Trinity 4

Sermon preached by the Revd Anna Matthews

 What was it in your life that made you realise life doesn’t all go according to plan? That despite your best endeavours, your hard work, your resources or your good deeds, stuff happens that you can’t control? When you realise that your carefully plotted plans and ambitions, or your savings account, or your diligently worked for reputation and position can’t save you?

 Often it’s something that interrupts our sense that we are in control of our lives. A bereavement. An illness. A relationship gone wrong. A trauma. A pandemic. Something happens and we discover we are powerless against it: we can’t bring the dead back to life. We can’t restore health. We can’t make someone else love us, or forgive us. We can’t undo the damage done to us. We can’t control a virus.

 We react differently, at different times. Sometimes we’re afraid. Sometimes we’re angry, affronted by our impotence, or the breaching of some sort of invisible contract we thought was in operation. Sometimes we despair. Sometimes we will try everything in our power to fix it, which is often another way of trying to hang on to some sense of control.

 We meet two characters at their wits’ end in today’s Gospel reading, though they are united only by their need. Jairus is a respected leader of the synagogue. He has position, influence, contacts, and learning behind him. But they can’t save his daughter. Confronted with his need, he sets all that aside and throws himself down at Jesus’ feet, begging him to make his daughter well.

 The woman with the haemorrhages, on the other hand, has nothing. Her illness has cut her off: the bleeding makes her ritually unclean according to Jewish law, which meant she couldn’t go to the temple or synagogue, couldn’t mix in the community, couldn’t even touch another human being without defiling them. We’ve experienced something of the loss and lack of human touch during the pandemic. Imagine that for 12 years. And she’s tried everything: the best doctors, the quacks, the questionable remedies you read about in the back of magazines… all to no avail. Alone, broke, and still bleeding, she is desperate.

 And her desperation interrupts Jairus’s desperation. Jesus is already on his way to Jairus’s house when the woman stretches out her hand to touch his cloak. And immediately she’s healed. But rather than just going on his way, Jesus stops, looks around, and asks who had touched him. And the disciples don’t get it. Jesus is in the thick of the crowd, people jostling him and pressing in on him all around. Lots of people have touched him, and they’re supposed to be on their way urgently to Jairus’s house. But Jesus singles out this one woman.

 And you can imagine her cringing before such attention. She knows she’s broken the purity laws. She’s defied the conventions governing contact between men and women – and particularly between a rabbi and an unclean woman. She could have melted back into the crowd. But this woman has courage as well as need. She fell down before him, Mark tells us, ‘and told him the whole truth.’

 She lets Jesus see her in all her need and want. The whole truth includes her illness and her longing for a cure, her loneliness and need of company and touch, the desperation that made her bold, the faith that reached out a hand to his garment. As well as risking incurring Jesus’ anger, she risks the crowd’s, too: in the bustle of people she might well have touched others. We don’t have to make much of an imaginative leap nowadays to know what it is to fear invisible contagion in a crowd.

 But Jesus doesn’t respond with the anger she fears or the rejection she might expect. ‘Daughter’, he says, ‘your faith has made you well.’ She’s the only woman in all the gospels that he calls daughter, restoring her not just to health but to relationship and community.

 But Jesus’ attention to this woman means time has run out for Jairus’s daughter. Messengers arrive to say she has died. Yet Jesus is not done yet. ‘Do not fear, only believe’ he tells Jairus, and goes on to his house. Jairus, remember is a leader of the synagogue, someone whose keeping of the law and commandments is noticed and commented on. Jesus is now ritually unclean, having been touched by the woman with a haemorrhage. A good rabbi would have gone off to purify himself, not trek his uncleanness right into the house of a respected synagogue leader.

 But the respected synagogue leader is just as desperate as the woman had been when she reached right through the purity laws to touch Jesus’ cloak. He’s willing to pin his entire hope on Jesus being able to do the undoable and raise his daughter to life.

 And Jesus does. ‘Little girl, get up’, he says – or perhaps better, ‘little girl, arise’ – we are meant to hear a foretaste of another rising from the dead as Jesus takes the girl by the hand and draws her from death’s domain.

 Miracles, in the Gospels, are there to demonstrate that in Jesus the kingdom of God has come near. They’re not meant to dazzle or impress – which is why we often hear Jesus telling people not to say anything about them. They tell us something of God’s purposes, and who Jesus is. They show us a glimpse of a kingdom where sin has no dominion; where illness is healed; captives are freed; the hungry are fed; and death is defeated.

 What they do not show us is how to get God to do what we want. That would just be another way of trying to maintain the illusion that we’re in control of our lives. Stories like those we hear today are not there to make us search for the magic formula that will unlock Jesus’ power but to encourage us to trust that what Jesus desires is our healing, our wholeness, our salvation.

 I can’t promise you a miracle. God is not in my power any more than he is in yours. But I can promise you that Jesus will meet you in your need. Amid the crowds that press in on him he will attend to you, will look at you, see you, and love you, if you let him, if you will take courage and faith from a desperate woman to tell him the whole truth about your life.

It can seem a paltry thing, to come to Jesus with our need. Without good works or achievements or reputation to surround us, we can feel vulnerable, shy. Most of us are quite well-practised at keeping our needs hidden: we put a good face on things, tell people we’re fine, bury the loneliness, the brokenness, the sorrow, the shame, the fear because we just don’t talk about things like that, and that keeps us going tolerably well. Until it doesn’t.  

You don’t have to be desperate, like Jairus and the bleeding woman, to go to Jesus with your need – though if you are, they are good companions in faith to have. Drawing close to him, reaching out to him, sharing the truth of our lives with him, is something we can do daily. And that gets us alert to his power and grace at work in our lives and attuned to his voice, so that at the end of our lives, when we are left with only our need, we can recognise him saying to us what he said to Jairus’s daughter, as he speaks to us from the far side of the tomb: ‘child, arise.’