Jairus fell at Jesus’ feet and pleaded earnestly with him, saying: “My little daughter is desperately sick. Do come and lay your hands on her to make her better and save her life.”,,, Now, there was a woman who had suffered from a haemorrhage for twelve years…she had spent all she had without being any better for it, in fact, she was getting worse. She had heard about Jesus, and came up behind him through the crowd and touched his cloak. “If I can touch even his clothes”, she had told herself, “I shall be well again.”
Mark 5: 21-43
Today’s gospel-reading, which describes Jesus’ cure of the woman suffering from chronic haemorrhaging and the raising of Jairus’ young daughter from death, might lull us into thinking that Jesus’ endless kindness and compassion boosted his popularity enormously. However, even a cursory reading of Mark’s Gospel reveals that Jesus received mixed receptions almost everywhere he went.
In Mark Chapter 5 (source of today’s gospel-reading) the demons who had recognised Jesus for who he really was (“son of the Most High God”) begged him not to disturb them. The pig farmers, into whose stock Jesus had driven the protesting demons that had controlled the raving demoniac, begged Jesus to stop disturbing them and to go back where he had come from. The cured man, who had been forced to inhabit the graveyard, begged Jesus to take him back with him to Galilee. No sooner was Jesus back there than he was met by Jairus, who begged him to come and cure his desperately ill daughter.
Mark was not only alerting his community to the conflicting demands being directed at Jesus but was pointing out to them that Jairus and the unnamed woman were models of the staunchest kind of faith that would not let anything prevent them from going to Jesus.
Of interest is the fact that the three principal characters in Mark’s gospel-story all have two things in common: they have all taken risks and they have all crossed social boundaries. Jesus was fresh from an excursion into the territory of the Gerasenes, where he had mixed with gentiles and meddled in their affairs by driving out demons from a demoniac and relocating them in a herd of pigs which rushed headlong into the sea. In doing so, he risked censure by the Jewish religious authorities. He was doubly at risk for daring to engage in conversation with a woman who was rendered ritually unclean by her repeated bouts of bleeding. Both Jesus and the unnamed woman had crossed the boundaries set in place by the purification laws that forbade their having social and physical contact with one another. Jairus was a synagogue official, who demonstrated disrespect for his position by going to Jesus in the first place. He had cruelled his pitch by setting aside all human respect and publicly falling at the feet of Jesus and begging him to cure his desperately ill daughter. All three had flouted social and religious conventions: Jesus by putting compassion and respect for others ahead of inflexible adherence to empty rules; the woman by disobeying rules that locked her out of gaining access to the only hope she could see open to her and Jairus for daring to have recourse to an itinerant rabbi who, he realised, had more credibility than official religious leaders wedded to lifeless ritual.
As we have read and analysed this gospel-reading, we have done so as spectators. How might we take on the role of participants, engaging with it from the inside? I suggest we might find a way in by first wondering if Jesus had expected how the events of that day would unfold for him. He had probably anticipated another day of teaching those who would come to listen to him about the kingdom of God. Jewish men did not normally expect to be confronted in public by women, let alone women whose ill-health meant that they were ritually unclean. Neither would Jesus have expected a synagogue official to thrown himself down begging him to cure a sick daughter. While Jesus himself had been courageous enough to risk official criticism by challenging rules and regulations that crippled and controlled good, ordinary people, he surely did not expect those very people to fly in the face of religious authority.
That challenges me to stop and ask myself whether I prefer a domesticated, toothless Jesus or a Jesus who challenges me to claim my place in the people of God, to risk breaking free of things that stifle and confine me. This gospel-reading alerts me to the fact that God’s Spirit can invade our comfort through the unplanned and unexpected events of each day. God has blessed us with imagination, creativity and freedom to embrace what we recognise as good and right. We have not been loved into life by God to become inflexible and risk-free. We have to prepare ourselves to engage with a Jesus who will challenge us to embrace the creativity of his Gospel and whose Spirit will sometimes galvanise us into taking daring action to reach out to people who might need us to go with them an extra mile.
I suspect that there have been times in the lives of all of us when we have let ourselves be hamstrung and debilitated by rules and regulations of religious practice. There are times when we have to let faith transcend oppressive, inflexible practice. Had the woman with the haemorrhage followed the religious prescriptions set down for her, she would have lost her opportunity of healing. Had Jairus not stepped beyond the expectations of his job description, he would have found himself burying his beloved daughter and living in ignorance of Jesus and the kingdom of God.
I suspect Pope Francis would applaud us for digging into today’s gospel-reading.