THIRTEENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME

SCOTT ANDERSON

Readings for this Sunday:
2 Samuel 1:1, 17-27 | Psalm 130 | 2 Corinthians 8:7-15 | Mark 5:21-43

“The one who had much did not have too much,
and the one who had little did not have too little.”

That seems to be a key to well-being for the Corinthian church, a fair balance, a stance of sharing and enough for all, the recognition that laws that bar some from life to the full while marrying others to privilege just won’t work for the long haul. And for us to, for all of life, if we take this gospel seriously and allow it to speak to our hungers and hopes. Perhaps it is this axiom that should guide our reading of Mark as well.

Although Jairus was rich, it seems he could not bring himself to be poor until his daughter lay on her death bed and he fell to his knees in realization that nothing else mattered. But he was wrong because even then he didn’t remember how poor he was. It wasn’t until Jesus stopped, halted everything for the sake of this unnamed woman, this woman whose life had been taken away from her some twelve years ago with the occurrence of a tragic event. For twelve years she had hemorrhaged. For twelve years she bled. And for twelve years she had been unclean, unacceptable, unapproachable. 

Clearly she had been a woman with some means. The very fact that she had money of her own to spend on doctors to try to solve this says a lot in a time when women themselves were property and not owners. And yet, even that hadn’t been enough. She emptied her storehouses on health care and the best technology could offer, and still no cure. 

You could imagine her longing for death. But even death would not come for her. Instead she became an untouchable, a pariah, one of those anonymous spectacles who walk around in our cities, bent over, pushing shopping carts, rushing from nowhere to nowhere. Her husband divorced her. He had to, otherwise he’d have sacrificed his own life, his entire family. Otherwise no one in the family could have gone to synagogue. They would have had to give up their friends, their work, their life. It is better that one suffer, after all, than the whole people. 

It wasn’t until Jesus stopped Jairus and the crowd in their tracks and forced them to pay attention to this woman who had touched him, and now emerged from the shadows to tell him the whole truth that Jairus remembered what he had long ago willed himself to forget. 

Think about it. Jesus didn’t have to stop to single out this poor woman who had been suffering. He could have just allowed the power to go out. He could have allowed the healing to happen quietly and with dignity, and just gone on his way, gone quietly with Jairus to the daughter. 

But he didn’t. 

He stopped everything. He chose to create a scene. He seems to have done that quite often, in fact. In the midst of the panic and the anxiety and the sense of life-and-death urgency, he drew the attention of the whole crowd to this woman whom we would expect had no desire to be seen. He invited the whole crowd to pay attention to a daughter of God, to a tragedy and an injustice this village had supported at least by its inaction and refusal to question the laws that tore families apart rather than holding them together. He invites the crowd to look closely and see in this withered spectacle, a woman of ultimate worth, and not only that, but the mother of a child, the wife of a husband, a woman who had once been so vital, who had once had a life that child-birth and bleeding and senseless laws had ruined. Jesus stopped everything and gave the community another chance to make it right, to restore the family, and perhaps even to change its course. 

And that is when Jairus realized that there standing before him, singled out by Jesus and his refusal to let her go quietly, was his wife whom he had lost when child birth had injured her. There standing before him was the one he had divorced because he was sure he had to, because his culture and his faith said she was ruined, because he was sure there was no other choice, because otherwise he would have had to give up his position of responsibility, he would have had to sacrifice his livelihood.

You see Jesus had in mind not just to heal a daughter, but to heal a family. We do not hear about the mother at the beginning of the story. And it’s not because she’s home with the daughter, it’s because until her healing in the middle of the story, the daughter’s mother was dead. She had died when her religion and its leaders told her that her injury in child-birth made her unclean, untouchable. She had been forced from the side of her husband, the leader of the synagogue and of her beloved now 12-year-old daughter to her frantic search for healing and restoration, and ultimately to the edges of society where she lived as an untouchable. 

And yet, in the Kingdom of God there is new life. In fact two beloved daughters, not just one, are healed. It comes when Jesus says, stop and take a new look at what is going on around you. It comes when the church pays attention, looks and listens and challenges any and all laws that tear apart what belongs together, rebukes any flag that flies for war and separation and distinction whether it is a union jack or the stars and stripes, protests any structure that privileges anyone over another, honors every life with time and loving kindness.

Of course, we don’t know how it all turned out for Jairus and his wife and her child. We are left at the junction of decision because ultimately the story isn’t about Jairus and his family, the story is about us. It is about what we will put up with rather than protest that takes away our life. It is about our own loss and about our own families and about everything we have willed ourselves to forget. It is about what we are going to give up and give back to God and what we are going to hold onto in our vain and deadly attempts at self-justification.

“True growth in holiness,” says Richard Rohr after the spirit of St. Francis, “is a growth in willingness to love and be loved and a surrendering of our willfulness.”  Rohr draws a distinction between the Ten Commandments and the eight Beatitudes of Jesus to draw a helpful distinction for us about the letting go that salvation requires: “With the Beatitudes, there is no social or ego payoff for the false self.” There is no need to be “right” or better than others.  In fact it is the stripping of these needs, the experience of life at the absolute margins of our abilities that leads us to the salvation of God.

This is, of course, what happens when Jairus’ daughter is on her death bed and he is in danger of losing not only her, but ready to remember the wife he long ago refused to fight for, the woman he willed himself to forget in order to hold onto his position, his means of support, and his pride.

“The one who had much did not have too much,
and the one who had little did not have too little.”

The story tells us that we can only save our lives if we lose it. We spend so much time trying not to get lost, trying to hold onto our control and self-assurance. When image becomes everything we become nothing. We tear families and the human family apart. We become so lost that we can’t even see we are lost, much like we can’t see that this story is about a single family until all of a sudden we notice, and then we can’t imagine how we could have ever seen it differently.

But that’s just it. It took something that we couldn’t provide. It took eyes to see, ears to hear that are a gift of Spirit and, as much as we would prefer not to admit it, of the suffering that we spend so much of our energy avoiding. And yet, it is precisely here that our Salvation waits to meet us, to invite us to look closely and deeply and see what was and still can be, to remember how much we belong to each other, to remember how absolutely important each and every speck of creation is to our own life and wholeness, to remember that the church is called to mend the world after the way of this saving one who notices and calls and acts and questions and ultimately guides us back to our true home.

Thanks be to God.