Hands of Fear/Hands of Faith

Sermon for June 28, 2009 The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost; Proper 8 Text:  Mark 5:21-24a; 35-43 Title:  Hands of Fear/Hands of Faith A.   Hands are amazing creations of God!!  The same hand that can lift a heavy weight or hammer a nail or ball up in a fist can also pick up a dime off the floor.  Hands are engineering marvels!!  Scientists and engineers are just now making prosthetic hands that can move in many of the directions that a real hand can move.  But even now, this five-fingered miracle of God cannot be imitated. You know, you can learn a lot from watching a person's hands.  Besides being amazingly flexible, they are also amazingly expressive of our emotions: You may know the story of a certain business executive who was overwhelmed with work stresses to the point of depression.  Things were not going well for him, and he was bringing his problems home with him every night.  Each evening he would eat his dinner in silence, shutting out his wife and five-year-old daughter. Then he would go into the den and read the paper, using the newspaper to wall his family out of his life.   After several nights of this, his daughter walked up to him, and taking her little hand, she pushed the newspaper down. She then jumped into her father's lap, wrapped her hands around his neck and hugged him strongly. The father said abruptly, "Honey, you are hugging me to death!" "No, Daddy," the little girl said, "I'm hugging you to life!" Hands are not only expressive of the emotions, but they are often the instrument of God's healing, for it is the human touch that can give life. B.  Case in point – this morning's passage of Scripture.  Jesus is crossing back to the "other side" of the Sea of Galilee -- that is, he is returning to the western part of the Lake, a region that is more familiar territory than the land of Gad to the good Jewish citizen.   As we saw last week, Gad was a place reputed to be full of evil and demons.  Not a place people in the western region of Galilee wanted to go.  But despite all this crossing back and forth Jesus was doing, the crowds were consistent.  They swarmed Jesus like He was some kind of rock star!   If you watch the hands in this passage, you can get the Gospel message Mark is trying to convey.  First, there are the outstretch hands of need.  The crowds gathered around the Master with outstretched hands of need because they wanted healing in their own life circumstance.  They begged Jesus for help!!  But suddenly, out of that crowd there stepped a solitary, distinguished individual.  Jairus was the ruler of the synagogue, and as such, he was a man of substance, rich, powerful and religiously prominent.  In the life of the synagogue, he called the shots. He decided who would preach, what scripture would be read, and what hymns would be sung. He represented the elite of society, especially the religious world.   But all this power was of no help to Jairus, because his 12-year-old daughter was dying.  Jairus humbled himself before Jesus for the seriousness of her illness changed him from an important official to a desperate dad.   Out of love and concern for his little girl, Jairus' posture of importance was punctured, collapsing him at Jesus' feet, hands raised up to implore the Master for help. The sickness ravaging his daughter's body infected the whole family with pain and worry.  I suspect we all know how he felt.  When my oldest son Matthew was 18 months old, he was severely burned by an overturned cup of boiling water.  Following behind the ambulance on the way to the hospital, with Matt and his mother both in the ambulance, I begged God through never-ending tears to heal my son.   Jesus responded quickly to Jairus' 9-1-1. They immediately headed for his house. And the large, cumbersome crowd tagged along to see what might happen.   Although it is not a part of the lectionary reading for today, Mark interrupts their journey to Jairus' house with the account of the woman with the bleeding problem.   It is a technique that Biblical scholars call "insertion".  He does this for two reasons.  First of all, it adds a measure of drama to the story by forcing the reader to ask "Will they make it to Jairus' house in time?"  But more importantly, this technique of putting a story in a story is commonly used by Mark to allow one story to help interpret the other, as will shortly become clear.   If ever there were a direct opposite to the respectable figure of Jairus, this woman was it. First of all, and forgive me for what I am about to say, she was a woman, which in Jesus' day made her a second-class citizen.  But more than that, she appeared to be alone. Without the protection and position of a husband or family to support her, she was powerless in her society.   Added to this lack of family is the unfortunate status this woman bore – her continual flow of blood has made her ritually unclean for the past 12 years, as defined by OT law.  Or to put it another way, for 12 years this woman had been banned from sites of public worship or from any contact with other people.  Verse 26 declares that a dozen years of physicians and treatments had relieved this woman of whatever resources she might have had -- but had never relieved her illness.  A not uncommon situation today, I think we can agree. These two vastly different people, the down and out hemorrhaging woman and the upper-crust daughter of Jairus, are both loved into life by our Lord.  And that is why Mark reports each of their stories together.   Since religious Law forbade this woman to touch anyone, it is little wonder that this poor, unclean, outcast woman decided that an anonymous, back-door approach was her best chance of obtaining a cure from Jesus.  When we look at her hands, we see the hands of hesitancy and fear.  So far we have moved from hands expressing need to hands expressing fear and hesitancy.  Note that Mark says Jesus was in the midst of a great crowd that "pressed in on Him".   Again, like some kind of rock star, they all wanted a piece of Him.  Yet, when this woman managed to finger a bit of Jesus' cloak and is healed by its touch, Jesus demands, "Who touched my clothes?".  Obviously in such a crush, many people touched, bumped, brushed and squashed against Jesus. It was the woman's faith- filled, expectant touch that was so distinct and unique that Jesus could distinguish it as being very different from all the others.  Upon touching Jesus, not only did her blood flow stop but she "felt in her body" that she had been instantly and completely healed.   She had been sick so long that when her condition vanished, she could not fail to feel its absence.   Although the healed woman might have been content to sneak away, never even bothering Jesus with her presence, Jesus would not let what had happened go unannounced. Though the disciples are befuddled by Jesus' demand ("Who touched me?"), the healed woman knew Jesus was speaking to her. Verse 33 recounts how the woman came in "fear and trembling" and told Him the "whole truth."  According to the Law, she should never have touched the Man from Nazareth because of her uncleanness.  But desperation drives us to do desperate things, and although she was afraid that the full punishment of the Law would fall upon her, she still had to grab hold of even the slightest chance to be healed.  How wrong she was!!  Jesus' reason for calling the woman out was not to grandstand for the crowd, rather, it was to complete the healing process.  Her healing was finalized by the restorative words that Jesus spoke to her.  So now watch the action of the hands:  Jesus extended to her the hands of compassion.  Jesus stopping His trip to Jairus' house long enough to heal a desperate woman because He loved her.  And also by stopping it demonstrated that He was in charge all along, because it didn't matter what time Jesus arrived at Jairus' house to do the healing, or even if He arrived at all.  God's time is always the right time.  Jesus proclaimed this woman a "daughter" of Israel once again -- no longer an unclean outcast.  In addition to wellness in body, she enjoyed a newfound wellness in her spirit.  Jesus blessed her and told her to  "go in peace" -- a peace that included physical health and a full, healthy relationship with her God and her people. But even as this healing is successfully completed, Jesus is challenged by what appears to be a failure. Messengers arrive from Jairus' house with the tragic news of his daughter's death. The Master isn't needed anymore, because surely no one can raise the dead.  Jesus' response to these naysayers is to urge Jairus to "only believe."  The very same words Jesus uses with us when we think we are confronted by an impossible to win circumstance.  Only believe.   The public nature of this next healing is curtailed somewhat by Jesus. First he selects out only Peter, James and John to accompany him into Jairus' house. Once he reaches what is now a house of mourning, Jesus separated Jairus and his wife from the crowd of ritual death-mourners already gathered to weep and wail. As if to throw seeds of doubt into the crowd, Jesus suggested that the little girl was not dead, but only sleeping.  To Jesus, who is the Master even over death, death is merely like sleeping. This suggestion allowed the crowd to doubt the miraculous event about to take. Jesus' limited selection of witnesses emphasizes the need for his disciples to "be with him" if they are to learn and understand His special messages to them. Just as only those gathered about Jesus learned the full meaning of his parables, so only those gathered about him at this moment of miraculous restoration knew Jairus' daughter was not awakened from sickness but was roused from death.   And finally, we watch the Master's hands of healing.  The healing words Jesus spoke were repeated twice in this narrative, emphasizing their simplicity and yet their power when used by Jesus.  Immediately restored to life, the little girl began to act like any normal 12-year-old. She was no spirit or angelic being but simply herself, and as such, Jesus reminded his "amazed" witnesses that they should give her something to eat.  This proved to everyone that she was not a ghost, because ghosts don't eat, but was a real flesh and blood person, healed by the Master.  C.    But what about today?  Jesus is not physically with us.  There is a hymn that starts out "heal me, hands of Jesus…." So how can the hands of Jesus heal us today?  Like the unnamed woman with the bleeding condition, like Jairus, like his daughter, we reach up to the Master with hopeless hands, fearful hands, desperate hands.  Today we seek out the Lord in the midst of the confusion, murkiness, and pain of life with 911 prayers, on our knees, at the dinner table, in our office, in our room.  How can the hands of Jesus heal us today when we sometimes don't even know where to find Him or even if He desires to heal us? Notice the story again.  What did Jesus say to the woman with the bleeding problem?  "Daughter, your faith has made you well.  Go in peace, and be healed of your disease."  And to Jairus:  "Do not fear.  Only believe."  You see, the genius of Mark is that by linking these two stories together, he demonstrates that Christ is there for any of us, from the least to the greatest (by human standards), from the mighty to the powerless, male and female.  No matter who we are, we are equalized before God by our common need for Jesus, for His forgiving love, His saving grace, and His healing power. You see, the real gestures in this passage were not the gestures of the hands at all.  It was the gestures of faith. Faith was the power behind the healing of the woman with the hemorrhage.  Faith on the part of the father was the force behind the healing of His daughter.  Faith is the means for us to touch Jesus also.  And by faith I mean trust.  Trusting that Jesus loves us enough to be close to us, even when we don't acknowledge His love and presence through prayer and worship.  Trusting that Jesus desires us to give us control of our lives so He can make something of them.  Trusting that Jesus has the whole world in His hands, and that He is in charge of what is going on, no matter how much we think we are or others are. And I don't know about you, but I can't trust Jesus for a lifetime.  I can only trust Him one day at a time.  Sometimes I fail to even to that.  And sometimes that is the hardest thing in the world, because I'm weak and I forget that He is in charge.  But He is.  And He loves us.  And He wants what is best for us.  I understand that the Sequoia trees of California , known as Redwoods, tower as much as 300 feet above the ground.  Strangely, these towering trees have unusually shallow root systems that spider out just under the surface of the ground to catch as much of the surface moisture as they can. And this is their vulnerability. Storms with heavy winds would almost always bring these giants crashing to the ground but for the fact that they grow in clusters and their intertwining roots provide support for one another against the storms. And so it is with our Christian life.  Christ is as close as our very breathing.  The storm will not ultimately knock us down, because He is there.  Amen.   Keith Almond P.O. Box 4388 Leesburg, VA  20177 703-344-3569 almond_keith@yahoo.com