The truth is he’s very unsettling. This Jesus who marches through the pages of the gospel of Mark – he’s unsettling. The disciples are out being tossed around in a storm. They’re thinking they’re going to die. And where is Jesus? Back sleeping on a cushion.
When they wake him up he’s mad at them. He seems to expect them to be calm. He seems to expect them to trust that everything will be alright. He tells them to have courage and believe. Just believe.
Of course, this is after he stares down the wind and the waves the same way that he’s been staring down the demons in all of these stories from Mark. Do you remember two weeks ago when Jesus confronted the unclean spirit in the man in the synagogue? Do you remember what he told the man? “Shut up!” Not a nice thing to say. You can only get away with saying it to demons in polite society. But now this is what he says to the storm. “Silence! Shut up!” The evil forces of the world all get the same treatment, even if they are as natural as a squall on the sea.
He’s unsettling, this Jesus. He seems to know just how to get at the heart of the problem. He comes ashore and there is a man who has been possessed by demons. They have tried to bind this strong man but he keeps breaking the chains. He howls and dashes himself with stones. Nobody seems to know quite what to do with this man, but Jesus knows. He goes right to the root of the problem and addresses the unclean spirit. “Come out!”
The demons are Legion – a Roman military term referring to a grouping of about 5,200 soldiers. They beg Jesus to be sent into a group of neighboring pigs. And so Jesus casts them out and sends them into the pigs – 2,000 of them – and the go rushing off the cliff. It’s unsettling. Especially for the pig farmer. Although, if you’re a pig farmer in a Jewish country you’re probably not expecting a lot of return anyway!
Finally Jesus starts to allow the secret out. Before this Jesus had been telling everyone not to say anything about who he is. But this time, when the man who had been healed asks to come with him, Jesus tells him instead to go tell his friends what the Lord had done for him. And he goes and does just that. The word is starting to spread.
Then Jesus goes on and he meets Jairus. Jairus is the ruler of the synagogue in this seaside
town. He’s one of the religious leaders and most of them have not been too keen about this wandering Galilean prophet. Later in the story it is men like him who crucify Jesus.
We don’t expect these two to be in the same story together except as opponents, but Jairus has a little problem. No, make that a big problem. No, make that a life-or-death problem. Jairus has a 12-year-old daughter, a “dear daughter” he calls her, and she is dying. Suddenly nothing else matters. Suddenly it doesn’t matter that the rules of the day say that he’s not supposed to like this Jesus. It doesn’t matter that he’s a threat to social order. It doesn’t matter that he’s an unsettling figure and a menace to the status quo. When your child is sick you want someone to unsettle the status quo. You want someone to change the channel, run roughshod over whatever ails them. If you have children you know what I mean.
So when Jairus hears that this Jesus’ character is in town he goes down to see him. He fights his way through the crowd. He falls down at Jesus’ feet. No other religious leader in any of the gospels does anything like this, but this is a desperate man and he throws himself down at Jesus’ feet and says, “Come and lay your hands on my daughter so that she can be saved and live.” And Jesus goes with him.
Now this is a pretty nifty story. Social barriers come crashing down. Jairus was willing to set aside all the things that would have kept him from associating with Jesus. Jesus is willing to walk with this man who would normally be opposing him in order to heal his daughter. The next scene in this story should be Jesus going to Jairus’ home and healing his sick daughter. But a funny thing happens on the way to the healing.
Jesus has set out for Jairus’ house and once again, as usual in Mark’s gospel, throngs of people surround him. In the midst of this mob there is this woman who is going to make Jesus do a U-turn. Now she is not a prestigious figure like Jairus. In fact…she’s about as far down the social prestige ladder as you can get from the ruler of the synagogue. As a woman she would never have associated with someone like Jairus. As a woman, in that culture, she would never even have approached a man who was not her relative. That was just a no-no from the start.
But there was another reason this woman would not have approached others, especially men. You see, this woman had her own 12-year-old to worry about. For twelve years she had suffered from a disease which brought her physical pain. But the physical pain was not even the half of it.
In Jewish society, a flow of blood made a woman ritually unclean. Those who touched her became unclean. Today we say, “That’s silly. That’s absurd. That’s superstitious. That’s cruel.” But in her day it was the way of the world. So disease was not her only illness. For twelve long years she was a social outcast as well.
Not that she hadn’t tried to be healed. O, she had. She had squandered every penny she had on doctors and like the prodigal son who squandered away his fortune, she had as much to show for it.
To make a long story short, she wasn’t getting a house call from Jesus. She didn’t have the social pull or the right connections. So she decided to heal her twelve-year-old the only way she knew how…she broke the rules. She said, “I know there’s a crowd, but I’m going. I know he’s a man, but I’m going. I know an unclean person shouldn’t touch others, but I’m going. I know I’m not supposed to touch him, but I’m grabbing the hem of his garment! I’m grabbing the hem of his garment and when I do I’ll be healed. The hem of his garment will be enough. The hem of his garment will be enough!” And she snuck up behind him and before anyone could say anything she reached out and grabbed the hem of his garment…and it was enough. BAM!, as Emeril would say, she was healed.
It was like a jolt of lightning. And immediately she knew she was healed and immediately Jesus knew that something powerful had happened. He whirls in his tracks and he says, “Who touched me?” Today when we read this we wonder…is Jesus angry? Is he incredibly sensitive? To the disciples it was just a ridiculous question. They say to Jesus, “You’ve got to be kidding! You have all these people crushing in around you and you ask, ‘Who touched me?’”
But Jesus knows. The woman knows. She falls down at Jesus’ feet. The Bible says she was trembling and afraid, but not because she feared Jesus. The Bible says she was trembling because she knew what had happened. She had been saved. Saved…healed…made whole. The words make no difference. The same word means all three in the Greek. And all three had happened to her.
Jesus is not angry. He addresses her by the title, Daughter. Funny how daughters are getting healed everywhere in these stories. “Daughter,” he says, “your faith has saved you; go in peace and be healed from your affliction.” Wow. That’s some interruption.
But now the story can keep going, right? Now Jesus can go on and heal that other daughter, that other twelve-year-old. But no. There’s a complication. Word arrives from the synagogue leader’s house and the news is not good. “Don’t bother the teacher any more. It’s hopeless. Your daughter is dead.”
Now healing is one thing. Resuscitation…that’s something else. You can just hear the wheels turning in Jairus’ head. If only we hadn’t been interrupted. If only he had kept on moving when he was touched. If only…if only…the fear and darkness are creeping in.
But Jesus does not allow it to continue. Jesus says, “Don’t fear, only believe.” And Jesus can say this, you see, because everyone in that crowd had just seen this in action. Jesus can say this because everybody had just seen a woman break every rule, cross every barrier, do everything she possibly could, because she believed that the hem of his garment would be enough. She was a daughter who was effectively dead. She was a daughter who was sealed out of the society, shut out of the system, shunted to the side…and yet she believed that she was going to live and she was willing to risk everything because when you come right down to it…what did she have to lose? If there was life for her it sure wasn’t in sitting by the side of the road guarding her uncleanliness. If there was life for her it was not going to come by respecting the walls meant to protect others from her. If there was life, it was going to come through hope, through belief, through the hem of his garment...if I can just touch the hem of his garment.
Fear is death. Fear is death. What good is fear against a power that can bring a woman twelve-years dead back from oblivion? What good is fear against a God who can send a legion of foes off a cliff? What good is fear against a God who can calm the seas and still the winds? What good is fear against a God who refuses to respect the boundaries of the tomb? What good is fear against a God who won’t get real, who won’t accept that nice guys finish last, who won’t agree that the best we can say about life is that “stuff happens,” who won’t let our lives be defined by the worst things we’ve ever done, and who insists that despite all evidence to the contrary that the reign of God is coming and in fact, it’s already here! What good is fear with a God like that?
What is it that God and the angels are always telling biblical people when they show up? God appears to Abraham in a dream and before telling him about all the incredible things that will happen, he first says, “Don’t be afraid.” Hagar, the unfortunate surrogate mother who gets sent off into the desert to die with her child, Ishmael, God calls to her and the first thing God says is, “Do not be afraid.” The angel of God appears to Mary with the news that she’s going to be unexpectedly expecting and what are the first words he says, “Don’t be afraid.” Joseph finds out that Mary is unexpectedly expecting and is about to make a break from her and an angel appears and the first words the angel says are, “Do not be afraid.” Are you starting to get the picture? When God has something big to say…when God wants to tell us to look out for something wonderful that’s about to happen…when all the evidence around says…BE AFRAID…the first thing God says is, “DON’T BE AFRAID.”
And why is this important? Why do we care about this? Why is this the most important thing that we could hear today? Because we are living in a state of fear.
We pick up the newspapers and there it is. The break-ins and crime just down the street. The wars that drag on. The stock market which sinks, taking with it retirement accounts and dreams. The recession that threatens to become a depression. The deficit spending. The budget shortfalls. The gnawing sense inside of us that tells us we are vulnerable. The secret sins and quiet addictions that sap our energies and divert our souls. The relationships ruined by violence and abuse. Depression. Worry. Anxiety. Grief. Death.
But Christians are not called to live like that. Christians cannot live like that. It is a perversion of who we are meant to be if we let fear dictate who we are and how we live. This Jesus is unsettling, but he is leading us to life, to claim the territory where we live. To send the demons packing and to work new wonder. As Christians we did not receive a spirit of slavery to fear again, as Romans reminds us, we received a spirit of adoption which allows us to call upon God in the intimate way that a daughter calls upon her father and mother. As Christians we are not looking back and we are not allowing fear to be the one turning us around. We are always moving forward. Always reaching out into a future that is defined by the resurrection and by God’s final victory. The barriers have been broken and we are racing to keep up with the new world that’s coming. We may not grasp it all in this life. We may not understand it all. We may not be able to comprehend even the smallest bit of what God has in store for us, but if I can just touch that hem. The hem of his garment is enough. The hem of his garment is enough. The hem of his garment is enough.
We’ve come too far to turn back now. We are on a road that is all about hope and love and perfect love casts out fear. Hope and love are the foundation on which the church is built. Jesus leads us onward. Where he’s going is unsettling. But he has wonders to show us. Don’t be afraid. Only believe. Thanks be to God.
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