Mark 5: 21-45 “Jairus’ Daughter Healed”

When I was in seminary, a professor invited me to be part of a Bible Study. We would meet together as a small group over our lunch break and pour over scripture together. One of the first scriptures we looked at together was this one, two stories, tied together by Jesus, that otherwise don’t seem to make much sense. 

Jarius is well known in the community. He was one of the leaders of the synagogue. He would have been a man with power and privilege and yet, even deep need came to him, as he broke down before Jesus, begging for the life of his daughter. 

Jesus agrees to go with Jarius, but along the way there is an encounter with an unnamed woman. We are told that for twelve years she has struggled with a health issue that caused bleeding. She was broke. She was out of options. She had no power. She couldn’t be part of the community of the synagogue where Jarius lead because she was ceremonially unclean. 

Two people who’s lives would not have intersected. Two people, one rich, one poor. One looked upon well in the community, one disregarded. One male, one female. But that day they were united by one thing, a desperate need for Jesus. 

Both felt like they had run out of options. Both were willing to go to extremes. And both of them were precious enough to Jesus to stop what he was doing and bring life to them.

Jarius’s daughter was 12 years old. She was now at an age when she could be married, but instead, she lay dying in her family’s home. And Jarius, because he loved his daughter so much, we went as far as to break every rule in the book. He would have known that Jesus was blacklisted amongst the religious leaders of the day. In fact, he may have even been one of the people engaging in the blacklisting in the first place. Just a few chapters earlier in Mark 3, we find Jesus engaging in another healing - the healing of a man with a withered hand. And in that healing everything broke loose, because he dared to heal this man on the Sabbath, in the synagogue, in the presence of these leaders. And scripture tells us right after that healing, “The Pharisees went out and immediately conspired with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him”

And yet. 

And yet, even though Jarius would have known this his daughter was worth the risk. His daughter was worth casting aside the blacklisting of the religious leaders in order to fight for her life. 

Only on the way to Jarius’s home, Jesus brought healing to another woman. This woman had been suffering with bleeding for as many years as Jarius’s daughter was alive. She, too, was at the point where she was willing to risk it all just for the possibility of restored life. This woman had the courage to interrupt Jesus’s day and touch him, to touch just the hem of his garment. She did exactly what she knew that she wasn’t allowed to do, because she was so, so desperate. 

Have you ever been there, brothers and sisters? Have you ever been so desperate for healing, so desperate for Jesus that you were willing to risk it all? Willing to do the courageous thing as an act of faith?

A few months ago I was blessed to go on a 42 hour silent retreat. Over the course of three days we did not speak, except during worship and time with a spiritual director. During one of the worship services the priest spoke about another passage of scripture from he Gospel of Mark, Mark 10, but what he was getting at speaks so profoundly to this particular passage. Dis-ease. Dis-ease of the body, when we are so sick that all we long for is the freedom of healing. Dis-ease of our world, where violence and conflict abound. Dis-ease in our personal relationships where we wish that things were different. Dis-ease in our spirits, when we know that something isn’t right, but we can’t quite put words behind what we are feeling. 

Jarius and this unnamed woman knew dis-ease. They felt it deep within themselves. But here is the thing about dis-ease. It is not the end of the story. Healing is. Healing that may look like what we expect. Healing that may not be anything like what we expect. But we still believing that healing is possible and healing is coming. 

Hope is what lead Jarius and this woman to Jesus that day. Hope that something different then everything that others were telling them was possible. 

As much as this story is about the woman and the child, its actually about so much more. Often our rational brain starts with the question asking how these people were healed, but the real question is who is this one who brought the healing? Who is this Jesus?

Friends, have you met Jesus, the healer? Jesus who shows us time and again the absolutely generous grace of God. Jesus cared enough about these people to stop what he was doing, stop everything that he was doing on a day where it seemed like everyone needed him for something, because he saw these people. He saw their pain. He saw their deep need. And he offered them life and life abundant. 

Sometimes our desperation is actually an act of faith. An act of courage. All too often, we see these individuals as going to Jesus as a last resort, but really in going to Jesus at all, they were risking everything for the possibility of the unknown. But just that possibility made it worth it to them to seek him out. 

What leads us to Jesus, today? What in our lives cries out to Jesus out of desperation? What is our act of radical faith in the presence of Christ?

Because friends, this is part of the mission of God. To bring us healing. To bring us life. We, too, have deep areas of hurt and needs that Jesus sees and is just waiting for us to bring them before him. Spiritual writer Flora Slosson Wuellner put it this way in her 2010 Upper Room Devotional piece, "Once we do name hurt and deep need, we move into another dimension altogether. We are no longer trapped. A window is open, and we are able to see where we are.”

We are going to have an opportunity this morning to bring our deep needs to Jesus in prayer. We are going to have a time of anointing if you would like to come forward, or pray with others or pray silently in your seat. But know wherever we are, crying out to Jesus, that he hears you. He sees you. And he is bringing you life, and life abundant. Let us pray…