This Week: Proper 8B
Gospel: Mark 5:21-43
Jesus’s healing stories are transgressive. Always. Transgressive against nature, culture, community, expectations. He heals people he isn’t supposed to heal—in every sense of that phrase.
That we find these stories comforting is also transgressive. Is it because we only feel half of the stakes here? That Jesus heals—and that’s it? That transgression isn’t so daring after all? Even when Jesus heals the wrong people at the wrong time and in the wrong way.
Wrong, of course, being their operative word: the disciples, friends, and others who should know better.
Notice that the obstacle this week isn’t the Pharisees and scribes. It isn’t the spiritual leaders who populate the Most Wanted list in the Christian imagination. The disciples, friends, and loved ones of the healed cast themselves at the feet to trip the Messiah, make him stumble, change course.
Let us not forget the forestumbling, of the woman, suffering for a decade as doctors steal her money while offering false medicine. The community shows no sympathy to her throughout that decade—even less as she seeks compassion from Jesus. She reaches out with longing, fingertips stretch to hold, clutch the cloak. Like new birth, baptism.
The Other Healing
The cruelty of the other story tumbles forth as these people, interchangeably friend and foe, block his way in to heal a child. A Don’t bother falls out alongside others: It’s too late. She’s dead. The things we say to encourage others not to trouble themselves to do the very things we long for. They stand there like statues to Hypocrisy. Don’t/Come. You’re (not) welcome.
We might wonder if Jesus does the same. I don’t think so.
He walks in and says the girl is sleeping. Suggesting she isn’t properly dead.
But if she isn’t dead, then perhaps Jesus isn’t doing anything here. And if she is, perhaps he is not being accurate in his speech.
There are other perhapses, however. Perhaps he isn’t the one to heal her. And perhaps neither are these people there to guard her.
Perhaps she, too, has been healed and also heals herself.
Healing Faith
I don’t suppose we attend to these healing stories with much rigor. The conceit of most conviction is that Jesus heals. That he does this thing.
And yet the text is teeming with other challenging theses, like faith has made people well. That Jesus is not the acting agent here. But it is, in fact, we who perform these miracles.
I am neither convinced nor concerned by this truth. These stories don’t seem bent on revealing the true nature of Jesus’s power nearly as much as bridging our understanding that we be a part of our own convictions. That our faith has tangible effect on the grace of God.
There is nothing more transgressive than to argue that Jesus has little to do with these healing stories. But I’d suggest we are being even more so by arguing that he has more.