There was a woman afflicted with hemorrhages for twelve years. She had suffered greatly at the hands of many doctors and had spent all that she had. Yet she was not helped but only grew worse. She had heard about Jesus and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak. She said, “If I but touch his clothes, I shall be cured.” Immediately her flow of blood dried up. She felt in her body that she was healed of her affliction. Jesus, aware at once that power had gone out from him, turned around in the crowd and asked, “Who has touched my clothes?” But his disciples said to Jesus, “You see how the crowd is pressing upon you, and yet you ask, “Who touched me?” And he looked around to see who had done it. The woman, realizing what had happened to her, approached in fear and trembling. She fell down before Jesus and told him the whole truth. He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has saved you. Go in peace and be cured of your affliction.” (Mark 5.25-34)
In my only New Testament course as a college student, the professor asked us to pick our favorite gospel and to read it in one sitting. I chose Mark because his text was the shortest of the four, which probably says all that needs to be said. In my defense, it was difficult to choose a gospel based on a higher cause when I knew next to nothing about any of them. Almost always practical, I went with length, already understanding that management of time was an essential skill in college.
The professor’s point was that a gospel could be best understood only if it was read as a continuous text, not as spliced fragments that were parsed out over a period of time. He believed that the organization and tightness of a gospel could be seen only in its continuity and flow, matters generally overlooked and underappreciated when hearing a gospel in chopped bits and pieces.
Doing as he said, I sat down to read Mark’s gospel from cover to cover, that is from Chapter 1 through Chapter 16. And as I plowed through it, I began to see particular patterns and points that reappeared regularly. Essentially, it was much the same as if I had stepped back from a painting to look at the whole picture rather than standing near it to focus on one part. In other words, things came together like a mosaic, offering a more vivid image of Jesus as Mark intended to present him.
Learning an important lesson from that assignment, I’ve never forgotten it, remembering it as I do few other assignments that were given in college. It made an impression on me, teaching me a critical lesson about any study of the gospels. That lesson is that each gospel writer worked with a particular intent and weaved his narrative to achieve that end, a reality entirely left unnoticed when the text is only looked at piecemeal.
So, here at the start I would urge you to do the same. Sit down and read the gospel from start to finish. You might be as surprised as I was when you’ve finished the exercise. And while the liturgists have attempted to do somewhat the same thing when giving us a sequence of episodes from a particular gospel Sunday after Sunday, something is still missed when there is a break in time between hearing the episodes. Furthermore, often one or another episode is passed over for reasons that only the liturgist could explain.
That point is brought home again today as we look at the selection that is offered to us on this Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time. It contains two stories tied together, resulting in an unusually long reading both for Mark and for the listener, a fact that is made apparent by the option offered by the liturgists to look at only one of the stories–that of Jairus’s daughter–instead of listening to both stories, the other being the woman with the hemorrhage.
If both stories are read and studied rather than taking the option to look at only one of them, it becomes crystal clear that Mark has connected and intertwined the two of them, having the story of the woman with the hemorrhage inserted in the middle of the story of Jairus’ daughter. In so doing, Mark has a purpose, presenting us with a positive double whammy, each story reinforcing the other.
The problem, of course, is that even here we’re only getting a part of the picture. As I see it, the double stories of Jairus’ daughter and the woman with the hemorrhage are best understood as belonging to the larger landscape of four miracle stories that Mark has bunched together one after the other in this part of his gospel that some scholars like to call the culmination of Jesus’ mighty works.
So, let’s step back for a moment to get that bigger picture. The first of the miracle stories in this section is the calming of the sea that we heard last Sunday. The second is the healing of the Gerasene demoniac which is skipped over in the lectionary for some reason. The third is the story of Jairus’s daughter, interrupted by the fourth story, the healing of the woman with the hemorrhage.
With these four stories now seen together, not as separate entities, what do we see? What is Mark’s point in putting them back to back? The first thing to see is that they all have the same internal order. Each begins with a plea. In the calming of the sea, the disciples ask Jesus, “Do you not care that we are perishing?” In the healing of the Gerasene demoniac, the demon begs Jesus, “Send us into the swine. Let us enter them.” In the story of Jairus’ daughter, Jairus says to Jesus, “Please come lay your hands on her.” And in the story of the woman with the hemorrhage she says, “If I only touch his cloak, I will be cured.”
In each, Jesus asks a question. He says to the fearful disciples in the boat, “Why are you terrified?” He asks the demon that has possessed the man, “What is your name?” In the third story he asks, “Why this commotion and weeping?” In the healing of the woman he asks his disciples, “Who has touched my clothes?”
As we might expect, each story then contains the cure. In the first, “there was a great calm” on the sea. In the second, “the unclean spirits came out and entered the swine.” In the third, “The girl arose immediately and walked around.” In the fourth, “Immediately her flow of blood dried up.” An answer to the calamity is provided by Jesus, the all powerful one.
Similarly, the response on the part of onlookers is virtually the same. The disciples in the boat “were filled with great awe and said who is this.” The locals in the Gerasene region “were seized with fear and they began to beg Jesus to leave their district.” The mourners in Jairus’s house “were utterly astounded.” And the woman with the hemorrhage “approached in awe and trembling.”
Not only are the stories stitched together by the same internal structure, but they are held tightly together by Mark’s wanting to show us that Jesus is the all-powerful one sent by God. In the storm at the sea, he has power over nature. In the story of the Gerasene demoniac, he has power over demons. In the story of Jairus’s daughter, he has power over death. And in the story of the woman with the hemorrhage he has power over sickness.
Furthermore, each story is undergirded by the absence or presence of faith, a key point in the entirety of Mark’s gospel. The disciples in the boat do not have faith as Jesus makes clear in his question to them, “Do you not yet have faith?” The townspeople in the Gerasene territory want Jesus to leave their area. The mourners in Jairus’s house do not have faith, “ridiculing Jesus” when he arrives at the house and says to them “the child is not dead but asleep.”
The only two stalwart examples of faith in the stories are Jairus, whom Jesus tells “Do not be afraid, just have faith,” and the woman who has suffered for twelve years from an affliction, to whom Jesus says, “Daughter, your faith has saved you. Go in peace and be cured of your affliction.” They stand head and shoulders above everyone else in the stories, serving as a clarion call to the listeners of Mark’s gospel to have the same faith as they do.
That, of course, seems to be the whole point not only of these four miracle stories but of the gospel as a whole. At the end of the gospel, we will meet another person of faith, the centurion who stood beneath the cross of Jesus as the miracle worker suffers and dies. When Jesus breathed his last breath, the centurion said aloud, “Truly this man was the Son of God,” in that moment becoming the spokesperson for Mark who wants that to be the final declaration of faith in the gospel.
The message to the rest of us could be no clearer, these four stories in succession challenging us to become people of faith, not unbelievers, or worse, people like those in Jairus’s house who ridicule Jesus when he says “the child is not dead but asleep.” As so often happens in the translation from Greek into English, something is lost. When the text says that the mourners ridiculed Jesus, the more correct translation is “they laughed at Jesus.”
It is easy to see that the word ridicule, although conveying something unpleasant and unsavory, pales beside the word laughed. To laugh in the face of Jesus is the response of the ultimate skeptic, the one who sees in Jesus a charlatan and a fool, unworthy of respect or even a modicum of human decency. We will find such persons again at the crucifixion in the form of the chief priests and the scribes who “mocked him among themselves and said, ‘he saved others; he cannot save himself. Let the Messiah, the King of Israel, come down now from the cross that we may see and believe.’”
Next week, we will find ourselves in Jesus’ hometown where he is unable to perform any mighty deeds because of the lack of faith also among the people there, as Mark is quick to tell us. In fact, only a handful of miracles appear in the remainder of the gospel. There will be two feedings of the multitude and two giving of sight to blind people. Jesus’ last stop before he enters Jerusalem will be in Jericho where the blind man Bartimaeus begs Jesus to give him sight. Jesus answers his plea with the words, “Go your way. Your faith has saved you.” Once Jesus enters Jerusalem, he will find no one with similar faith, except the Roman official, a foreigner who watches in wonder as the miracle worker dies on the cross.
In one of his books, the writer and scholar Fred Craddock once made this observation. He wrote that when it comes to the matter of the Messiah, there is always enough suffering in the world to make the idea of a messiah a powerful one. On the other hand, Craddock said, there is always enough pain in the world to render ridiculous the statement, “The Messiah has come.”
Like Mark, Craddock presents us with a choice–to believe or not to believe. Mark’s presentation of these four miracle stories urges us to become believers in Jesus, the Beloved Son sent by the Most High God to demonstrate in mighty deeds the presence of the Living God among us in our suffering and in our setbacks, in our misery and in our misfortunes. So, do we believe the good news, or do we laugh in the face of Jesus? That is the question that Mark finally asks each one of us.
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 