As if Everything is a Miracle
Pamela L. Werntz, Priest-in-Charge

O God who heals us, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.

So much to preach about after almost a month out of the pulpit and we have three provocative readings!  (Don’t worry, I won’t go more than an hour or two!)  There’s that great line in David’s lament about how his beloved Jonathan’s love was wonderful, better than the love of women.  And on a day when PBS’s Religion and Ethics NewsWeekly is here preparing a segment on religion and same-sex marriage.  That just kind of preaches itself doesn’t it?  And Paul’s exhortation to the people in the church to excel in generosity in what we undertake.  An explicit Biblical instruction to excel in generosity of spirit!  You know, sometimes I do think we should take the Bible literally!  Of course I’m teasing a little bit.  What I really believe is that we should take the Bible seriously and struggle to know its essential truths – not debating literal or figurative, but essential.

So David’s lament and Paul’s exhortation present compelling material for reflection.  And yet it’s Mark’s story of Jairus’ daughter and the hemorrhaging woman that I most want to explore with you this morning.  The writer of Mark is telling one story about how faith restores relationships with the community and with the Holy, how faith can restore health and life itself.  The one story has two parts beautifully woven together -- the story of Jairus’ daughter interrupted and then completed by the story of the woman with an uninterrupted flow of blood.

Notice the contrasts.   Jairus is a leader in the synagogue – the word used can also be translated as “president,” or “presider.”  We are to understand that he’s well-respected, and that he has resources at his disposal even if he’s not particularly wealthy.  It’s worth noting that here is a very positive picture of a Jewish leader in Mark.  The woman, on the other hand, hemorrhaging for 12 years is sick, poor, and dangerously unclean.  She contaminates anyone and anything she comes in contact with.  Have you ever known anyone like that? Theologian Robin Griffith-Jones describes the deep contrasts this way:  “the man at the community’s center and the woman on its margins; his public appeal for help and her frightened, covert touch; his urgency and her cost of crucial time…”

Now notice the similarities.  Both Jairus and the unnamed woman fall at Jesus’ feet.  Both are desperate.  The woman has been hemorrhaging for 12 years.  Jairus’ daughter has been alive for that exact amount of time. Jesus tells the woman that her faith has made her well.  Jesus tells Jairus to have faith, not fear.   In both stories, the healing takes place with the power of touch, of the laying on of hands or the grabbing of a cloak.  In both, Jesus seems to have no concern of ritual contamination, impurity.  In both cases the cure is instant and understood to be complete.

What is it that the Gospel of Mark is trying to tell us?  What do we know from this story that we would not know if it were missing from the Gospel account?  I can imagine at least three things:

First, we know from this passage of Mark, something about the Gospel’s capacity for social justice (in the healing of the woman at the margins of society) and for spiritual renewal (in the fear transformed into faith of Jairus, the leader of the synagogue) – that social justice and spiritual renewal, as Gospel truths, are both valid, both important, indeed, both essential for renewing and restoring community.

Another thing that this story tells us is that what people then (and now) often believe about purity is backwards when it comes to the realm of God.  William Countryman has written a book about religious and societal purity codes with the wonderful title, Dirt, Greed & Sex.  In it he writes about how purity and holiness have long been connected.  Pure = holy.  Impure = unholy.  Purity codes in a society have to do with rules about the avoidance of dirt – physical dirt: germs, parasites; spiritual or moral dirt: inappropriate personal and interpersonal behavior.  There are dirty hands and dirty jokes, dirty plates and dirty dancing.  When I was little, pet stores sold miniature turtles.  But those turtles were known to carry salmonella – so my mother made me vow to never to touch a turtle.  So powerful was her purity code admonition, that I have not touched a turtle to this day.  You get the idea.  Back to Countryman.  He writes that, “the assumption of purity codes is always that uncleanness is more powerful than purity – that purity is difficult to maintain, and impurity is easy to contract.”  Here’s what’s backwards.  Mark’s story about Jesus was that the holiness of Jesus overcame impurity, rather than being contaminated by it.  Mark’s story is that Jesus has the power to overcome whatever separates us from God – from the Holy – so that we don’t need to worry so much about what might contaminate us when we’re following Jesus.  And we certainly don’t need to protect Jesus by establishing sterile fields that limit access to the sacraments of the Church!

Finally, this story also lets us know very clearly that faith, here rendered believing, is our calling from Jesus.  To our ears, though, I think the word beloving is a better translation than believing.  That’s because faith has to do with unyielding courage – with grit – with determination to get to Jesus no matter what it takes – with swallowing one’s pride or risking humiliation, collegial scorn or public derision – like Jairus – like the hemorrhaging woman.  Think of this kind of having faith as having stubborn resolve to claim the love of Jesus Christ.

And this faith is a generous undertaking!  Faith has to do with trusting in the power of God, that is, in the power of Love to heal the incurable or to reconcile the unreconcilable.  Or how about this Trinitarian expression:  faith is about trusting in the power of Creation, in the power of Incarnation, and in the power of Inspiration to redeem what appears to be without value.  This kind of faith has to do with life before death (not life after death) – living life fully, and not just waiting for the next life.  Faith is not an absence of fear or a denial of fear; faith is fear that has said its prayers, as the AA saying goes.  Faith is a matter of following one’s heart – not so much about thinking with the head.

And for the faithful, when a good thing beyond human understanding happens, it’s called a  miracle.  But note well:  the writer of Mark, the earliest Gospel written, wants us to understand that miracles are not the basis of faith.  Miracles are not the basis of faith.  Rather faith is the basis of miracles.  I believe it was Albert Einstein who said that there are two ways of looking at the world – one as if nothing is a miracle, and the other as if everything is a miracle – and that he chose the latter.  As far as I can tell, faith does not prevent bad things from happening – not in Jesus’ time and not in ours.  But faith is what always delivers reconciliation and healing and fullness of life.

Updated July 27, 2009