Passionate Jesus - Hope for the Hopeless

Preached on Sunday March 11, 2018

Scripture readings: Psalm 34; Mark 5:21-43

Walking along the Columbia River
Desert Aire/Mattawa, WA
February and March, 2018

I know a woman here who can raise the dead:

Provided that they are houseplants.

That woman’s name is Ruth Naser.

She’ll have to tell that story here sometime.

In the Gospel, the woman whose hemorrhage had been getting worse for twelve years, even though she had spent all she had for physicians’ care, and folk medicines’ cures, and healers’ prayers, had come to believe that Jesus could do anything. She needed someone who could do anything.

Jairus (whose twelve-year-old daughter was dying) was ruler of the synagogue in Capernaum. This means that he wasn’t a rabbi. He was a layman. You could say he was “lay-president” of the synagogue. You could say that he was like Rodger York, because a Presbyterian Clerk of Session is like that.

Jairus had also come to believe that Jesus could do anything. Jairus now needed (and his daughter now needed) someone who could do anything.

Jesus can do anything. The truth is that Jesus always wants to do even more than we ask. The way Jesus answered the hopes of these two people shows us what Jesus really wants, because his methods show us the heart of God, where Jesus comes from.

Jesus once said, “He who has seen me has seen the father.” (John 14:9)

This would have been true before the creation of the cosmos. Even now that Jesus had become a human being on earth, it was still true. What Jesus said, how he said it; what Jesus did and how he did it; whatever happened to Jesus, and how he responded to it all worked to reveal his Father. It all worked to tell us who God is and what he made us for, and what God wants, and what God promises, and how he gives it to us: the life of God on this earth.

The everlasting Son, who dwelt among us as a human being in Jesus, the whole course of his life and every day of it, as told to us in the Bible, was designed to reveal who God is and God’s relationship with us.

In one single day in the life of Jesus, in Capernaum where Jesus had based his ministry on the shores of Lake Galilee, two desperate people spread themselves flat and face down on the ground in front of Jesus. Their state of mind was almost identical but, otherwise, they were nothing alike.

They both received answers to their prayers, but the answers were substantially different from what they thought and hoped to receive. Having their prayers answered required a great deal from them for Jesus’ answer to run its course, the answers of Jesus filled them with fear.

The woman had a sickness that made her physically and spiritually unclean. She had a female hemorrhage.

It was a matter of blood. Blood was holy. Blood represented life. The blood of animals was shed as a sacrifice to show that sin and evil could only be overcome at the price of a life.

Mark, and the other gospels, tell us that the blood of Jesus (his blood being both truly human and yet coming from Word Made Flesh (“And the word was with God and the word was God,”), living a human life, had such a power that it could make the unclean clean and pure. Christ dying for us, the body of Christ wounded and tortured for us, the blood of Christ poured out for us is the giving of a life that can take away all the sin of the world.

But the blood that comes from purely human activities and life, or that comes from wounds or sickness (because wounds and sickness represent the fallenness of the world) represent what’s wrong with our world. Such blood represents what is unclean and contaminated in our world. Such blood was taught to be a sign to the people of Israel of the sins that contaminate others; because sin and evil can contaminate us.

So, this woman who touched Jesus’ robe was untouchable (almost as bad as a leper). She wasn’t allowed to touch anyone. And no one could touch her without being contaminated until the end of the day. If she was going to be around people, she needed to be very sneaky. If her sneakiness failed, then she would get in a lot of trouble. She would get the whole town after her.

The man Jairus was a leader. He was popular: popular enough to be elected as lay leader by the big, rich congregation in Capernaum. He probably had lots of money. Maybe he was elected because people thought he would be more likely, that way, to pay money out of his own pocket to repair a leaky roof on the synagogue.

Jairus dressed well. He was prosperous enough to have a real bath in his own house and so he was cleaner than most people, and you couldn’t track him down by sniffing the air. He always washed his hands, and you could shake his hand, or pat him on the back, without wondering where he had been and what was rubbing off on you. Most of all he was devoted to doing what was right and clean in God’s sight. He was clean, and the opposite of the unclean woman.

He was also devoted to his twelve-year-old daughter, and she seems to me to be like an only child. A year, or two, or three after her twelfth birthday she would be leaving home to get married. They did that so young in those days: usually to a man who was about sixteen years old.

She was growing up. Everybody knew it. But she was daddy’s little girl. Let’s call her Talitha, since Jesus called her that. It would make a very pretty name.

Here, again, this was the opposite of the unclean woman. She had to live the past twelve years away from her family, at least not in the same room, and never closer than an arm’s length.

I’ll try not to say anything more about them than I need to. I was going to call the unclean woman and the very clean man both hopeless, but one commentator stressed that they weren’t hopeless, only desperate. I guess it must be better to be desperate than it is to be hopeless. Do you really think so?

I don’t think that Jesus would make a difference between the two states of mind, any more than he made a difference between the unclean woman and the synagogue-man.

Once, Jesus said, "If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mulberry tree, 'Be uprooted and planted in the sea,' and it will obey you.” (Luke 17:6) Some preachers say that if you want to get your prayers answered, you have to build up your tiny, tiny faith until it’s at least as big as a tiny mustard seed. But the point is that, even though Jesus knew (and everyone knew) that there were smaller seeds, the mustard seed was the poetic symbol for the tiniest things. Jesus meant that, even if you have the smallest faith in the world, God hears your prayers and grants them according to his will, and his will doesn’t always work by our standards, all the time.

Jesus said a wonderfully gracious thing to the healed woman. “Daughter your faith has healed you.” You could say she had enough faith to touch Jesus’ robe, and that’s true. It’s also true that she didn’t have enough faith to ask Jesus for healing.

What would we normally say about someone not having enough faith to ask the Lord for help in their great need? I believe that Jesus praises her faith by completely different standards than even God’s people (or church people) use.

We make rules about what God will or will not do, and we jack up Bible verses under our rules to make them look good to ourselves and to others. You are the daughter, or you are the son, of Jesus and you can come to Jesus any way that Jesus leads you.

Just come to Jesus, he knows you’re there. His power goes out to touch you and meet you in your need. He doesn’t usually follow the rules that his own people set.

I’ll tell you where her faith came in. It was only just about to come in.

Jesus asked her to do a terrible thing. Or it seemed terrible to her.

She had to come out of hiding. It was only when Jesus healed her that she was required to do what she never would have done on her own. She had to confess what her treatment by others had done to her. She needed enough faith to confess her own sneakiness. She needed enough faith to point to what Jesus had done for her without her telling him. She needed enough faith to hear herself being set free by Jesus.

She wasn’t healed so much because of her faith. She was healed for the sake of her faith. She was healed because she would be given the real faith that she needed so badly if she were going to live a truly new and healed life.

Jesus looks ahead. He always does.

Don’t let your present ideas about Jesus (and about life) keep you from him. Don’t let your thought habits keep you from whatever it is that Jesus asks of you now.

Maybe that is another kind of faith that Jesus is looking for. Surprise yourself. Let yourself be surprised by Jesus. That’s the key to the gospel.

Jairus, the synagogue-man, had the faith to bow at Jesus’ feet and ask Jesus to answer his desperate prayer. He had enough faith to ask; and this was a hard thing for someone like Jairus to do. It was very risky; especially because he was on the same leadership team as people who were thinking about whether it might be a good idea to kill Jesus.

That leadership team was motivated by their concern for their own authority, and Jairus was openly going against them. Jairus had some power in that synagogue, and in that community, but they outnumbered him by something to one.

Jesus said “yes” by following Jairus up the road to his house. Then, suddenly, Jesus seemed to be distracted by an interruption. Jesus took his own sweet time to deal with an invisible person in the crowd. Jesus had to out-wait the woman’s fear, and then encourage her confession. We don’t know how long that took.

For Jairus, it felt that Jesus was taking forever. The woman was an interesting case. Jairus, himself, might have sat in a synagogue trial to judge such a woman’s case.

And then it was too late for Jesus to answer his prayer. The time was up. It was too late. His little Talitha was dead. She could no longer be healed. Why trouble the master any further? So, Jesus asked Jairus to do something much, much harder than to have enough faith in Jesus to trust him to heal his sweet, sick little girl.

As things stood, it was no longer possible for Jesus to answer Jairus’ prayer with a “yes”. Jesus, in effect said no to healing Talitha.

Jesus intended to do a rare thing, even for him. In all of the gospels, we only have a record of Jesus bringing three dead people back to life from the dead.

There could have been cases that were not recorded. The whole world couldn’t hold the books to tell all that Jesus has said and done. But other kinds of miracles definitely outnumber his raising of the dead. And no one ever seems to have thought to ask Jesus to raise anybody from the dead. We never read of that happening.

Jesus decided to do what Jairus never seems to have heard of Jesus doing before (although there is one case that may have happened before).

If we’re not aware of the Lord ever doing a certain thing, chances are that we won’t even think of asking for it. We can’t ask for; we can’t pray for; something that we don’t even know about. But Jesus can answer such a prayer without our being able to ask.

The unclean woman didn’t have the faith to ask. Jairus, as smart as he was as the synagogue-man, didn’t have the brains to ask. Not because he was stupid: Jairus simply didn’t live in a world where the knowledge of what Jesus intended to do existed.

Jesus took Jairus beyond his personal boundaries of the possible, even though Jairus was a man of faith who was willing to stand up for his faith in defiance of the power of other people who could easily remove him from his position. Jairus had faith, but now he had crossed into new territory for himself, where he couldn’t do anything but feel afraid.

Jesus said, “Do not fear, only believe.” In a sense, Jairus had to close his mind to fear. That is one of the hardest things to ever have to do. Jairus’ success at closing his mind to fear couldn’t have been very successful in the face of the loss of his little girl.

I believe that Jesus knew that he was going to raise Talitha from the dead, and that Jairus’ fear wouldn’t and couldn’t stop him from raising her.

Jesus only wanted Jairus to be able to take it easy. It would simply be easier for Jairus if he wasn’t afraid. Jesus isn’t really tripped up, or incapacitated, by our fears.

Jesus is not afraid of our fears, just as he isn’t afraid of what we fear. Jesus had watched evil, and ugliness, and grief, and death rule the earth for ages and ages, while he sat in heaven in fellowship with his Father there. Now he had come, in flesh and blood, to heal many people like the unclean woman and to raise just a few people like little Talitha.

Jesus’ intended mission plan was to heal some people, and to raise three people on earth from the dead, and then go on to heal the whole world by letting the world do its worst to him, and then to defeat this world while he was tied up in all the chains and ropes of this world that bind us, but which could not bind him.

Jesus was going to raise Talitha from the dead, then he would die himself and raise himself. Jesus was not afraid. That was his answer to Jairus; an answer beyond Jairus’ comprehension.

This is beyond our comprehension, but this may also be Jesus’ answer to you, and me, and our fears.

The Lord’s Supper is beyond our comprehension. We have so many prayers for Jesus’ presence, and power, and compassion, and here he comes to us as pieces of bread and little cups of grape juice that we call wine. But you have to admit that the power and reality of what we are offered here, and what we receive here, at this Table, is also beyond our comprehension. It's beyond anything we can understand well enough to ask for.

Jesus is not afraid to give us bread and wine and tell us that this is the way for us to come together to him and to receive all that he is and all that he does, at this table. Jesus’ answers are often like this, but this is only the beginning of where he will take us. This is only the beginning of what we will learn from him. Because he is able to be here, in this way, now, Jesus can do anything.