Mark 5.21-43
Anyone who was lucky enough to hear Mark’s gospel recited in one sitting as by Alec McCowan about 40 years ago ago will appreciate how the overall dramatic effect of Mark’s crowded, breathless narrative is enhanced by punctuating pauses, such as the sandwich story of Jairus’ daughter and the haemorrhaging woman which we heard this evening.
It’s an effective narrative technique, but I want to suggest that it may have some more substantial purposes and the first is to facilitate the contrast between hectic popular activity of teaching and healing, both sometimes quite controversial and even hostile, with moments of calm and intimacy. Nearly every miracle story has at its centre a moment when Jesus is, momentarily, alone with another individual, interacting on a human level where anxiety and desire are answered by Jesus’s demanding enquiry, often “What is it you really want?”. It’s an enquiry prompted by a human sympathy and divinely gracious desire -even compulsion- to heal.
The contrast of public and crowded good work- the preaching of the Kingdom of God- and all that entails for us as society is one aspect of the gospel; on the other hand is the individual encounter and the meeting of personal need. Together they are a paradigm of salvation and our religious experience. I am more sympathetic to the former, active and social aspect rather than
the personal and confessional. But I am drawn to story of Jairus’ daughter and the haemorrhaging woman as they together throw light and nuance on those private encounters, and how they nourish the idea of social salvation.
Both are unusual miracles in that there is no initial dialogue between Jesus and the sufferer; the encounter is one way. The woman touches Jesus’ clothes and that is enough to release miraculous power; Jesus tells the girl to get up, and she does whether from deep sleep, coma or death.
Jesus feels the power going out of him as his garment is touched. Seemingly the process is automatic; it does not need to be willed by Jesus. I see this as facet of the incarnation. That Jesus the man should also be God is not an easy idea, but this miracle more than most others demonstrates it, because Jesus here is not a miracle worker (of which there were apparently plenty in 1st Century Palestine). He can’t stop the creative and healing power of love rushing out of him, just as God is most essentially the creator moved by love to make a world that “is good”. We, like the woman, however ashamed or hopelessly helpless we may feel, need only approach God to find forgiveness or healing before we even dare voice our need, because that is what God is like. And we will find help from one whose sympathy is unconcerned about social
taboos, ritual purity and all the other paraphernalia that cling to and clog up religion.
Another opportunity afforded by the sandwich construction is the ease with which comparisons can be made to draw out both similarities and differences between two stories which have something in common. Here we have two females; one a mature woman, hideously disabled and in every sense impoverished by dysfunctional menstruation and the ministrations of useless doctors and the prejudice of society; and another, a twelve year old girl, on the threshold of womanhood and the menarche and very shortly, probably, marriage.
They are both called daughters- using the standard Greek word for a female child of any age. Neither, of course, are Jesus’s daughters, and used of the woman, it might be thought a trifle paternalistic, but it is rather, I think, affectionate, used by the man (who is not much older, and may be younger, than she is) at whose feet she falls, convinced he can help her when so many others have failed.
In the second half of Jairus’ daughter story two different words are used. When telling the girl to get up Jesus says “Talitha Cumi” which is Aramaic and translated “Little Girl, get up”. Talitha literally means Lamb, just as we might in a familial context call a child a little lamb. It is definitely not, however, how we would
normally address a pubescent child. In contrast, however the next sentence uses a different word for a girl; “korasion”. This is very unusual word which is used only in this story in the Gospels and, in Mark, only again once, in the next chapter, where Salome is called a korasion as she presents her stepfather with the head John the Baptist on a platter. Salome has perhaps had an unfairly poor press, but however sympathetic one may feel she would scarcely be called a little lamb.
Mark (and the other evangelist following him) is surely making something of the contrast between the woman and the girl. Is it too fanciful to see the stories as exemplifying an extraordinary sympathy in Jesus for the condition of women? That sympathy for the individual and disregard for social norm, is obvious enough in the story of the haemorrhaging woman. Does Jesus, disregarding the pessimistic opinion of the girl’s household, indicate that he knew what was wrong with the girl? Does he see that the girl’s malaise is based in fear of growing up and all the ghastliness that it entailed? She’d rather be dead. (Is it anorexia perhaps? It is telling that Jesus’ first instruction to her is to have something eat?) Anyway, Jesus addresses her first as a little lamb, the six year old that she want to be, but he tells her to get up; and so she does but now as a korasion- a girl still but a woman too.
I admit this interpretation is highly imaginative, and I make it because I want to see another side of Jesus, showing an entirely human and sensitive sympathy for a fellow human being and one whom contemporary society would either shun as taboo or treat as of little concern – a silly girl.
Two stories then which show two facets of Jesus ministry; demonstrating both the creative and healing power of God and the radical sympathy of which as human beings we are capable. Jesus makes way for the kingdom by sweeping away taboo in the one case and embracing the human condition with extraordinary kindness and sensitivity in the other, but each objective supporting the other. The kingdom of Heaven is populated by individuals. Amen.