Göttinger Predigten
Göttinger Predigten im Internet hg. von U. Nembach
Fifth Sunday after Pentecost, 06/28/2015
Sermon on Mark 5:21-43, by David H. Brooks
One of the things that we find hard to understand is how, depending on circumstance, a strength or a talent can actually be a weakness. Business consultants call such moments “blind spots” or “shadow zones:” our tendency is to emphasize and develop our talents or cultivate our resources so much that they begin to be outsized and, well, cast a shadow, obscuring something that we need to see. Experts in a given field are particularly vulnerable to this—the very ability to size up a situation and dismiss what is clearly irrelevant often means that something vital is missed. I say again, we fail to understand this. Too much of anything, even or perhaps especially those things we would consider unmistakable blessings— humor or empathy, wealth or power, friends and associates, education and knowledge, anything that comes to mind for you—any of these things can cast a shadow that can prevent our seeing or understanding something important.
A funny example of this is a story the actor Burt Reynolds tells on himself. Early in his career when he was still an unknown actor, Reynolds went to a bar and sat down two stools away from a beefy man with enormous shoulders. Without warning, the guy began harassing some patrons seated at a table nearby. Reynolds warned him to watch his language. That’s when the guy with the huge shoulders turned on Reynolds. Reynolds went on to say:
I remember looking down and planting my right foot on this brass rail for leverage, and then I came around and caught him with a tremendous right to the side of the head. The punch made a ghastly sound and he just flew off the stool and landed on his back in the doorway, about 15 feet away. And it was while he was in mid-air that I saw...that he had no legs.
Mark's dual stories of a man whose daughter is ill and a woman who has come to the end of her rope and hope in a long, drawn-out search for a cure of her illness, is a story about shadows. At first glance, it would seem that Mark could not have put together two more different people if he had tried. Jairus is referred to by name, identified by status, and appears in our story as powerful and persuasive. The woman, on the other hand, remains forever anonymous; she is poor and sick and unclean due to both her gender and her illness. Yet there is a common experience that binds these two diverse individuals together: They are both utterly desperate, and they both come to Jesus as their last and only hope.
Although Jairus is introduced in verse 22 as a significant member of society, his personal pre-eminence is pushed aside by Jesus just as his story is pushed right off the pages by the determination of the nameless, powerless, bleeding woman. Her long illness, personal struggles, failure to find healing and enforced poverty are carefully detailed by Mark's text. Mark, in the shifting of the story, holds a bright light to someone who would ordinarily be unnoticed, someone who, by her embarrassed reaction, would prefer to remain unnoticed. But all these negatives only serve to point up her story's positive thrust and focus -- her tremendous faith in Jesus. Despite her appearance, her gender and her status, this woman surprisingly provides Mark with an ideal model of faithfulness. Here, in the shadow of a culture that is focused on cultivating—or perhaps getting, acquiring, maintaining—holiness and purity, we encounter someone who clings to Christ, desires only to touch, to hold, to remain in contact with the Lord. Mark turns our attention away from what we might prefer to notice, or what we might prefer to celebrate, so that we might see truly. What is more, Mark points out that Jesus is not content for this woman to simply receive healing in the shadows. It is only when she is brought forth, identified and celebrated that she is made well, or better yet, made whole. In verse 34, Jesus personally addresses her, and declares that she is sesoken, more so than iamatos; she is saved/made whole, not just healed. Power healed her; being brought out of the shadow where so many are relegated made her a whole person. Her pistis, her faith in Jesus gave her the ability to move beyond the blind spot of her culture, her world.
The faith of this woman now becomes the faith Jesus calls forth out of Jairus. In the face of the devastating news Jairus' companions bring to him, Jesus counsels in verse 36: "Do not fear, only believe (pisteuein)." Here is where Mark connects the dots most clearly—a woman suffering for 12 years becomes the example for a man whose 12 year old daughter has entered into death’s shadow. But Jesus draws the one he calls talitha back out into the light as well.
This is a hard lesson, when we live in a world that wants to celebrate with all we can our reputations, our abilities, our wealth, our power, our strength. We are so desperate that we will even insist that the things that our Lord teaches are the results of sin are in fact the sign of our righteousness. Where are we living in shadows? Where are we ignoring blind spots? Our call is to in faith grab hold of Jesus, trusting not our own strengths, but trusting only in our Lord’s power to heal, to make whole, to restore and renew. It begins with humility, admitting that we do not know everything, that we are not equal to everything, that many times our lives need less of our strengths and more humility, a recognition that we, most of all, need to be still and let Jesus be Jesus , so that he can give us the gift we need most. Amen.