Epiphany 5 (NL2) John B. Valentine
Mark 5:21-43 February 4, 2024

“NOT JUST ANOTHER HEALING STORY”

Let me begin with a confession ...

Your mind is NOT playing tricks on you!

The lesson which Donald Eismann read for us a little bit ago is in fact exactly the same lesson which John Goetz read for us at worship LAST Sunday!

Same text ... same translation ... same everything.

The Gospel of Mark ... the fifth chapter ... beginning with the twenty-first verse.

And it’s not a typo ... and it’s not a clerical error ... and it’s not a mistake.

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You see ... on Tuesday evening ... in the context of our Tuesday evening Zoom Bible Class ... we were looking at that lesson from last Sunday ...

• And talking about what that text meant ...
• And what it means to us ...
• And how the sermon which I preached last Sunday interpreted that text..

But the conversation we were having led to us looking at that text from a radically different angle than the angle I approached it from last week’s sermon ...

And the aforementioned Mister Eismann said something to the effect of:

“No offense, Pastor John, I liked your sermon and all ... but this second approach is an even better approach than the one you took last week. I think that THAT approach would make for a better sermon. And, honestly, I think that approach is what people really need to hear ....”

And ... as politely and empathetically as I could ...... I brushed him off. (Ha!)

But then I got to thinking ... “Why not?”

• Why not ... just this once ... preach on the same text two weeks in a row?
• Why not give you a sense of the preacher’s dilemma each and every week?
• Why not break with convention and give you what it is that Donald thinks we all need to hear?

I mean ... after all ... the texts we read in worship on a given Sunday are recommended by a team of scholars and worship planners ...

But at the end of the day they are only ‘recommendations’ per se ... not ‘rules’.

So let’s take Donald’s suggestion under consideration ...

And look at this same text from a different angle than the one we approached it from last week ...

And if the result is a positive one ... alls good!

And if the result is ‘less than positive’ ....... you can blame Donald! (Wink wink!)

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Anyhow ... as we noted last week ... this lesson from the second half of Mark 5 recounts two healing stories ...

It begins and ends with the story of Jairus and the healing of Jairus’ daughter.

And sandwiched in between is another healing story ...

The healing of an unnamed woman who’d been suffering from a gynecological ailment for as long as Jairus’ twelve-year-old daughter had been alive.

Now last week I highlighted how different those two stories were ...

The one protagonist-slash-petitioner coming from a place of privilege ...

• being a male person in a male-dominated society ... and all ...
• having a name and significant social capital an money and the like ...

And the other protagonist-slash-petitioner coming from a place of poverty ...

• being a female-person in a male-dominated society ...
• having no name and no money ... on account of her having spent it all on quack-physicians ... and basically being an outcast.

But then I went on to note how ... nonetheless ... both of them reached out to Jesus ... trusting that Jesus COULD help them and hoping that he WOULD help them.

And I particularly highlighted how ... at the end of the day ... the question that drove them ... and that drives us ... into the arms of Jesus ... is the question of whether or not we matter ... whether we count for anything at all.

Now that is certainly one of the key points that Mark the gospel-writer is trying to get across is his telling of this tale.

But today .... as noted previously ... let’s try to look at that story from a different perspective altogether.

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Anybody remember what a Venn Diagram is?

(Well ... anybody besides Pastor/Math Teacher Pam ... who probably draws more Venn diagrams in a week than the rest of us draw in a lifetime.)

Venn Diagrams are those drawings with overlapping circles intended to highlight similarities and differences.

If we were to draw a Venn Diagram of these two healing stories ... with two overlapping circles ... you’d get the sermon I preached last week:

• There would be lots of details of the two parties ... Jairus and his daughter and the unnamed woman ... in the differences part ...

• And Jesus and healing and restoration in the middle ... in the similarities part.

But what Donald wanted to know ... the question that he kept badgering me with during our class ... was what people in the ancient world THOUGHT of the physicians and miracle workers and healers and the like ...

What encounters with ancient physicians and miracle workers and healers really looked like.

And ... in order to probe that question ... what we’d need is not a two-circle Venn Diagram but a three-circle one!

• One circle for the standard story-pattern of healing miracles in the ancient world ...
• One circle for the story of Jairus and his daughter ... and
• One circle for the story of the woman with the twelve-year hemorrhage.

So that we could play the ‘same or different’ game between them.

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Now ... for the most part ... healing stories in the ancient world fall into very familiar patterns ... both those contained in the Bible and those that come to us from the annals of ancient Rome or ancient Greece.

• They start with a description of the problem ... the health issue ... who it is that needs healing and why ...

• Then they detail where the sufferer went ... and to whom they went ... in search of a cure for what ailed them ...

• Then they would talk about what it was that the healer needed to do ...or the patient need to do ... to effect that cure.

It’s just kind of a standard format for the way all those stories were told.

Now ... granted ... WE are much smarter about medicine than were those folks in the ancient world ...

After all ... we wouldn’t even think about ‘going’ to a pool in Jerusalem to be healed of something that ails us ...

Though we might make a fuss how ‘going’ to UCSF or Stanford ... or maybe even the Mayo Clinic ... is the place where real healing takes place ....

And we wouldn’t think of making a concoction of spittle and dirt to plaster over our eyes to cure blindness ...

Though we might put eyedrops in our eyes every night to ward off blindness ... because some physician warned us about macular degeneration ...

And we couldn’t imagine that anyone could be so stupid as to believe that wearing certain clothes or engaging in certain behaviors or eating certain foods could actually affect a cure of anything ...

Except that is exactly what most of the health care advice on social media actually promotes these days ...

Point being ... healing stories in the ancient world and healing stories in our world ain’t all that much different from one another.

And ... honestly ... the story of the healing of Jairus’ daughter aligns perfectly ... in our Venn Diagram ... with most every other healing story in the Bible ... and every other healing story in the ancient world.

But the story of the woman ... the nameless untouchable woman ... that one is just different.

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You see ... the way Mark tells the story of the so-called ‘woman with the flow of blood’ is just different.

It isn’t a story about some healing that Jesus can conjure up ...
It’s about a healing that happens quite apart from his willing it.

It isn’t a story about something that Jesus gives to her ...
It’s about something she takes from him ... somewhat to his chagrin.

It isn’t a story ... like every other story ... about something Jesus can DO ...
It’s this woman’s testimony about who Jesus IS.

You see ... whereas the story of Jairus and his daughter and the healing that Jesus affects for her is completely in alignment with other healing stories in the ancient world ...

The story of the ‘woman with the flow of blood’ is completely OUT of alignment with that same genre of literature .... it’s just DIFFERENT ......

And that difference is a big part of what makes this story so important.

For this woman’s statement that ... "If I but touch his cloak, I will be made well" ... means this is maybe less a story about a healing than it is a story about her testimony as to who Jesus really IS!

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You see ... one of the ways that biblical scholars understand and explain Mark’s gospel is something they call ‘the Messianic secret’?

The question “Who is Jesus .... really?”

And you can kind of map out the whole of Mark’s gospel around that question ... and who knows the ‘secret’ that Jesus is really God and who doesn’t?

So ... for instance ...

In chapter one ... Jesus himself is let in on the secret ... when ... in the waters of baptism ... he hears the voice say “You are my Son, the beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

And later on in chapter one ... an unclean spirit confronts Jesus ... and blurts out the secret ... “I know who you are, the Holy One of God” ...

And then another unclean spirit announces basically the same thing at the beginning of chapter five.

But ... for the most part ... while Jesus ‘gets it’ and the unclean spirits ‘get it’ ...

• Peter and James and John don’t start to ‘get it’ until the story of the Transfiguration that we’re going to look at next Sunday ... and don’t really ‘get it’ even then.

• And the rest of the disciples don’t ‘get it’ ...

• And the crowd doesn’t ‘get it’ ...

• And the religious authorities and the politicians certainly don’t ‘get it’.

But this woman here in this story ... she DOES get it.

She gets that it’s not just about what Jesus says ...

She gets that it’s not just about what Jesus does ...

She gets that it’s about who Jesus IS that matters.

She knows the secret ... the life-changing, hope-instilling secret ...

That Jesus is himself the presence and the power of God.

And her testimony somehow begs of us a question ...

DO YOU KNOW THAT SECRET TOO?