July 1, 2018
Mark 5:21-43
I’ve now been working here at St. Paul’s for exactly a month, and — I cannot tell a lie — it has been something of a whirlwind. You all have been so welcoming and friendly, but there are a lot of you and your names are awfully slippery! The staff is helpful and funny, and I’m starting to catch on to who does what. I’m learning how lots of machines work (though it’s possible that Greg Milliken’s name may always live on my internal voicemail). I’m beginning to get a sense of the systems — everything from how documents are shared in the Google Drive to the process of bulletin creation. I’ve been getting immersed in wedding preparation and baptisms, pastoral care and outreach, liturgy formation, and the workings of your amazingly dedicated vestry. But I’m fairly certain I’ve only begun to do what lies at the heart of this job. Meanwhile, my family is still very much in the process of figuring how things will work with me being away from home more. So it has been a bit of a balancing act.
But as I got a sense for the context of our Gospel story today, I felt some relief. Because the things keeping me busy these days are nothing compared to what Jesus has been up to!
In the week leading up to the story we just heard, Jesus healed someone of a withered hand on the Sabbath, 
preached and taught and appointed a couple disciples,
took several boating trips — one of which required him to calm both his frightened disciples and a raging storm,
and exorcized a demon-possessed person (killing a herd of pigs in the process).
It sounds to me like Jesus needs a summer vacation!
But of course there’s no vacation on the horizon for Jesus. Before he knows it he’s once again surrounded by a crowd — touching him, hanging on his every word, asking questions. But then the crowd sees Jairus, one of the synagogue officials. And quickly, like the waves parting at the exodus, the crowd moves to make way for this important figure. They watch as Jairus falls at Jesus’ feet and begs him to come heal his daughter.
And this is interesting. We don’t know specifically whether Jairus and Jesus have met before this moment, but here’s what we do know…. The synagogue leaders have caused a good deal of trouble for Jesus, making accusations against him and asking him questions to trap him. To them, Jesus is a threat to religious order, a challenge to their holy practices and customs. And so they have done everything they can to make Jesus’ ministry more difficult and dangerous.
I wonder who might be a sort of Jairus to you? Someone that causes you trouble or seems to oppose you at every turn. Someone, or maybe even a whole class of people, that you disagree with so strongly that you can barely have a civil conversation. That isn’t so hard to do in our current political climate.
Now imagine the possible responses Jesus might have made to this person coming to him for help. There is the revenge possibility: “Why would I ever help you after the way you’ve treated me?” There is the tit-for-tat option: “Let’s make a deal. You get the religious leaders off my back and I’ll help with your kid.” And there is the response from inadequacy, “I don’t know anything about what you are going through. I’m sure there’s someone more experienced that you can find to help.” Or maybe the response from fear: “I can’t help you because if it goes badly, things will be even worse for me than they already are.”
But Jesus doesn’t opt for any of those responses. He looks past all that Jairus has done and all that he represents and sees him instead as the desperate, grief-stricken parent that he is. Jesus looks at Jairus — whom the world might classify as his opposition, his enemy even — with love. Jesus listens to him, and changes course to go with him to see his little daughter who is at the point of death. The God of heaven and earth comes to a grinding halt for Jairus. Not because Jairus is powerful and important, but because Jairus is a child of God in pain.
Seeing what happened, the crowd around Jesus also changes direction, wanting to see what new and unexpected story Jesus will give them today to share with their friends. But Jesus and Jairus have no sooner set off, when along comes a woman who has been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years.
For twelve years, this woman has been bleeding, and neither the doctors nor the religious leaders have been able to help. We are not told her name, which seems fitting, because to the world around her, this woman is a ritually-unclean nobody. The purity codes of the Torah are explicit — from Leviticus Chapter 15: “If a woman has a discharge of blood …, she is unclean. Anyone who touches [her or anything she has touched] becomes unclean….” This is someone that people cross the other side of the street to avoid.
I wonder who might be like this woman to you? Who do you consciously or unconsciously consider other, unclean, untouchable? Who lives on the margins of your world, disapproved by your friends or your tradition or your politics or your understanding of holiness? What group of people make you uncomfortable?
Now more than ever, you could imagine Jesus’ possible responses. He could have claimed busyness: “Sorry, ma’am, I’m very busy and don’t have time to stop.” He could have weighed other responsibilities as more important: “I’m sorry, but I’m off to help a dying child of a Very Important Person – I’m sure you understand that I have to protect my reputation.” Or he could have refused to let her off the hook: “I’m sorry but you got yourself into this situation, so you’ll have to get yourself out of it.” Or he could have done what everyone else did — just looked right through her and walked away.
But of course Jesus doesn’t ignore her desperate pleas. He doesn’t worry about her status, or her purity, or her reputation. Or his own. And he doesn’t even just physically heal her and move on to his next task. Jesus stops. He listens. He lovingly calls her daughter. The God of heaven and earth comes to a grinding halt for this woman. She is worthy of his time. She is a member of the family, a child of God, just as surely as Jairus is.
And only once Jesus has given all she needs — all she longs for, physical and spiritual, does Jesus turn back to Jairus and start walking with him again.
Oddly, the Gospel of Mark includes a number of stories written this way - with one story inserted in the middle of another. Over and over in Mark, Jesus starts to do one thing, and then changes course and does something else, before finally returning to whatever he started with. Jesus seems to be all over the place, easily distracted. But it turns out that these frenetic interruptions are actually a consistent literary technique, called “sandwiching”. The writer of Mark puts these two stories together, intentionally interrupting Jesus, in order to make a point.
These stories make clear that Jesus’ mission isn’t to travel efficiently from Point A to Point B. Jesus’ mission is to spread the love of God to the world. Which means that is isn’t possible to be an interruption to Jesus. Jairus and his daughter, the unnamed woman who comes up behind him, every single person Jesus meets. None of them, none of their needs, are distractions from his mission. They are his mission. And so are we. The God of heaven and earth willingly comes to a grinding halt for each one of us, whether we are falling at Jesus’ feet in our tears and fears and pain, or just tugging uncertainly at the hem of his robe.
And Jesus invites us into his mission of sharing God’s love in the world. And often opportunities come through events and people that might feel like distractions. But what if instead we can learn to see them as Holy Interruptions? What if God is intentionally interrupting our best-laid plans and our busyness and our certainties? Inviting us to see with eyes of love, hear with ears of understanding, and stretch our our arms in welcome. Sometimes even to come to a grinding halt for the other beloved children of God that break into our stories.
Amen.
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