Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time[1]
Our God is a God of Life, not of death, and so the Reign of God when it comes brings life-giving and life-restoring events: the blind see, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, demons are cast out, the dead are raised, and the poor have the gospel preached to them. The woman with the flow of blood gets her life back, merely by touching his cloak. The desperate love of a father for his daughter leads to trust beyond hope and the return of life to their daughter. Our challenge, in turn, is to be people of life, like Christ, and to continue to be a community where life-giving and life-sustaining events occur.
Today we have two powerful manifestations of this life-giving and life-restoring Reign of God in the vicinity of Jesus the Anointed One, Lord of Life. But to appreciate their full power, it helps to put ourselves back into their original situation, to read ourselves into the events and the people in the events.
The Woman with the Hemorrhage: this is more than just an
inconvenience. In her society and
culture it renders her perpetually ‘unclean’.
Like a leper, or a corpse, or nowadays maybe a person with AIDS before
we understood it properly, she is untouchable, and all the time, continually,
it doesn’t go away. Anyone she touches
is also rendered unclean. She is thus
just by this effectively cut off from life in society and life as a woman, and
also from attendance at synagogue or
She has heard about him, this Jesus person. “If I can touch even his clothes”, just his clothes, that shouldn’t do him too much harm, and maybe he won’t even notice, and the crowds might render her anonymous, take a risk, worth a chance. And she does it. And she is cured immediately, and knows it, and is frightened and trembling, not just because she is cured but because he has noticed it: Who touched me? he asks. And he continues to look around. And for a little while it is as if there are only two people in the world, Jesus and this woman, only two people left. But all he wants is to find out how come healing, life-giving power has gone out of him. All he wants is to hear her story: and she comes forward, and she falls at his feet and tells him the whole truth. “My daughter”, he says, “your faith has restored you to health; go in peace and be free of your complaint”. And so Jesus gives her back her life; or rather her faith does, in contiguity with Jesus, touching Jesus, the Anointed One, the Lord of Life, or just his cloak.
This is inserted into the middle of another story, mediating between “critically ill” and “dead”, the story of Jairus, the synagogue official, a person of some status, therefore, and his desperate love for his daughter, who falls at the feet of this itinerant preacher and pleads with him earnestly, “My little daughter is desperately sick…” This in a culture which usually values daughters as less than a donkey – but not this father, who will do anything for his little daughter, nothing to lose, worth a chance. But the bad news comes: Your daughter is dead, why put the Master to any further trouble? Except that there is a new ingredient, a new experience intervening, what has happened to the woman in front of their eyes, and the wonders just worked before their eyes, the life-restoring power of the woman’s faith. “Do not be afraid; only have faith”, Jesus says. Or in the more direct New American Bible, “Fear is useless; what is needed is trust.” And so, as one commentator says, Jesus goes with the flow, he decides his course of action from the development of events, recognizing in them God’s will to raise the dead, empowered by the experience of the power going out of him and the power of the woman’s faith: this is a new-be for him as well.
And he takes with him just Peter, James and John, his little
prayer group, who appear also at the Transfiguration and in
Jesus taking with him just Peter, James and John and mum and dad, and his strict instruction to tell no one about it, fit well with the function of what we call ‘miracles’ in Mark’s Gospel. Later on, in John’s Gospel, they get construed as ‘signs’: this is because John is interested so much in the significance of Jesus for us. And they are therefore very public, very up-front. But in Mark it seems, the function of a healing miracle is to heal, and of a life-restoring miracle to restore life, and that’s it. The intention is essentially pragmatic, the less fuss the better, and indeed fuss seems to be a distraction and even an obstacle to Jesus’ mission overall, getting in the way of his felicitous functioning as a preacher of the Gospel.
They are a long way from being proofs of his divinity, therefore, like in some presentations of Christian apologetic. It is not quite accurate, even, to regard them as ‘proofs’ of the coming of the Reign of God, though they can be put to this purpose. They are more like expressions or manifestations of the Reign of God, the kind of thing that happens as a matter of course in case of local intensification of the Reign of God, like around Jesus in first century Galilee, what happens in the vicinity of Jesus the Spirit-filled Anointed Servant of God’s Reign: life-giving, life-restoring events from a God who is God of Life, not of death, in the vicinity of Jesus, the Lord of Life. But even within this context, the primary aim is to get things done, and indeed in this respect it doesn’t even matter if she is dead or only in a death-like state (though this is a matter of definition anyway). What matters is that at the beginning of the process she is critically, desperately ill, maybe even dead; and at the end she is walking about. Absolutely don’t tell anyone. Give her something to eat!
(This fits well with my philosophy of miracles as the
consequence of a shifting of probabilities of certain kinds of events occurring
in the vicinity of a local focusing of the Divine Lure, in Biblical terms, a
local intensification of the Reign of God, with the kinds of events specified
as ‘life-giving’ or ‘life-restoring’. It
fits also the pattern of praying for sick people, surrounding them with prayers;
and with such phenomena as
This raises the question about us, meant to be the continuing presence of Christ in the world, through the power of Christ present among us, and the power of his Spirit handed over to us, to make us the sons and daughters, members of his body, branches of his vine. Our challenge, then, is to be people of life, like Jesus the Lord of Life, and to continue to be a community where life-giving and life-restoring events occur. To be our own little intensification of the Reign of God, of the God who is the God of Life, not of death, manifesting the life-giving and life-restoring presence of Jesus the Lord of Life, among us and through us.
But we are also challenged by the faith of this woman and of this man, this father of a desperately ill little daughter, to be people of faith, even in desperate times, when all seems lost.
[1]
What follows is inspired by Soul Sisters, by Edwina Gateley,
art by Louis Glanzman (Orbis,
2002), pp. 88-105. It also reflects some
of the thoughts of my friend and colleague in Malanda Parish, Fr. John Butcher,
our Pastor Emeritus as we term him.