Readings (click here for full text of the readings; click here for Order of Service):
  Deuteronomy 15:7-11; Psalm 112; 2 Corinthians 8:1-9, 13-15; Mark 5:22-24, 35b-43

Janis Joplin once said, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,” and if that’s the case, then today’s gospel reading is all about freedom.  It’s about giving up everything that’s familiar, everything that you’ve trusted in and staked your life on, in one final desperate grasp at life.

The gospel begins with Jairus, one of the leaders of the synagogue.  He was a powerful man who knew everything there was to know about the Jewish law.  He’d have also known that Jesus publicly questioned the Law a lot, like by saying that sometimes it was OK to break the Sabbath rule against working.  He’d also have heard that Jesus didn’t seem to have much use for the Jewish authorities, and had even called them a few unflattering names along the way.

To someone in Jairus’s position, Jesus was the enemy.  It’s hard to imagine Jairus asking Jesus for anything, but if he did, he’d probably seek Jesus out in private, so that the whole world wouldn’t know what he was doing. But Jairus was desperate – he had nowhere else to turn.  All the people who were supposed to be able to help his daughter couldn’t, so he asked Jesus for help.  And he didn’t ask Him in private – He asked Him in front of a great crowd.  And he didn’t ask Him calmly, rationally – he fell at Jesus’s feet and begged Him over and over again to help his little twelve-year-old daughter.

Jairus didn’t care about appearances.  He didn’t care about appearing strong, or about what the gossipmongers might say about a leader of the synagogue kneeling before the heretical teacher. His daughter was in critical condition, and he would do anything to help her.

We don’t hear any words come from Jesus in reply.  After describing Jairus’s desperate pleas, Mark simply writes, “So [Jesus] went with him.”  No questions asked. Jairus needed help, so Jesus helped him.  No doubt about it.

But on their way to Jairus’s house – and this section was left out of today’s reading – a woman touched the hem of Jesus’s garment.  Now this woman had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years, and no one had been able to help her.  She’d heard about Jesus and thought that maybe He could do something. But getting to Him was hard, because there were so many people around him. Plus, she was afraid of the synagogue types (like Jairus) because she was about as unclean as you can get – the Levitical laws said that a woman was impure for seven days after her normal period, “and whoever touches her shall be unclean until the evening.” If a normal period rendered a woman unclean for a week, this woman probably felt like she was going to be unclean forever.  For twelve years she had not once been allowed to enter the synagogue, and anyone who touched her, and anything she lay down on, and anyone who touched something that she had been lying down on – all that was unclean and had to be purified.

But as soon as she touched Jesus’s garment, she was healed.  Jesus sensed this, and asked who’d touched Him. The woman came forward, as Mark describes it, “in fear and trembling, fell down before [Jesus], and told him the whole truth.” And He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.”

Now this was all well and good for Jesus and the woman, but what about Jairus? He probably thought things couldn’t get any worse, but they had. Now Jesus had been touched by this extravagantly unclean woman, so not only was Jairus bringing a blasphemer into his house, he was bringing a ritually impure blasphemer who would make the whole house unclean. What’s more, they were wasting precious time dealing with this woman – time his own daughter might not have to spare.

As if to confirm his fears, even as Jesus was still talking to the woman, someone runs up and announces that Jairus’s daughter had died. In response to this tragic news, Jesus said to Jairus, “Do not fear, only believe.” And with those words they went on to Jairus’s house, where “people [were] weeping and wailing loudly.”  Some were professional mourners, hired by the family for the upcoming funeral. They were there to do a job, and so when Jesus said that the girl was simply sleeping, they laughed at Him. But Jesus told them to get out:  “You don’t belong here,” He might have said. “There is no one to mourn here.  Nobody dies here today.”

Then he went to her room, taking only her parents and three disciples with Him.  She lay there, perfectly still, to the sounds of the confused mourners outside the house, to the laughter of those who scoffed at Jesus, to the soft weeping of those who had lost their last shred of hope when she breathed no more. 

Mark writes that Jesus took her by the hand and said to her, “‘Talitha cum,’ which means, ‘Little girl, get up!’”  It wasn’t enough for Mark to tell us what happened – that she “immediately … got up and began to walk about” – he had to tell us what Jesus said to her. And it wasn’t enough to tell us in translation, in the polished Greek of Mark’s day. No, Mark tells us exactly what Jesus said, in the common, guttural, spoken Hebrew. This is one of only three times in his Gospel that Mark gives us the direct, untranslated words of Jesus.

Translation would weaken the moment; summarizing wouldn’t do it justice. There’s no need for elaboration; there can be no mistake:  she rose from the dead. And as she walked around the room, her parents “were overcome with amazement,” because the impossible had happened, and nothing would ever be the same.
 

The parallels between the story of the hemorrhaging woman and that of Jairus’s daughter are startling. One had been ritually unclean for 12 years, and the other had only been alive for 12 years, and during that time had enjoyed the blissful innocence of childhood. Both had encountered Jesus because no one else could help them, and perhaps they only came to Him when they realized they had nothing to left to lose.

And each story has someone falling down before Jesus.  In one case it’s a man of power who was so overcome with desperation that he was willing to give up everything on the chance that Jesus could give him what he wanted. In the other it’s an outcast woman who was so overcome with gratitude that she was able to overcome her “fear and trembling,” and stand before Jesus and the crowds of people who surrounded Him, and speak “the whole truth.”
 

The bottom line is that tt doesn’t matter how we come to Jesus.  We might want to come to Jesus in our Sunday best, with our house in order and our spirit prayerfully prepared, and sometimes it works out that way, and that’s great. But sometimes the only way we can come to Jesus is out of desperation, when the whole world is falling down around us and the only thing we can do is fall down on our hands and knees before God and beg Him repeatedly to help us, even though one simple request would have been enough. And sometimes we end up coming to Jesus out of gratitude, when life somehow went from bleak to bright in the blink of an eye, for the simple reason that we dared reach out for help, and God was there. These are the two ways that the women in these stories came to Jesus, and in the end they both were healed, and they were both proclaimed as God’s beloved daughters.

It’s definitely hard to find yourself at the your rope, with nowhere else to turn, and nothing left to lose.  But if that’s what it takes to set us free and bring us to our knees before God, then so be it. For when we ask God for the salvation and deliverance that we can’t find anywhere else, God won’t even stop to think about it. He may not even say a word.  He’ll just walk with us, to our homes, to the places of our greatest need, so that He can heal us. And lest we ever wonder if something so wonderful could actually be true, He’ll look us square in the eye and tell us not to fear, just believe. 

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