Lamentations 3.22-33, Mark 5.21-43
The Fourth Sunday after Trinity 27 June 2021, Austwick
Jairus was a man unaccustomed to being interrupted. A man of some position, a leader of the synagogue, his days were set out in order - prayers, meetings, meals, more meetings, more prayers - and this was to be expected, this was to be respected, this routine which gave this man his power and position in a world of powerful men.
But when his daughter became critically ill, when her near-death condition touched him, he felt his power drain from him. For this interruption to Jairus’ life revealed his powerlessness in the face of his beloved child’s suffering, his inability to help or save her.
So here in Mark’s gospel passage we see this esteemed elder of the community throw himself at the feet of an imposter, a freewheeling guru peripheral to Jairus’s institution, Jesus, with his reputation for healing: Jairus, desperate for any help he could find to restore his beloved child’s health. We might imagine Jairus weeks beforehand, taking the first call from his wife, asking him to come home quickly to help attend to his suddenly-ill daughter. We can imagine his irritation at this message interrupting, let’s say, an important finance meeting, his head starting to spin between the things he had planned for work that day and this unforeseen domestic difficulty. We might map out Jairus’s alteration over the coming weeks from being a man in complete control of his circumstances to one brought literally to his knees by a problem he could not solve. Touched by this ailing daughter whom he loved so much, all his worldly power drained away.
Today’s gospel passage describes two men, interrupted in the course of their lives. Interrupted by two women, in a world where that should not happen.
Let us turn to look at Jesus in this scene, a man at the height of his powers as a teacher and healer, driven by a sense of his own destiny, empowered by the crowds who pursued him everywhere. In this moment Jesus was a man on a mission, handed to him by Jairus at his wit’s end - imagine the transfer of power between these two men when Jairus fell at Jesus’ feet. Jesus, full of his own importance as a healer, unstoppable on the route which led to Jairus’ house and his daughter’s sickbed. Until that moment when, from nowhere, Jesus felt all this power drain from him, and was stopped in his tracks by a woman who bled.
The active Jesus, the Jesus in motion, the one whose initiative powered all the events described in Mark’s gospel thus far, with a ‘sense of purpose and direction, initiative and drive, is interrupted, disrupted, brought to a (temporary) halt.’
The initiative here belongs entirely to the woman. From first hearing about him from afar, she slowly but surely closes the gap between them and, touching him, triggers a flow of power from Jesus that is beyond Jesus’ control, intention or even awareness. She is healed before Jesus is even conscious of her presence. When, finally, he says, ‘Your faith has made you well’, he is simply naming what has already happened - responding to ‘the whole truth’ that she has told him. [1]
Sometimes it takes an interruption to shake us from ourselves and awaken us to another person’s truth. In those moments when we are stopped in our tracks and we feel our power leave us; this power bound up in our action and our agency - when all this drains away, then, and only then, might we take account of life from a different perspective, and allow this to change or even heal us.
What was this woman’s ‘whole truth’ which she told Jesus? Doubtless the plain truth of her twelve years of haemorrhaging, the traumas of the treatments she endured under so many physicians, each unsuccessful. Is it likely that her truth would contain the testimonies many women tell to this day - of those times she was unlistened-to by the doctors supposedly diagnosing her, distrusting her judgement, telling her that ‘she was not the most reliable narrator of her pain’? [2] Did her truth involve situations where she had felt exposed to treatment by people not entirely in control? This woman may have been suffering from what today is called endometriosis, a condition which has hospitalised the novelist Hilary Mantel. She recounts the last thing the surgeon said to her, on the afternoon of her procedure:
‘For you, this is a big thing, but remember, to us it is routine.’ But when I woke up, [she said] many hours later, he was standing at the end of the trolley in the recovery room, grey and shrunken as if a decade had passed. He had expected to be home for dinner. And now look! [3]
The woman who spoke her truth to Jesus told of her poverty, having spent all that she had on medical treatment, to no avail; perhaps she also spoke of exhausting the goodwill of people around her, who grew tired of her endless tales of menstrual woe, accused her of being a hypochondriac, or of other kinds of madness which conspicuously, mostly only women are ever accused of: neurosis, anxiety, depression, even hysteria: did they repeatedly tell her: ‘it’s all in your mind’, when she knew beyond doubt that it was in truth in her womb, in her ovaries, in her very blood? Had there been a husband whose faithfulness ran out? Did she speak of the sadness and shame she felt in being excluded, not just from the temple with its cleanliness laws but from ordinary friendships, ordinary conversations? By feeling ill-at-ease at always being associated with this disease afflicting her? [4]
Think of the many different ways that this woman’s ‘whole truth’ affected Jesus. Think of how being stopped in his tracks like that, must have challenged his drive and his busyness and his sense of the power and destiny of his purpose. Think of how this One who had become accustomed to being listened-to by rapt audiences everywhere, was challenged to become a listener to this woman’s truth. Challenged to listen well, to listen hard, to things he’d never before been exposed to. Consider what emotions arose in him for this woman as she told him all her truth.
For notice how Jesus responded to this woman’s truth-telling. Moved to not dismiss her as ‘woman’, and send her coldly away; moved instead - maybe by seeing Jairus’s evident deep love for his ailing child - Jesus called this woman ‘Daughter’. He called her ‘daughter’, that most loving and intimate of names; he called her ‘daughter’, embracing her as his own; and he sent her away with something she hadn’t known for twelve years at least. He sent her away in peace.
Another contemporary sufferer of endometriosis, Lauren Gross Blanco, writes of how she has found ‘a true friend in this unnamed biblical character.’ Reflecting on her own condition she writes that, ‘Although, like [the woman Jesus met], I will require a miracle to be cured, I have found deep healing in the hope which comes from a Savior who sees women like me.’ [5]
Notes
[1] Al Barrett, Ruth Harley, Being Interrupted: Reimagining the Church's Mission from the Outside, In, p.98.
[2] Arifa Akbar, Pain on the page: is this the end of the hysterical, ill woman of literature? Guardian, 19 June 2021.
[3] Hilary Mantel, Meeting the Devil. London Review of Books, Vol. 32 No. 21, 4 November 2010.
[4] This paragraph draws examples from Arifa Akbar, Pain on the page: is this the end of the hysterical, ill woman of literature? Guardian, 19 June 2021.
[5] Lauren Gross Blanco, Jesus Sees You: Endometriosis, the Bleeding Woman, and Me. CBE International Blog, March 24, 2020.
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