July 2, 2006
(Fourth Sunday after Pentecost; Proper 8)

Ponder Anew What the Almighty Can Do

by The Rev. Canon Susan Sommer

Deuteronomy 15:7-11  •  Psalm 112  •  2 Corinthians 8:1-9,13-15  •  Mark 5:22-24,35b-43
(From The Lectionary Page)

Shortly before we left Chicago, a frenzy of piety broke out in a dank viaduct adjacent to one of the busiest expressways in the city. Water, or some slightly more sinister fluid, had flowed down the concrete wall and created a pattern that suggested an image of the Virgin Mary. News of this image rapidly spread and in very short order, pilgrims flocked to the site, bearing prayer petitions and votive candles. The Department of Transportation, worried about the hazard posed by worshipers, was caught in between the rock of public safety and the hard place of public piety. In fairly short order, excitement died down, a rainstorm changed the patterns on the wall, cracks were sealed, and we got on with our lives. I never saw the image in person – it being on a stretch of expressway that I used to avoid like the plague, due to a density of both traffic and potholes. I did, however, see the image printed in the Chicago Tribune. I remember being struck less by its resemblance to popular images of our Lady and being struck more by our curiously human propensity for seeking patterns in the world around us and assigning meaning to them.

We do that all the time, and we apparently have done so from time immemorial. Our Jewish forebears’ concern with ritual purity and contamination was all about seeking meaning from patterns in nature. The normal pattern for human life is to be alive: to be dead, therefore, is to be unclean. The normal pattern for blood is that it stays within our bodies and sustains life; a person who bleeds and yet does not die doesn’t fit the pattern and is therefore unclean. Animals with cloven hooves generally are ruminants – creatures which chew their cud. Pigs are an exception to this pattern, therefore they are unclean. That which fits a pattern is of God; that which does not fit a pattern represents the forces of chaos. Not only were the two realms mutually exclusive, but the realm of God was to be protected and kept undefiled from the realm of chaos.

Today’s gospel passage picks up where last week’s left off. Jesus has stilled the stormy waters of the Sea of Galilee and has exorcised an entire legion of demons from a Gentile man, thereby restoring him to soundness of mind. Far from keeping himself untainted by that which was unclean, Jesus waded in with utter, divine impunity. Far from being contaminated by the uncleanness of demons and pigs, and Gentile country in general, Jesus instead was an agent of restoration. That which is of God cannot be contaminated by that which is of chaos. This ran counter to everything that devout Jews would have believed from the Torah and the disciples were still processing this stunning theological reversal when they returned again to the homeland.

Immediately, they encounter more from the realm of chaos. Jairus’s daughter lies at the point of death, and en route to that mission of mercy, a hemorrhaging woman touches Jesus. Once again, uncleanness abounds and yet, once again, Jesus is not contaminated but rather is an agent of restoration. Pattern after pattern after pattern is shattered. Those on the margins are to be drawn in. Sacred laws are broken with impunity. The wealthy and powerful wait while the dispossessed and voiceless ones are heard and healed and restored. Death itself is cheated of its final power and a twelve-year-old girl prefigures Christ’s own resurrection 11 chapters later.

It’s astonishing stuff, this business of Christ’s ministry of healing and restoration. Old certainties, old orthodoxies are laid waste by the Son of God who simply will not allow the status to remain quo. In him, the Spirit of God was on the move, making possible behaviors which before would have been unthinkable. Jairus would have seen in the pattern of his daughter’s deadly illness intimations of his own sinfulness – for how else was suffering of one’s child to be understood except as divine retribution for one’s sins? Yet he nonetheless beseeches this itinerant rabbi to save his daughter. The woman with the hemorrhage would have seen in her affliction God withholding graciousness from her for some reason. She was forbidden to touch anyone or anything, and yet she reached out and touched Jesus’s clothing. In the presence of Christ, old patterns are reinterpreted and new life is given by the giver of life.

The healing stories in today’s gospel point to the astonishing faith of Jairus and of the unnamed woman who interrupted Jesus on the way. We think of the healings themselves as miraculous, and they certainly are. But for our purposes, we do equally well to remember that faith itself is miraculous. The opposite of faith, let us remember, is not doubt. The opposite of faith is certainty. The opposite of faith is a heart closed to daily revelation of God at work in the world. Everything in the world inhabited by Jairus and the hemorrhaging woman would have led them to certainty. Suffering was caused by sin. Period. Uncleanness was to be avoided. Period. The realm of God and the realm of Chaos were mutually exclusive. Period. And yet something broke open for them, enabling them to set aside their accustomed hermeneutic and reach out to Jesus in faith. That’s the miracle. That’s the new life to which we all are called.

It is human nature to seek patterns in our daily life and to assign meaning. Nothing wrong with it, unless the meanings we assign take on absolute, unchangeable, cultural certainty. When that happens, we find that we are waltzing with idolatry, shut down to the newness and the sheer wonder that a life lived in the presence of God requires.

Instead, the evidence throughout the gospels seems to suggest that old certainties, old orthodoxies are routinely laid waste by the Son of God who simply will not allow our status to remain quo.