Mark 5:21-43 "The Touch" Scott Hoezee

The recent death of the pope gave us the opportunity to watch a lot of video footage of John Paul's various excursions around the world. Seeing those images again revealed that no matter where the pope went, the one constant was the fierce desire people had to touch him. Last Monday the New York Times published a particularly wonderful photo that shows this. It came from a visit the pope made to this country and specifically an appearance he made at a cathedral in Newark, New Jersey. The picture had clearly been taken from the balcony and showed the pope from above and behind as he proceeded up the church's center aisle. John Paul had both of his arms extended outward to the side. And from the pews lining the aisle were the extended hands of dozens of people stretching and reaching so that their hands could brush against one of his hands.

For some reason, with charismatic leaders, we feel a desire to touch. Robert F. Kennedy exuded a similar attraction. According to Bobby Kennedy's aides, there were many times after campaign appearances in 1968 when Bobby had to throw away his shirt. So many people clutched and clawed to touch him that Bobby's hands would be scratched and a bit bloody even as his shirt sleeves became tattered to shreds.

As Mark 5 depicts it, Jesus was someone people wanted to touch and be touched by. But in the case of Jesus, such touches were about far more than the people's desire to make contact with somebody famous. Jesus' touch was said to have healing powers. As we can see in this story, some had concluded that Jesus was a type of magic object, a live wire who could give you a jolt of the divine whether he was aware of your touch or not.

It makes for a great story but notice how clever Mark was in composing it. Notice especially the role played by hands. Jairus does not simply ask Jesus to come and heal his daughter, he very specifically says, "Please come and put your hands on her." In Mark's gospel, Jesus has already performed any number of miracles that did not involve a physical touch. Yet Jairus very carefully requests the laying on of Jesus' hands to bring about his daughter's restoration.

As Jesus makes his way to Jairus' house, a woman in the crowd touches Jesus to relieve her of a hemorrhage that had clearly consumed her life. So just after Jesus walks past her position in the larger crowd, she reaches out her hand, grabs a piece of his cloak, gives it a quick squeeze, and then lets go before she actually tugs on Jesus and so draws attention to herself. And she is instantly healed. It's surprising, isn't it, that this method "works." We ordinarily resist seeing Jesus as some kind of magic charm. We'd prefer to think that the miracles Jesus worked were done deliberately and as an act of his will. Reading this story for the first time, you wouldn't expect this anonymous touching of Jesus to be effective. Yet it is.

Jesus notices that power had gone out from him, which is a curious way for Mark to put it. Lots of people were touching Jesus and jostling him at the time. Apparently none of them was tapping any divine power, however. That's why the disciples are rather incredulous when Jesus asks, "Who touched me?" If you've ever been in a crowded elevator making room for still more people who want to get into the car, you know what this is like. Everybody is touching somebody as you all shuffle sideways and back to let someone in or out. In that situation it would seem odd to say, "Who touched me?"

However, that question would make sense even in an over-crowded elevator in case you felt that someone was making a grab for the wallet in your back pocket or in case you had reason to believe someone was molesting you sexually or something. When you sense something beyond a typical jostle in the crowd, you ask about it. In Mark 5 it's the same for Jesus: someone had touched him with a purpose and that differentiated that touch from the general press of humanity that they were all enduring. So he asks about it.

The woman in question is mortified. And I chose that word "mortified" deliberately. She is literally scared to death. You see, she didn't belong in that crowd to begin with. She, too, had been forced to jostle with lots of folks as she jockeyed for position. What those other people didn't know, however, was that according to Jewish law, every person who came into contact with this woman had been made ceremonially unclean. When I was young, the nature of her illness would have been described delicately as "a female problem." Back then, that was code for "Inquire no further."

This woman had a female problem and according to ancient law, it made her an outcast. For the good of all, she needed to remain far away from other people because so long as her problem persisted, she carried the contagion of unholiness. Touch this woman or be touched by her, and you couldn't go to God's Temple for a week. In other words, if it becomes known that she was putting the community at risk, she could be stoned to death. She's been socially dead for a dozen years now and although people might feel bad about that, there wasn't anything they could do about it. But if she could not quietly accept her socially mortified status, the community would have no choice but to remove her forcibly before she did more damage.

So when Jesus singles her out as having touched him with a purpose, her joy at having been healed turns to instant dread. Just as her life was about to begin anew, it looked like it might end. That is why she appears before Jesus with fear and trembling. She wasn't afraid Jesus would rebuke her mildly by saying, "Next time ask first, OK?" The trouble she was in was far more grave than having been a tad presumptuous.

But to her credit, she tells what Mark describes as "the whole truth." She could have lied, claiming she had sought healing for a bad cold or a sore back. But no, she admits the nature of her ailment and you can be well assured that the whole crowd had a collective sharp intake of breath. Suddenly every person there was wondering if he had rubbed shoulders with this woman. "Who knows how many people she had made unclean in the last ten minutes alone!" people no doubt began to murmur to one another.

But before the imminent panic got rolling, Jesus did an amazing thing: he called this woman "Daughter" and sent her away with a benediction. Jesus restored her to the community and so conveyed to everyone there that the contagion of holiness that Jesus bore was now more powerful and more important than any potential contagion of unholiness that anyone else could possibly bear. We will get back to this in a few moments but for now note the way Jesus is, on the spot, creating a whole new community, a whole new way to live together as sons and daughters of God.

Meanwhile, where is Jairus? I picture him standing on the sidelines tearing his hair out! He had come to Jesus on the most urgent of errands. Time was of the essence here, yet Jesus has stopped. Finally, even as it looked like Jesus was ready to get back to the main item of business, men with tears in their eyes come rushing up to Jairus. Jairus perceives their message from the pained look on each one of their faces.

For his part, Jesus ignores the messengers and turns directly to Jairus. Then he speaks words that were either the dearest thing any person has ever spoken or the very height of folly: "Fear not, only believe." In the Greek of Mark 5:36 there are just four words as in the translation I just gave: Fear not, only believe. Why did he say this? What did Jairus have to be afraid of just then? Wasn't sorrow, not fear, the primary emotion cascading his heart and mind just then? And what was it he was to believe? The imperative verb form in that sentence has no direct object, no suggested target. Jesus didn't say "Believe in me" or "Believe that this will all be OK in the end."

And yet he had just said to the woman "Your faith has saved you." In Greek the word for faith is pistis and the verb "to believe" is pisteue. So within the span of just a few words, the woman is called a daughter whose faith saved her and then Jesus tells Jairus to have faith regarding his own daughter. Maybe Jesus even nodded his head briefly toward that woman as he said this to Jairus. "Have faith as she just did."

In any event, the story shifts now from one daughter to the next as Jesus makes a beeline to Jairus' house. The role of touch comes in again in that Jesus takes the little girl's hand as the prelude to raising her from the dead. The little girl is restored to the community of her family, and Jesus' swift urging that they feed her is a symbol of the kind of communal joy and sharing he desires for all people. There is no better symbol of life's vibrancy than when we share food and drink with each other.

So two daughters of Israel are restored here. Twice in this story Jesus is touched by or himself touches someone ritually and ceremonially unclean but not only is Jesus not contaminated, the ones who had been contaminated to begin with are made holy and whole. Jesus has crossed the boundaries that had once defined the community, has rewritten the rules, and so has revealed a new day. Make no mistake: this story is all about the creation of a New Israel. Mark seeded this story with clues. How long had the woman been bleeding? Twelve years. How old was the little girl Jesus raised? Twelve years. No Jewish person reading this story could fail to miss seeing the repetition of the number twelve as a symbol of the twelve tribes of Israel.

Long about the same time that Jairus welcomed his little girl into the world, a women he didn't know began to hemorrhage. For twelve years this woman suffered. For twelve years this little girl grew and became ever-more-dear to her father. Both women were headed toward a rendezvous with Jesus on the very same day. Although their paths to Jesus were as different as could be, both of these daughters of Israel would point forward to the new community Jesus came to build.

Of course, all these centuries later, you and I are members of that community, that New Israel. So what does this mean for us? In an age of exclusion, of social boundary lines that had become iron-clad barriers to community, Jesus in Mark 5 was a beacon of inclusion who freely crossed lines in order to reach out to more and more and more people. What about the church today? Can people look at us and see the possibility for community and communal love? Is the church looked at as a place that reaches across all divides to include people or as the place of ultimate exclusion?

These are delicate and difficult questions today. Recently a popular television show used the title of the traditional hymn "Just As I Am" against the church to suggest that any response to gay people other than simple acceptance was unChrist-like. You can sense a similar dynamic in the back-and-forth letters that have appeared in newspapers and religious magazines lately. One person suggests that Jesus welcomed all who came to him, telling those who were being judgmental that only those without sin could cast the first stone. No sooner does a letter like that appear and someone else responds by saying that Jesus also always told people to "Go and sin no more." "Just As I Am" is how you come to Jesus initially, not the way you remain forever after.

Ironically, as I pointed out in a sermon some years ago, the lines "Those who are without sin may cast the first stone" and "Go and sin no more" both come from the same Bible story! Somehow Jesus always found a way to be critical of those who were being judgmental even at the same time that he was helping to bring about transformation in the lives of the people who had been unfairly judged. As we've noted before, Jesus was full of grace and truth, and apparently he was the only one. He had truth such that he could see down to the most basic problems and sins in our lives and yet had more than enough grace to forgive all that was bad so as to dawn a new day on the horizon of our hearts.

Mark 5 shows that anyone could touch Jesus or be touched by him. Jesus would not let any barrier stop him from loving someone. In this story two dead daughters appeared before Jesus. They came to Jesus or were approached by Jesus just as they were but they left their sacred encounter changed, renewed, not at all the way they had been before. Now as always the church faces the challenge of being both a welcoming community and an agent of transformation in the name of Jesus. One without the other will never do. If we welcome without hoping for the transforming power of Jesus' Spirit, we display the love of the gospel but not its power. Then again, if we insist on transformation to take place before we welcome someone in Jesus' name, we hold out for the power of the gospel but fail to display its compassionate love.

Jesus showed us that it was the presence of his love and compassion that usually provided the setting in which transformation could eventually take place. It didn't always happen instantly and no one who walked away from an encounter with Jesus did so as a perfectly pure and holy person through and through. Jesus knew how to deal gently with those whose sanctification could be on the slow side. Even one of his most beloved disciples, Peter, was known to be a kind of "one step forward, two steps back" kind of person--a man with towering love for Jesus and yet feet of clay; a man who after Pentecost found a boldness to preach he never thought he had and yet he still sinned when he rebuked Paul for preaching to non-Jews.

The welcoming love and grace and compassion of Jesus form the context from which all else flows, and we can't be his representatives now if we can't muster that welcoming presence in the church today. But neither can we display Christ if in the name of welcome we adopt some casual "live and let live" approach to the shape of people's lives. But even if we manage to hold these together, we even so will at any given moment find the church to be a mixed bag of people at lots of different stages of their transforming journey with Jesus. But Jesus welcomes the stragglers as well as the sprinters, the shining lights as well as the flickering candles. So must we.

In Mark 5 a new community bursts onto the scene and it did so because Jesus was not going to let anything stand in his way to let that community be established and grow in grace. As we said at the outset tonight, everyone wanted the touch of Jesus' hand. Even today when people reach out for a pope or a charismatic political figure, they are reaching out for a jolt of something new, something that can change their ordinary lives into something extraordinary.

In and through all of that reaching, whether they know it or not (and mostly they don't, of course) folks are still reaching for Jesus' hand. That holy hand is still available but it now comes through my hands and your hands. When the people around us touch our hands, can they feel his love and power, his welcome and grace? In the end, it doesn't matter who we encounter in this life. In all cases we are called to say those lyric words, "Fear not, only believe." New life begins right there. Amen.