A Sermon for the Third Sunday after Pentecost
Linda M. Maloney
Deuteronomy 15:7-11
Psalm 112
2 Corinthians 8:1-9, 13-15
Mark 5:22-24, 35b-43
How many of you here are grandparents? So am I! My first grandchild, Andrew Rhys Maloney, was born on June 16. I was there for his birth, and helped to bring him home. I can show you a picture of his proud parents holding him at the door of the house they bought to welcome him.
So when I read Mark's story of the healing of the little girl this week, I felt particularly attuned to the plight of the parents and looked at the scene through their eyes. Look at Jairus, an elder of the synagogue in Capernaum. This is a man of dignity, a man of stature in the community! He is a mature man, for he has a daughter twelve years old. And he is terrified of losing his little girl! He must be an unusually sensitive and loving father, because girls were not an especially valued commodity in the first century. They were a drag on the family: you had to provide a dowry for them, and then they went off and served someone else's family all their lives. But Jairus loves his daughter, and the thought of losing her is just unbearable to him. I know how he feels, and so do you. I think of those young parents I left behind in St. Louis, and their precious little boy, and all the terrors they have ahead of them, along with the joys of parenthood: the horrible fear of losing that wonderful child.
Jairus has seen Jesus healing and casting out demons in the synagogue. He knows what Jesus can do, and Jesus is his last hope. He throws all his dignity away. As he sees his little girl struggling to draw her last breaths he runs and throws himself at the feet of this other man and begs him, over and over again, to come and heal his daughter. It must have been hard to get Jesus' attention in the noisy crowd; Jairus can't just make one dignified request. Mark says he "begged him repeatedly." He kept trying until he got what he wanted. Finally Jesus agreed to go with him.
On the way to the house they meet some people who tell them they are too late: the little girl is dead. "Give it up," they say. "It's over. Get on with your life and don't bother this guy; what could he really do, anyway?"
Imagine how Jairus feels. His heart sinks. He has already thrown away his dignity in front of the whole world; now he begins to weep and wail like a-well, like a woman! What shame for an important man!
But Jesus doesn't turn away and go on about his business. He comforts Jairus, and even gives him hope: "Don't be afraid," he says: the same thing he says to frightened disciples in every situation. "Don't be afraid; only believe." As a leader of the synagogue, Jairus has certainly believed with all his heart in the power of God, all his life, and he has taught others to believe. Now comes the real test: can he believe in the power of God, and in Jesus' power, in face of the fact of his daughter's death? (Oh, easy for him, you say! He had Jesus right there with him! Well-don't we? And do we believe?)
Jesus is impatient with the mob around him. He does what any of us would do when people we love are in terrible trouble: he tries to quiet the noise and get rid of the crowd. He sends most of his disciples away, and he tells the professional mourners to pack up and go somewhere else. "She's not dead," he says. "She's just sleeping." Now the people in the know are really sure that this Jesus fellow is a fool. As Hawkeye says to another character in a M*A*S*H* episode: "we studied dead, and this one's dead!"
Is Jesus just letting the poor parents down easily by calling their daughter's death "sleep"? Paul talks to the people in Corinth about the people in their community who have "fallen asleep," meaning the dead: it's a nice way to think of death, and it helps us sometimes. Jesus takes the weeping father and mother, and his few disciples, with him into the room, and shuts the door. Now at last they can be alone with their little girl's body and say goodbye to her in private.
But wait a minute! Jesus does something surprising. (Doesn't he always? With him, it's almost as if we're surprised to find him doing anything not surprising.) He touches the dead body, which will make him unclean. That is one of those boundaries Jesus is always crossing: he touches lepers and prostitutes and other unclean people, and instead of becoming unclean like them, he makes them clean. The flow has been reversed: and that's a key idea to hold on to. Something has fundamentally changed with this man's entry into our world.
Touching the dead girl, Jesus takes her by the hand and says: "Little girl, get up!" The gospel even preserves his tender words to her: "Talitha, cum." He shows as much love for her as her parents have. He invites her to rejoin him in the world of the living, and she does. Her parents' weeping turns into tears of joy; they are so overcome with joy and amazement that Jesus has to remind them to give their daughter something to eat.
You can feel the strong emotion throughout this story. It's such a human story, so easy to find your way into, especially if you have children or grandchildren. How our hearts hang on those little beings; how much will we sacrifice for them, even everything we have; we'll even make fools of ourselves in public if it will help them. How we wish there were a healer like Jesus who could save them from everything that hurts or harms them! But besides being a human story, of course, like every story in the Bible this is about God, too. Everything in the story tells us about God, and how God feels about us.
After all, God is just like Jairus: shedding all dignity, all divinity, all majesty and glory and becoming just one more human being like us, a human being who loves and laughs and weeps and feels pain and dies-and in his dying and rising reverses the flow of things, turning our lives and their meaning back toward God. The dignified Jairus throwing himself at Jesus' feet is just nothing compared to God's becoming a human being like us, letting people laugh and jeer at him like the people in this story.
God is just like Jairus, and Jairus's wife: terrified of losing us, of letting us screw up our lives and other people's lives and become strangers to God, dead to the joy of God's love. God hates the thought of losing even one of us as much as we hate the thought of losing one of our own babies. And so God reaches out to us and says: "Don't be afraid; only believe. Dear one, take my hand and get up. Live!"
It seems as if God couldn't just reach "down" from heaven to lift us up. God knows it would be too terrifying for us; that the divine hand would be invisible to us, the divine voice too loud and scary, like thunder. So God became one of us, to have human hands like ours, hands we can recognize-for now, thanks to Easter and Pentecost, those hands are yours and mine-to lift us up and make us live. And God even gives us, not just "something" to eat, but the very body and blood of Jesus: the essential food for life's journey.
To really hold fast to the hand reached out to us, though, we need to have a baby's grip: you know how a newborn baby can grip so strongly that if you put your fingers in its tiny hands, you can lift it right up? Soon it forgets, and has to learn all over again how to hold so tightly. My baby grandson, at two weeks, is already forgetting that grip. How quickly we become fascinated with the things we can do with our hands and forget that first instinct: to hold tight. That is why Jesus asks us to become like little children: to hold to the mystery of God's love with the strength of a baby's grip, even though we don't understand it, any more than that baby understands what it is doing. All we have to do, even when we are stone cold dead in sin, is to hold tight to the hand stretched out to us, and do what the voice says: "Dear one, get up. Live." Amen.