In the gospel of Mark, we get a series of stories which reveal Jesus’s true power. Which far exceeds everyone’s expectations.
touching Jesus’s cloak and a hidden resurrection
Proper 8B | Mark 5:21-43
Last week, we heard about Jesus and the disciples caught in a storm. Everyone was freaking out. Everyone but Jesus. He was sleeping through it like it was no big deal. So, of course, the disciples rouse him. The turn comes when Jesus chides them for a lack of faith and then calms the storm.
What happens between that story and this story is an encounter on the other side. There they meet a man, imprisoned in a graveyard, possessed by many demons. Not just one deomn, but a thousand of them. Jesus yanks those demons out of the man and puts them into a herd of pigs who run off a cliff.
So now we get this story of Jesus and the disciples crossing back over, encountering a father stressed about his dying daughter and a woman who grabs Jesus’s cloak and is healed.
These stories aren’t merely connected by a timeline. They all have a common theme.
Terrifying Power.
In Mark, Jesus begins his ministry as an extension of John the Baptizer’s. He preaches a message of turning away from evil and believing in the healing grace of God. But very quickly, this message gets literal as Jesus is healing the sick, casting out demons, and bringing thousands of people to see what he is up to.
But soon, the numbers become overwhelming. They push and grab and want a piece of the miracle healer. The one who cures everyone. We are left to imagine the chaos—the shoving and clamoring, like those Black Friday doorbusters that encouraged everyone to rush, shove, and then trample their neighbors for a deal on would-be Christmas presents.
And like those doorbuster sales, the people were blinded by the miraculous and lost track of the purpose.
Belief brought these crowds to Jesus by the thousands. Belief that he could heal them or their loved ones. To solve that singular problem.
This, of course, is quite reasonable. Faith healers were a thing, and effective ones could certainly attract a following. People who can transform the weather, or cast out a thousand demons at once? Not so common. In fact, unheard of outside of their equivalent of comic books.
People come in hordes to find the Jesus who exercises a familiar power. But he has far more power than they know.
This Theme
This theme of terrifying power is built on two conflicting ideas of belief. They have a belief about the world—that it works a certain way. They have a belief in Jesus—that he can heal people. So their belief is, in a sense, transactional. And with it, they’ve built a confidence on familiar boundaries.
Jesus defies those boundaries. He overwhelms them and exceeds them.
And for some, this is a glorious revelation. But for most, this is a terrifying overturning of everything they know. Their confidence came from familiarity; their belief dependent on predictable outcomes.
When Jesus invites us to believe, he isn’t speaking only of belief in the achievement of predictable outcomes. He wants us to push past that and believe in spite of the unpredictable.
This power of Jesus’s, which terrifies those who see its true nature, is for transformation and renewal. It is for redemption and returning the one cast out back into her community. He sends the prisoner, chained up and tormented by a thousand demons, back into the community; healed and whole again.
This is a terrifying power whose beauty is only known by those who believe past those modest expectations.
When more is possible
So when a man comes to Jesus, the leader of a synagogue named Jairus, we are more prepared for the miraculous than he is. He’s merely hoping Jesus can save a life. He believes that is possible.
A woman in the crowd believes more is possible. She grabs his cloak—maybe that will be enough—and her disease vanishes.
I think it’s too easy to call this belief. Not the same belief the others come to Jesus with, anyway. She says
“If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well.”
Which is not the same as Jesus putting his hands on her and healing her. What she is doing is going to the next level. She isn’t remaining at the stage of expectation, but pushing past normal.
It doesn’t say that she believes. Or that she is convinced it will work. In fact, these may be the words of somebody getting up the courage to reach out and do the unthinkable.
She has a hypothesis that maybe this guy is more than these thousands of people think.
That is why Jesus wants to find her. This stranger who touched his cloak and was healed. The one who stole his power from him. He is not searching for her out of anger or fear or sense of injustice. The opposite.
“Daughter, your faith has made you well”.
This is the wholeness—in body and spirit—that Jesus came to offer everyone.
Hidden Resurrection
This encounter with the woman helps us see the truth of faith. That it isn’t about our recognizing the limits of reality and the healing that is possible within them. It’s the challenge of seeing the possibility that healing extends beyond the body.
The whole of Jesus’s ministry so far has been with the multitudes who need healing, but struggle to see the unlimited boundaries of faith.
So when he hears that the child has died, Jesus takes the parents and three disciples, just those five, and visits the girl. Indeed she has died. And yet Jesus wakes her up from a permanent slumber.
When the grieving crowds next see the girl, they’ll hear Jesus’s ridiculous words in their minds:
“The child is not dead but sleeping.”
And they will wonder. Were we wrong? Was she really not dead?
Some will assume that’s it. Those are the boundaries of reality. That’s the only way. And they will go back to business, happy that the family is safe.
Some will wonder further. What if we were right?
And the truth hidden from them, will pick at them. Perhaps leading to a further investigation.
And they might wonder Is he the one?
We are in a time of abnormal.
Things we’ve taken for granted as permanent have ended and the limits of our expectations are exposed. We are rediscovering what it means to be community as we relearn this new, transformed world.
It would certainly be easy to declare normal has returned. Especially as things look more normal. And yet more people have died of the coronavirus worldwide in the first six months of 2021 than all of 2020. As safe as it appears here, our long road globally is far from over.
It’s almost like we’re in a desert, staring at a mirage, except that we can drink the water and sit under the shade of a tree. Reality and unreality are mixed in this beguiling moment.
And yet it is in abnormal times of confusion and conflict that deeper faith emerges. Not only faith within predefined parameters, but faith that transcends them. Faith that a greater possible is indeed possible. Faith in the potential for that mustard seed to grow.
This gospel narrative invites us to examine the familiar while expanding our understanding of what God is up to. To see how God is transforming our idea of normal; of healing; of community. And to reach out in faith to test the impossible, the improbable, no, the otherwise-impossible-but-now-somehow possible as a new, essential, and necessary act of faith.
We are called to reach out with the dangerous possibility of being changed. To be essential parts of the divine project. And to make that the root of our belief.