Sermon Notes July 1 Mk. 5:21-43

Let’s start with a fifty cent Bible word: intercalcation. It is when the writer makes a literary sandwich of a story by splitting the first story into two pieces of bread, one story is inserted in the middle of another... Here the raising of Jairus’s daughter has its filling in the healing of a desperate woman. The meat of the story may well lie in the interrupted sequence. When does something important get pushed to the side or sandwiched? When do we attend to the whole? Lately, people have renewed interest in using spiritual resources as guides to making decisions. We will introduce these bit by bit in session meetings. One assertion I’ve heard by people interested in spiritual discernment is to pay attention to the interruptions of one’s plans. Once we get through the frustration and annoyance, something could be percolating there. God seems to like to whisper new ideas in the course of an interruption. Maybe the meat of the life sandwich isn’t the framing bread but the interruption itself. Troubles interrupt our lives whoever we are, or as David would put it, “how the mighty have fallen.” The good or the rich, the evil or the poor have no monopoly or special immunity from troubles.We carry a picture in our minds about how our lives should go, but we rarely include the interruptions, the eruptions of trouble that often form a parenthesis in a life. One of the ways we measure the quality of our walk in faith is how we respond to the inevitable disruptions of our well-laid plans. Here Jesus is going to the bedside of the desperately ill child of a religious official. the poor man has to wait helplessly while Jesus deals with a case that is not an emergency. the woman has suffered indeed, but Jesus can return to her. Her life is not yet in danger after all of these years.I get frustrated with this account as I suspect something is going on with the emphasis on 12 years, but have not arrived at anything that strikes me as definitive. at the same time, I feel so much sympathy for the woman. Granted, medical care was not advanced, but to try everything, and all for nothing is a singularly dispiriting experience.We are tempted to do it now, to go to specialist after specialist and then to try the potions or possibly effective promises of alternative medicine, perhaps the same treatments that the woman received 2,000 years ago.Pain or the prospect of death casts off our pride, and we can get quite desperate for relief. Jesus here demonstrates utter calm. He is able to focus on the claim of the moment without getting fixated on a schedule, even a vital schedule. He is a classic example of a presence that can face down anxiety. He is not living into the future of arriving at the house of Jairus, but he is with this woman at the present moment. Jesus is not distracted from the present moment. He shows an egalitarian spirit, as surely the religious official is of higher status than this desperate woman. Jesus is dealing with two types of anxiety, the anxiety of crisis for jairus, and the anxiety of years of frustration on the part of the unnamed woman.The woman has been suffering for the lifetime of the daughter of Jairus. Suffering’s perspective is so related to our own struggle with it, and it is so difficult to try to grasp it from another’s point of view. In both places, healing occurs when it seems beyond hope for someone who suffered 12 years or a 12 year old young woman.