FINDINGS III By Harry T. Cook

Proper 8 - B - July 1, 2012      

Mark 5: 21-43     

Harry T. Cook

By Harry T. Cook
6/25/12 

When you've got the goods, everybody wants a piece of you. That's the sense of what will be heard in the reading from Mark this coming Sunday. Jesus is depicted as no sooner being back from the alien side of the sea then he is importuned to use his powers to cure a man's daughter of what ailed her.

"Okay, so let's go," is the response. On the way to deal with one emergency another emerges in the person of a woman who had been beset for a dozen years by hemorrhages.

Mark depicted Jesus dealing with bodily suffering and the approach of death - different expressions of the chaos with which he dealt in the previous story about the storm at sea. Mark's Jesus is a person of strength with whom primal forces as well as principalities and powers must reckon.

Here the issue is not anything Jesus was saying but what he was doing.

And there's a clue for people and communities who take his Name in their baptisms. There is, of course, a time for saying and a time for listening. But paramount always is the mandate to do: to do justice, to love mercy and to walk humbly.

Those who are empowered by the gospel have, in fact, a lot to give. They understand that personal security, while the need for it may be dictated by unbidden instinct, is not the be-all and end-all of life. Such persons, freed from their own fears, possess or are possessed of a power that awes. Merely touching their garments may effect nothing, but the wearers of the garments themselves may reach out to touch the touch-ers, thus making the desired connection.

It is often said of the figure Jesus that he was either in the midst of a crowd or followed by one. You'll see mention of the "crowd" (οχλος) five times in this passage. It is to be considered that the author of Mark and of the other gospels assumed or were told that the one of whom they wrote was a popular phenomenon and, as such, would have been attended frequently by a crowd of the curious.

One possible line of interpretation is that the Jesus of the gospels was not -- or was not depicted as -- an occult figure operating outside of public knowledge and scrutiny, that he was ready, willing and able to do his work as others did theirs. It is often said that Jesus "performed miracles," but the New Testament text says that he performed "εργα," i.e. works.

So now Jesus has come back to the "other" side, i.e., into more familiar territory. But there is trouble here, too. Yet it does not manifest itself until "a great crowd" had gathered around him. Think of the "welcome home" of a hero, for someone the word of whose deeds has preceded him. Mark observes at 5:21 that Jesus was "by the sea," not letting us forget that the primal chaos out of which bad stuff can and does come is never far from Jesus, nor he from it.

Now in an ironic way trouble shows up in the form of the impending death of a child. What's ironic is that the death is that of a child of an administrative officer of a synagogue -- a representative of the force that Jesus so publicly embarrassed during his appearance in the Capernaum synagogue back in 1:21ff. The synagogue factotum fell at Jesus' feet (the text says). With what relish must Mark have composed that scene! The factotum's reinforcement of the reaction of the people in Capernaum to the exorcism was not the reaction of the religious establishment when the Pharisees upbraided Jesus for permitting his disciples to pick grain on the Sabbath (see 2: 23-28) or for releasing a man from the burden of his sin (2: 4-12).

Meanwhile, Jesus is all for saving the little girl, according to the Markan narrative, and he willingly sets forth with her father (Jairus). But emerging from the crowd that followed in his train came a woman whose hemorrhages (we might assume vaginal in nature) over a dozen years had made her unclean in the eyes of society and who was therefore as much of an outcast a leper. Moreover, she had, the text says, "endured much" at the hands of physicians who undoubtedly took her slim funds in the practice of quackery. Now she was worse off than before her treatment by the malpractitioners. We are not told her name. We are not told whether she was a Galilean or a Judean or even an observant Jew.

Mark says the hemorrhaging woman was so desperate that she took a chance on merely touching Jesus' clothing in hopes that some kind of transfer of power would be effected. That is, according to Mark's narrative, precisely what happened. Jesus is made to be aware of that transfer. His disciples are bemused by his question about who touched him, meaning that in the press of the crowd much unavoidable touching must have been going on. But the point of 5:30 is that power of the kind Jesus is depicted as possessing was finite. If a person got some of it from him, Jesus would end up with less.

Meanwhile, the woman is guilt-ridden and makes a clean breast of her transgression. Yet in a Samaritan-woman-at-the-well kind of moment, Jesus praises her for her courage and sends her on her way. We should not fail to mark the fact that a woman, an unclean woman, is depicted actually reaching out and touching the garment of a much-acclaimed man, and is praised for doing so by the man himself. Even as the Sabbath was made for humankind, and not the other way around, so the gender and taboo barriers fall before the presence and ministry of him who faced down the demons in the synagogue, the elements at sea and the homicidal mania of the psychotic from the tombs.

Wait, though: what about Jairus' daughter? Having dealt with the interruption of the hemorrhaging woman, Jesus now turns to address the little girl's situation, but not before the word comes that his ministrations would be worthless because she is dead. Not so, says Jesus, she is only sleeping, and continues on his way.

Jesus will insist that no word about this event should be spoken publicly, even though he told no-longer-Legion to go home to his friends and tell them of his release (Mark 5:19). He issued no gag order concerning the exorcism in the Capernaum synagogue or even the stanching of the woman's hemorrhage. Nothing was said about not telling the world about his seeming command over the storm at sea.

Ah, but those events, while bordering to some degree on the possibility of death, had not killed. The little girl, however, has died. Jesus is made to say that she is "only sleeping," but I think we can read that as a pre-diminishment of what he was about to be depicted as doing: raising the dead. This is Mark's Lazarus moment.

According to Paula Fredriksen, a careful reading of the Gospel of John, suggests pretty clearly that it was not the cleansing of the Temple, which is referenced in Chapter 2 of John, but the raising of Lazarus told of in Chapter 11 just days before Jesus made his final trip to Jerusalem that brought down the authorities upon him.(See From Jesus to Christ, 2nd edition, by Paula Fredriksen, Yale University Press, 2000, pp. xxii, xxiii, 109). Fredriksen makes a case for preferring the primacy of John in the reporting of that event.

The Lazarus thing, real or not, would have demonstrated the kind of power any establishment would fear from one considered an upstart -- a peasant sage going about advocating an unbrokered access to acceptance and freedom, and of whom it could be said that he had foiled death.

Just as the women of Mark 16:8 are frightened by the seeming reversal of death, so Jesus is saying to those whose ones who went with him to the house of Jairus, "This is volatile stuff you have witnessed today. Don't talk about it casually. No one should know about this" -- "this" being the fact that she was not asleep at all, but dead.

It would remain for the early apostolic community to tell the world it believed that Jesus himself had shaken off the chains of death, meaning what we are not sure at this remove.      

Some significant number of human beings who for one reason or another cling to the outward manifestations of religion are seeking power for their lives in the form of release from anxiety, pain, fear and general emptiness of one kind or another.

Crowds of them file into mega-churches at the drop of a pietism and become consumers of whatever the fare may be on a given occasion -- a scolding over sin for the sake of being shriven, or a upbeat promise of a peace that passeth understanding, or even a financial blessing or promise of success guaranteed by giving money to the preacher's church.

Crowds fill mosques for Friday prayers, sometimes in some places to hear denunciations of non-Muslims who should only be made to perish in the worst kind of death for the sin of being Western devils.

Other religionists go to church, temple or synagogue perhaps out of habit, or maybe for the community aspect of it, or yet to obtain or be exposed to a certain undefined even indefinable je ne sais quoi that will somehow make things better internally for themselves or for the environments in which they live and move and have their beings.

However, as Harry Emerson Fosdick once said, they probably do not go to hear about what befell the Jebusites.

Among such crowds will invariably be some version of the woman with the 12-year hemorrhage who has been ill-used in her search for surcease, who has been going to this church or that temple hoping to find a center for critical thinking and evolving belief. She will not want to be met by malpractitioners of a fixed and static "truth" founded on unchallenged a priori principles.   

She will reach out to touch, and want to be touched by, what she hopes will be a community of seekers not bound to tired creedal formulations but a freed folk committed to inquiry. If she finds it or is found by it, that community's existence, in turn, will have found new validation for its life and mission.

Such a community can then move on to deal with dying and death as Jesus and his following are depicted as doing. The intellectual life of the Christian church is as moribund as Jairus' daughter and is in need of resuscitation already.