Transcription of Homily 13 Sunday Ordinary Time 2012 - St. …
1 1 Homily : 13th Sunday in Ordinary time (Cycle B): GOSPEL MK 5:21-43 What do we do with this gospel reading today? What s it saying to us? It s not an easy one, so let s try to pick it apart a bit to see if we can get something. Let=s begin with a simple question: How many Astories@ are there in this reading ? The story of Jairus= young daughter and the healing of the sick older woman There is a kind of Markan sandwich: a story within a story- the Aflavor@ of the outer story (in this case, the story of Jairus daughter) adds zest to the inner story (the story of the woman with the Aissue of And the inner story, then, is meant to shape how we understand the outer one.)
2 What are the two stories about? What binds them together and kind of Acreates sparks that fly off one another? What are they about? Both are about fear and faith. And both are about the power of Jesus to take people from one to the other- from fear to faith. Just now in the Church there is a lot of fear going around for one reason or another, so maybe these stories can still speak a Word of God to us. So, how does the Aouter story@, the story of Jairus= daughter, begin? 2 A synagogue official, a Apresident@, has heard about Jesus.
3 He is probably concerned a little bit about the ruckus Jesus is causing in the hood, but he leaves this aside, comes to Jesus, falls down in front on him (a very undignified gesture) and asks for his help because his daughter is sick. Then what happens after this initial encounter between Jesus and the synagogue official? Mark breaks off the story and now brings in the older woman. Jesus is on his way to Jairus= daughter, where, as we already suspect, he will find a corpse. The picture which Mark is creating is one of sorrow mingled with the threat of impurity- because contact with a dead body is one of the chief sources of impurity in Jewish Law.
4 And now he introduces this old woman who has chronic internal bleeding, which certainly made her impure- and this perpetual uncleanness had lots of consequences for her, for her family and for her social life. The impure woman touches Jesus, and this should have rendered him, according to the Law, also impure. Jesus knows that something has happened, that someone has touched him. There is a crowd pressing around him, but he still asks who touched him- a bit like asking Awho touched me@ when you=re in the middle of a play in football scrum.
5 There is a healing by touch that occurs, but it is such a strange phenomenon that we probably can=t probe much further about how such things work. 3 But there is a question that does immediately arise: was it Jesus= power that rescued the woman or her own faith? Which one? Or is that the wrong question. It is certainly Jesus= power, but at the same time , he says, Ayour faith has rescued Maybe the best way of answering that question is something like this: faith in itself is powerless, but it can become the channel through which God=s power worked in her life, and can work in our own lives.
6 Jesus is not a magician who can do conjuring tricks for an amazed but uninvolved audience. Jesus is the One through whom the Living God was remaking Israel, and remaking human beings and remaking this world. And faith, however much fear and trembling and uncertainty may accompany it, is the first sign of that remaking, that renewal, and of new life. The way in which Mark presents the story is suggesting to us that when life crowds in on us, with all of its pressures, there is still room for us to come up behind Jesus- if that=s all that we can do, and reach out and touch him, in that odd mixture of fear and faith that characterizes so much of Christian discipleship.
7 Then what happens next? Right on cue, as the suspense heightens, messengers come and tell Jairus that his daughter is dead. 4 What does Jesus say to Jairus? Don=t be afraid. Just believe. That=s like telling him to paddle a canoe across the Atlantic and not to worry. But somehow in the midst of the grief and the horror, there is a spark of faith that enables Jairus to walk with Jesus back to his house. When they arrive at the house, what happens? The professional mourners are already there.
8 In a society with daily deaths, there was a structured way for people to grieve, to let it out, to cry, to vent without restraint or embarrassment- unlike our Western Astiff upper lip@ approach! Jesus takes his closest disciples and the parents and goes into the room. And as he is going, he says, Athe girl is not dead; she is ASleeping@ in that world, though, usually meant So, there is a bit of an ambiguity in what he was saying. They go into the room where the dead girl is lying. Jesus reaches out his hand and says a word of command- one of the few given to us in the New Testament in Aramaic, the language Jesus would have spoken- Talitha koum- ATime to get up, little girl@- these are Ordinary words, words that you might use to wake up a sleeping child.
9 She got up, walked around, and was given something to eat. This passage leaves us with so many questions. Why did Mark leave Jesus= 5 Aramaic words, Ordinary words of everyday speech, untranslated into the Greek of his gospel? Maybe, to make the point that God was breaking into, and working through the Ordinary details of life- that=s a point, I think, that we often have trouble with. We think that God=s Kingdom is somehow like a magic show, but Mark is suggesting not- rather, the Kingdom works and grows often unnoticed and unseen in the ordinariness of life except to those who have the eyes to see it!
10 Perhaps more importantly, we are left asking why did something so marvelous, so wonderful as happened to this little girl happen only to a few people? There must have been, and there always are, dead people whose relatives come to Christ and ask for a wonder, a miracle, and it doesn=t happen. If God did it once or twice, why doesn=t He do it to everybody? We are often left either with disbelieving that the story could have happened at all, or thinking that it is just unfair of God to have special cases.
