Spotlight Reflection on Mark 5:21-43
There was one fear that really grabbed our nation and world in the 80’s. I remember sitting in the gym of elementary school as the entire school watched a movie. This was a made for tv movie about a boy with AIDS. You may even remember the movie. Honestly, I could not tell you the name, but I remember the talk around the movie. After the film our PE teacher told us that we are to never come in contact with AIDS patients. They were like the lepers of Jesus’ time. People were afraid to play sports with players with AIDS until Magic Johnson broke down those barriers. Everyone was so afraid of AIDS that people even feared drinking from public water fountains.
Fast forward to 2013. I, being a green chaplain, began working in a city that, per capita, has the 3rd highest HIV/AIDS population in the USA (with Baton Rouge being the highest in the nation!). Most of my time was spent with Oncology and Trauma patients and families, but one of my other units was the Infectious Disease unit. 90% of the people in that unit were HIV/AIDS patients. Sometimes we can’t help who we are or where we came from and those early childhood images of AIDS crept through my mind constantly when on that unit. Until one day, the suffering of humanity overcame my fear.
I remember it very well. The patient was a 30ish year old African-American male. I’m sure at one point in his life he was healthy and full of life, but on this day he was a shell of a person. He was entering the final days of his life. He was completely emaciated with yellow eyes from lack of liver function and did not have the power to say a word. I felt complete empathy for him. No one was in the room and no family was coming. He was all alone. I walked in as part of normal rounds and sat down in a chair near his bedside. I looked at him and tears began to run down my face. I could only reach for his hand and hold on to it.
In our passage, Mark uses a technique called “bracketing” or “sandwiching” which is the idea of using two different stories in order to tell one story. There is, however, a class and gender contrast between two of the main characters in our story. Jarius is an elder in the local synagogue which would make him a very important person in the area.
The woman, which we receive no name, has been stricken with this illness for twelve years, spent all of her money, and most importantly has been ostracized from the community because she would be considered ritually unclean. She was, essentially, a leper; the bottom of the class barrel if you will. Her story is heartbreaking and it gets lost in the story of Jarius’ daughter being raised from the dead. She deserves the spotlight today.
What is interesting about this story is the way it is told. The woman’s faith was so strong that she believed that if she could only touch his garment she would be healed. But Jesus, being pressed and touched from the crowd, asks the seemingly absurd question, “Who touched me?” The disciples gave him a frustrated response that, in modern terms, would be, “What are you talking about? Hundreds of people are here, they all want to touch you!” But something was different about this touch. Something was divine. The woman did not run, although most would have, because not only was she ritually unclean and not supposed to be there, she made everyone she touched ritually unclean including Jesus!
Jesus did not respond the way the reader would think, but he called her daughter. Jesus’ daughter. Jesus made her clean and restored her life. That, my friends, is the power of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Even the unfortunate seem to be fortunate!
Could you imagine being her family? People who could not associate with her due to her ritual uncleanliness, which she had no control over; now she shows up after twelve years of pain, disappointment, and social isolation to declare that she is healed and been made whole again. She tells them of this Jesus, who was being told that a girl of a rich man was sick, but he took the time to be with me! He was interrupted from “work” of healing a sick girl who was near death. However, as a teacher recounts to Herni Nouwen in his book Reaching Out, “You know...my whole life I have been complaining that my work was constantly interrupted, until I discovered that my interruptions were my work.”
Jesus knew this very well, my friends. She was an interruption, but it was proof of who this Jesus was. Jesus was not only there for the rich, he was there for the unfortunate of society as well. Jesus was making the ritually unclean, clean. Jesus was giving the blind sight. Jesus was casting out demons in people who were on the margins of the city.
That’s who Jesus is. He is there for the unfortunate, those that are on the margins of society. Those that are culturally unclean in our modern times, Jesus is calling us to make them clean. I remember that day in the hospital room and I wonder if that young man’s story will ever be told. He was cast off by society and his family. Maybe he used up all his chances, whatever that may mean, but I hope in those final moments he knew that God was with him and would not leave him to suffer alone.
Zac