements of these stories can make them seem remote from our world. Yet look more closely and we see people who, while perhaps living in a very different culture with very different technology from us, are people who tick just like us. The way Jesus is constantly mobbed by crowds as He travels around these little market towns and fishing villages in Galilee reminds me very much of today’s celebrity culture. Not everyone in these towns and villages thinks well of Jesus, and as much as the adulation of the crowds, the abuse He receives from the Pharisees reminds me of our own culture and its toxic side, which social media has revealed to be regrettably widespread. A third reminder of our own world is the desperation of the chronically ill people who approach Jesus seeking healing, people like the woman with the issue of blood—and for all that we can cure many diseases in a way that would seem almost magical to the people of Christ’s time, the reality is that at some point most of us end up living with chronic and debilitating illnesses, and the fear and misery they bring is unchanged.
That’s the context for us to notice what Jesus doesn’t say here. He doesn’t say, “I’m the Son of God.” He doesn’t even say, “I’m sent from God.” He certainly doesn’t say, “I can heal people by magic, and I deserve to be paid for it—so front up with the readies, folks!”
In fact, Jesus doesn’t claim the credit for these miracles at all. What He says to the woman suffering from chronic bleeding is, “your faith has made you well”; and what He says to Jairus is, “do not fear, only believe.”
He certainly wasn’t like a lot of religious charlatans, then or now, who use their charisma and capacity to inspire faith in others to make a good living for themselves. He wasn’t even like a lot of well-meaning but not entirely healthy religious leaders who look to provide worried people with simple answers. Now, remember that Mark has just claimed that Jesus can control the weather and He can cast out demons; these stories are part of Mark telling us that Jesus is someone with powers no human can possess. But what Jesus does in this story isn’t to use His power to establish control, but instead to inspire faith in people so they can fulfil God’s purposes for themselves by themselves. The crowd is looking for someone with magic powers, but Jesus instead reveals to people their God-given power. Just as God the Father gave us free will, so God the Son seeks not to control us but to liberate us from all that oppresses us and keeps us from living in accordance with our human nature, and that is in the image and likeness of God’s own nature.
Here’s the second thing I’d like us to notice. It’s tempting to think that people back in Jesus’ time were a bit uneducated and imagined miraculous healings happening all over the place because they didn’t understand science and stuff. But in these stories people don’t think these incidents are normal. The woman suffering from persistent bleeding is absolutely freaked out, shaking with terror when she realises that she actually has been healed when she touched Jesus’ cloak. Or notice how people laugh at Jesus when he says Jairus’ daughter is not dead but just sleeping.
Jesus is an agent of things happening that are beyond human power. Jesus seeks to empower people, but also to remind them in whose image they are made, and point them towards God. Wonderful and glorious as the human race is, we are merely creatures. We reflect the glory of our creator, who is great and wonderful beyond our capacity to even imagine. Jesus Christ is that glorious God made one of us. His mission is not so much to heal physical illnesses but the spiritual illnesses that have driven us apart from God since the dawn of time. That mission will be fulfilled at the end of Mark’s Gospel, on the Cross.
A third thing to notice is that these two stories are interleaved with one another. Mark wants to us to read them together, and to understand that each of these miracles relates to the other. That’s not just because both are about faith, but also about the contrast between the main characters in each.
The woman who suffered from persistent bleeding, was ritually unclean according to laws in Leviticus, and she made anything she touched ritually unclean too, which means in this story she made Jesus ritually unclean. Now, not everybody in First Century Palestine was that worried about ritual cleanness, but pious respectable Jews were, and that was certainly supposed to include Bible teachers like Jesus. At the other end of the scale is the synagogue leader, Jairus. He is a pillar of respectability. In fact, people like that in the Gospels often criticised Jesus for being too friendly with outsiders and people who weren’t too bothered with religious rules.
So Jesus is established in this pair of stories as being for respectable insiders and for outsiders considered beyond the pale. Mark is saying here that Jesus breaks barriers down and is for everyone.
Having explored all that, let’s return to faith, because it is central here. In what do we put our faith in in our era? It isn’t God, not for most of us, even for many of us who believe. We put our faith in systems and structures, in technological progress and democratic institutions. But everywhere we look these mainstays of our civilisation and society are becoming less effective, sometimes even breaking down entirely. We proclaim tolerance and diversity as the lodestars of our society and yet many people can barely stand to have a serious conversation with somebody who votes a different way than they do.
Election week reminds us that if our culture has an object of worship, it is we human beings ourselves—and therefore we are reminded that although we are worthy of free-will, including the free choice of our leaders, we are certainly not worthy of worship.
So the lessons I’d draw out from these healing stories for our own time and place is to remember that Christ came to break down the divisions between us, regardless of how we vote, what colour are skin is, or our sexuality, or even whether we believe in God at all. He also came to remind us that we reflect God’s glory and when we forget our dependence on God then society inevitably erodes. Ultimately, God came into the world as Jesus Christ to heal us from the spiritual illnesses, of self-will, conceit, and arrogance, that divide us from God and therefore from one another, and in healing those illnesses to make us fit for Heaven.
And now to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, be ascribed all might, majesty, dominion, and power, as is most justly His due, now and forevermore. Amen.
Top banner image—the Sea of Galilee near Magdala. © Gerry Lynch, 9 November 2024.
