Our Gospel reading for today is a story about Jesus healing two very different women. One is little more than a child. A girl about twelve years old, she is the daughter of the powerful leader of the synagogue. A man so well-known and highly regarded that everyone knew his name, Jairus was certainly more used to being begged for help than he was to begging for help himself. But when his daughter took sick, a sickness that no amount of money or power could solve, Jairus didn’t hesitate to run to Jesus, fall at his feet, and beg Jesus to come, lay his “hands on her, so that she may be made well, and live.” And Jesus went to Jairus’s home, took the girl by the hand, raised her up, and once she was up, told the crowd gathered to get her something to eat.
But before Jesus reached Jairus’s house, he was stopped by another woman. Unlike Jairus’s daughter, this nameless woman was alone, with no one to speak on her behalf. And while the girl had spent twelve years in a family of privilege, this woman spent twelve years suffering from an affliction that would not quit. The girl had a father who would beg on her behalf, while the woman had spent everything she had in search of healing, only to end up worse off, physically, financially, and eventually socially. The nature of the woman’s illness meant her suffering was more than physical. Such an illness left her ritually unclean, forced to the edges of society with no one to care for her, no one to fight for her, no one to even be with her. And in that way the nameless woman and Jairus were the same, two people with nowhere to turn, no hope to cling to, falling at the feet of Jesus hoping a miracle could take place. The actions of these two people show us that faith is not intellectual ascent to a set of ideals. Sometimes, as theologian Matthew Skinner puts it, faith is utter desperation, like rushing through a crowd saying this is my last chance, and I don’t care if I get in trouble, I’ve just got to touch him.
And like Jesus was on his way to heal Jairus’s daughter, Jesus healed the nameless woman. Unintentionally maybe, but she too was healed. And after Jesus spun around in the crowd and demanded, “who touched me,” and the woman came forward and admitted her desperate action, Jesus responded with the same words Jairus had asked for, “Daughter, your faith has made you well. Go at peace, and be healed of your disease.”
The story of Jesus healing two women is certainly good news enough in itself. But there’s something else going on in this story that keys us in to an even more powerful message of promise. If you remember last week I talked about how the Sea of Galilee functions as a boundary in Mark. And this story starts with Jesus crossing again in the boat to the other side. This detail is meant to highlight the reader that this story has something to do with border crossing. After Jesus crossed the sea, he met, and healed, two women from completely opposite ends of society. One from a family of wealth and power, one nameless and destitute; one with others to speak for her, the other with no one to advocate for her but herself; one only twelve, the other who’d suffered for twelve long years. And Jesus’ response to the two women is the same. He called them terms of endearment, daughter and little girl, terms which indicated their place as part of his family, he touched them without regard for his own ritual cleanliness, for both death and bleeding were causes of impurity, and he made them well. With these two stories, which Mark tells not just next to each other, but enmeshed within each other, Jesus lays out the borders of the Kingdom of God. The borders of God’s kingdom include both the powerful and the powerless, the wealthy and the destitute, those who can advocate for themselves and for others and those whom society has silenced. The Kingdom of God is defined by none of those boundaries. The boundary that defines God’s kingdom is desperation, the faith that comes from finding oneself in a place of helplessness and reaching out blindly for the hope beyond hope.
And that right there is good news enough. Salvation through Christ is for everyone is about as good of news as there is. I could say Amen and sit down right now, and this sermon would have done its job. But in this text there’s more than that, this text gets into the nature of what salvation is, of what it means when we say we are saved by Jesus. But to catch that, we have to get into the weeds a little bit, because the NRSV translation obscures the message. When Jairus came to Jesus, he begged that his daughter would be “made well.” And when the nameless woman touched Jesus, she wanted to be “made well.” And he said her faith had “made her well.” The word translated “made well” is the Greek word sodzo, it’s the same word Mark used in the passion story, when Jesus hung on the cross and the crowd jeered, “he saved other, and he cannot save himself.” So what Jairus begged for, and what the woman sought and received, was to be saved. They were pleading for salvation, pleading to be set free. So often in American Christianity we think about and talk about salvation as some fuzzy future promise, that in the great by and by we will be set free from sin and death and live forever with Christ. And salvation is that, it is the promise of eternal future. But this story shows us that salvation is more than that. Salvation is immediate, it is right now. When Jesus healed the woman of her bleeding and raised Jairus’s daughter from death, he wasn’t offering them some promised future; he was restoring them to life right now. Yes Jesus cares about the eternal salvation of our souls, but he cares just as much about our bodies in this moment. Salvation is eternal, but it is also immediate. Jesus loves you not just forever, but also right now.
And guess what, dear people of God who love to work. The specific piece of good news for you in this story is because salvation is a present reality, we the community of believers have a role to play in God’s saving action. When Jesus raised Jairus’s daughter, he told those who witnessed to get the girl something to eat. And when Jesus told the hemorrhaging woman her faith had saved her, he told her, aloud so that all the crowd to hear, “Go in peace, and be healed of your disease.” “Go in peace” was a ritual Jewish blessing, and by saying it Jesus was indicating to those gathered that this woman was no longer ritually outside of the community, and their role now was to treat her as part of it. Jesus started the process by healing the woman, by raising the girl, but the work now belonged to the community, to feed the girl, to reintegrate the woman.
Dear people of God, the work that we do in caring for each other and the world around us is not just good work, it is saving work. Illness and death are only some of the ways one might find themselves isolated and outside of the community, and when we bridge those divides and bring people back in, we are literally doing the work of salvation. What that means, dear people of God, is that the Franklin Food Pantry is not only about feeding physical hunger, it is about physically demonstrating to those on the margins that they are not marginalized by God. Giving Freeze Pops to neighborhood kids is about creating community and expanding the kingdom of God beyond these walls. And the Roadrunners club, and the fact that so many of you got here today by carpool is because this is how we make salvation tangible for each other. Dear people of God, you have been saved. And you get to save others. Because salvation is for everyone and it is happening right now. Thanks be to God. Amen.
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