Faith as Waiting
Lectionary Text: Mark 5:21-43 NRSV
21When Jesus had crossed again in the boat to the other side, a great crowd gathered around him; and he was by the sea. 22Then one of the leaders of the synagogue named Jairus came and, when he saw him, fell at his feet 23and begged him repeatedly, “My little daughter is at the point of death. Come and lay your hands on her, so that she may be made well, and live.”
24So he went with him. And a large crowd followed him and pressed in on him.
25Now there was a woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years. 26She had endured much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had; and she was no better, but rather grew worse. 27She had heard about Jesus, and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, 28for she said, “If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well.” 29Immediately her hemorrhage stopped; and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease. 30Immediately aware that power had gone forth from him, Jesus turned about in the crowd and said, “Who touched my clothes?” 31And his disciples said to him, “You see the crowd pressing in on you; how can you say, ‘Who touched me?’” 32He looked all around to see who had done it. 33But the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came in fear and trembling, fell down before him, and told him the whole truth. 34He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.”
35While he was still speaking, some people came from the leader’s house to say, “Your daughter is dead. Why trouble the teacher any further?” 36But overhearing what they said, Jesus said to the leader of the synagogue, “Do not fear, only believe.” 37He allowed no one to follow him except Peter, James, and John, the brother of James. 38When they came to the house of the leader of the synagogue, he saw a commotion, people weeping and wailing loudly. 39When he had entered, he said to them, “Why do you make a commotion and weep? The child is not dead but sleeping.” 40And they laughed at him. Then he put them all outside, and took the child’s father and mother and those who were with him, and went in where the child was. 41He took her by the hand and said to her, “Tálit-a cúm,” which means, “Little girl, get up!” 42And immediately the girl got up and began to walk about (she was twelve years of age). At this they were overcome with amazement. 43He strictly ordered them that no one should know this, and told them to give her something to eat.
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Each time I read this story, I find it almost dizzying: I imagine sweltering heat, crowds so dense there’s no space to move, the bustle of village streets at midday, and the rapid heartbeats of each person in the crowd, ripe with expectation.
At this point in Mark’s gospel, Jesus cannot escape the crowds. Though he often tells people he encounters to keep quiet about the work he is doing, word spreads rapidly — so rapidly that as people see his boat approaching the shore of the Sea of Galilee, as Luke’s account of this narrative will tell us, they recognize him and start to gather on the beach, waiting for him.
If there is one recognizable motif in this story, it is waiting. Jairus the synagogue leader’s daughter is at the brink of death, and just as word finally reaches Jesus through the swarm of people, someone else diverts his attention — a woman who has spent twelve years bleeding, which meant twelve years cut off from worship in her community, twelve years barred from one of the the only socially acceptable roles available to her as a woman. For both the woman and Jairus’s daughter, despite the vast difference in their waiting, their future hinges on a mere moment, a moment in which Jesus resists the pull of the crowds and carves out for both of them a quiet and undivided attention.
The author of Mark’s gospel is inviting us, through this Markan Sandwich — a characteristic narrative style in which two stories are woven together so that the meaning of the one hinges on the other — to imagine how the stories of the woman, Jairus, and Jairus’s daughter are connected, and also where their stories necessarily diverge.
Both Jairus and the woman meet Jesus in a moment of urgency and desperation in an unabashed last-ditch effort; both invite from the crowds surrounding them skepticism and ridicule; and by both, Jesus is interrupted, presumably on a journey to somewhere else entirely. The most glaring difference, however, between Jairus and the woman, is Jairus’s power and influence in his community and the woman’s marginalized social status.
Mark tells us that the woman has spent all she has on doctors who offered her no cure. Now, destitute and cut off from any support system, she has grown accustomed to clandestine movement as a means of survival. Commentators and interpreters draw attention to the woman’s malady, noting how her chronic bleeding put her in a state of perpetual ritual uncleanness under Levitical purity laws, which required anyone who came into contact with her to engage in the prescribed purity rituals before they could resume their typical daily tasks. If she had spent twelve years in this state, it is not a stretch to imagine that those in her community came to recognize her as someone to be avoided. It is important to note that in our contemporary imagination, we often associate ritual uncleanness with guilt or moral impurity, but this association was not present in the ancient world. Moving between states of ritual purity and impurity was a part of daily life in second-temple Jewish society. Still, the woman could have conceivably been perceived as an inconvenience to be avoided. And this context makes her community’s avoidance of her almost more agonizing — because the woman poses no real threat but is still singled out as a target of shame and shunning.
One New Testament scholar Louise Lawrence goes as far as to identify the woman as “sensory-disabled” because of the way in which her condition barred her from experiencing human touch. The woman, painfully aware of the stigma associated with her condition, hopes to remain hidden, to cause as little disruption as possible, and so she uses the density of the crowds pressing in on Jesus to her advantage. But Jesus’s outburst (as one might say), when turns toward the crowd and says Who touched my clothes, threatens visibility. Interestingly, his response is not triggered by the sensation of touching but by the sensation which the touching activates — the flow of power from Jesus’s body.
Candida Moss narrates this interaction quite provocatively: she says, “Like the woman, Jesus is unable to control the flow that emanates from his body. Like the flow of blood, the flow of power is something embodied and physical; just as the woman feels the flow of blood dry up, so Jesus feels—physically—the flow of power leave his body. Both the diseased woman with the flow of blood and the divine protagonist of Mark are porous, leaky creatures.”
Moss emphasizes here not the similarity between the woman and Jairus or Jairus’s daughter but between the woman and Jesus. Jesus’ response to the woman, it seems, spurs from a sense of shock over the response of his own body to the woman’s touch. The “porous, leaky” nature of each of their bodies was considered in their greco-roman context to be weak and feminine. Jesus, then, shares with the woman a kind of somatic knowing about how the particulars of one’s embodied experience either preclude or facilitate access to social power and agency. For both Jesus and the woman, their interaction threatens to reveal something to the crowds around them that they wish to keep hidden — namely, Jesus’ identity as the holy one of God (as Mark calls him) and the woman’s stigmatizing condition.
This context makes the exchange between Jesus and the woman all the more astounding. The woman comes to Jesus in fear and trembling and tells Jesus the whole truth — about her condition, twelve years of doctors and failed cures, and her final last-ditch effort to find healing. There is a vulnerability in how Jesus responds to her: Daughter, he says, your faith has made you well. In Jesus’ affirmation of the woman’s faith and her healing is an implicit acknowledgement of the vulnerability of both of their embodied conditions and an invalidation of any notion of shamefulness that the crowd around them might have associated with the woman and her disease. Jesus is not simply healing but rewriting social hierarchies.
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And then there is the matter of Jairus and his daughter. There’s an interesting parallel between the way Jairus speaks about his daughter and the way Jesus addresses the woman in the crowd. Jairus tells Jesus that his little daughter is dying, a term indicating endearment rather than age (since we later find out that the girl is twelve years old). Jesus’ subsequent address to the woman as daughter calls back to this moment in the text. Unlike Jesus’ encounter with the woman, however, Jairus is able to approach Jesus directly and ask for healing. Both Jairus and the woman are acting in faith, but Jairus is using the so-called “proper channels” available to him because of his social standing as a man in a position of power.
We know that in the ancient world, and in this particular society, patriarchy is the prevailing family structure and the mechanism through which power and agency are distributed — and, as we know, those things are not distributed evenly. As a father, Jairus is fulfilling his societal duty to protect and provide for his daughter as he approaches Jesus and asks for healing; but, as a result, in Mark’s narration of the story, Jairus’s daughter is only known in relation to her father. The girl is only called “Jairus’s daughter” until Jesus speaks about her: “The child,” he says, “is not dead, but sleeping.” It’s a small change, no doubt, but significant, and it is this phrase that signals to us why these stories are so inextricably connected in Mark’s imagination.
In Jesus’ healing of the girl and the woman, he is not only eradicating their maladies with what one scholar calls an “oozing holiness,” but he is subtly mending and renegotiating avenues of power and agency, which too often trend toward exploitation and marginalization. Jesus affirms the woman’s touching of his garment as a response of faith, even though the power she accessed was in some sense taken and not given to her, even though she did not access this power through the so-called “proper channels.” Then, he calls the woman daughter, implicitly accepting the role of her protector and provider, [a relationship without which she runs the risk of becoming isolated from society and its resources.] And finally, Jesus speaks to and about the girl directly, calling directly to her and taking her hand in his healing pronouncement, Little girl, get up! The term daughter, which in this societal context could carry an implicit notion of weakness, Jesus redefines in terms of belovedness. This healing, then, is not just a healing but a critique of the structures of power which neglect and silence those on the margins of society.
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And while all of this talk of ritual purity and hierarchical family structure in first-century Palestine may seem far off from our world today, I’d be willing to bet that many of you spend time thinking about how and by whom mechanisms of power and agency are either accessed or obstructed in our world today. In fact, I know many of you spend time thinking about this because I’ve talked to you about the work you do in this community to combat systemic injustices — with ACT and their work in affordable housing, STAIR’s mission to increase literacy rates in under-resourced populations, CARE’s commitment to dismantling marginalizing systemic structures, and so many more... So much of the work you do relies on working through and with a flawed system in order to diminish exclusionary and exploitative practices in that same system. And it’s difficult work that often moves slowly—much more slowly than we would like.
The text doesn’t tell us about Jairus’s reaction to the woman, but I can imagine that as his daughter is dying, he wonders why Jesus takes the time to stoop down and converse with her, especially when she didn’t ask to be acknowledged in the first place. Why, when Jairus’s daughter is on borrowed time, does Mark’s Jesus (who is always on the move and doesn’t like to stop and chat), make sure that he speaks to the one who pulled from him the flow of power?
This is a question I ask each time I return to this text, and each time I find it equally baffling. And as I read and studied in preparation for today, I couldn’t stop thinking about the staggering legion of injustices that plague our world, near and far, and the complex work required to combat them.
Sometimes, I think, when we create systems to alleviate those injustices we inadvertently become more committed to the systems than we are to the eradication of the injustices that make those systems necessary. We itemize our priorities into neat hierarchies to make our goals concrete and achievable, and, sometimes, in the process marginalize those who are also working to dismantle these injustices but who are not using the so-called “proper channels” to do so. So often what is retroactively praised as courage to speak out against injustice is in its present moment maligned as unnecessary disruption.
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This month, as we have celebrated Pride Month, we also remember (as Mihee so aptly reminded us a few weeks ago) that the first Pride celebration was an act of civil disobedience, action taken because the so-called “proper channels” for access to agency and liberation were not available to those existing in a queer and trans bodies. As I have remembered this month the costly action of those who have fought for all kinds of liberation in our history, it is impossible for me not to think of Palestine — the tens of thousands of lives destroyed by unconscionable, unnecessary violence; the reticence of so many to name these horrific acts for fear of disruption; and the courage of those who continue to fight and speak up, to reach for the garment’s hem in a last-ditch effort for healing.
Because we are so used to a mindset of scarcity, we see Jesus’ pausing to speak to the woman, to call her daughter, and to affirm her civil disobedience as an act of faith, as an impediment to the healing of Jairus’s daughter. But Jesus’ response to both Jairus and to the woman recalibrates our priorities. The dual call for healing from Jairus and from the woman, and the way in which their separate avenues for acquiring healing are both affirmed as acts of faith, feels to me like an invitation to think about the intersectionality of injustice — how varying structures of oppression can exist alongside each other and also within each other, and how this reality calls for an equally complex and intersectional approach to advocacy.
Jesus’ stooping to speak to the woman is an identification with her, a recognition of the vulnerability of her embodied reality because he, too, is marginalized by his existence in a body that people fail to value and understand. The woman’s embodied reality is what drives her civil disobedience. Jairus’ request for healing is urgent, but the woman’s is costly. And yet, somehow, there is room for both of them. Because what really makes the difference in this story between healing and disease or between life and death is not the how but the what — not the request itself but the healing touch of Jesus.
amen.
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Mary Shelley Reid is an M.Div. student at Princeton Seminary and served as the summer intern in 2024. She preached this sermon on June 30, 2024.