Trinity 4 Healing

There are so many curious juxtapositions in this mornings Gospel that one could spend rather a long time exploring them. Clean and unclean, establishment and outcast, believe and mocking to name but a few.

The basis of both stories are people coming to Jesus for healing. The structure of the stories – for those of you would like a technical nugget this morning – is an A-B-A. That is Mark starts tellling one story and then interrupts it with another before returning to the beginning again.This both adds dramatic tension but also links the two stories in a more intrinsic and deliberate way than simply telling them one after the other might have done. These stories speak into each other and speak of a wider truth.

The first person to come to Jesus is a highly respectable man, Jairus. To be the leader of the synagogue meant to be a leader in the community. The synagogue was the local gathering place for worship in the Jewish culture. People would go the the Temple, perhaps a few times a year, or perhaps only once, but the synagogue was the week in week out place for teaching and community worship.

So Jairus was not an anonymous figure – he was not some academic who had long ago hidden in the pretences of the law – he would ask Jesus for help and in doing so would prejudice his place in society. Jesus agrees to help and heads off but it is not long before his progress is halted by another person looking for healing. This time a much more private figure, a woman who would have been outcast from society and not celebrated by it.

Jairus comes to Jesus and asks, the woman quietly reaches out her hand. Both offer blind acts of faith and hope.

There are many pieces of the Good News which are offered in this story – but today I want to concentrate on the scope of the restoration which Jesus is offering. This restoration in these stories is manifested in, but not bounded by, an act of physical healing.

As many of you will know we have a window in the Lady Chapel which depicts the raising of Jairus' daughter. It is a common enough scene in churches. But the back story to our window is interesting – the model for the child is a real child and a child who died aged about twelve or thirteen – Olivia. The cloth which lays over the lap of the child in the window is a cloth which she embroidered for the Lady chapel here.

It is, on one level, a sad story and a tragic memorial but on another it expresses huge hope and faith. Presumably the grieving parents who commissioned this window did so set in the hope that their daughter was indeed raised to a new life – but not by a rather vindictive God who steals away children but by a God, who through the tragedy of life and the reality of pain, still offers the hope of restoration.

That, after all is the story of the Cross, that through suffering and pain Jesus offers new hope and the promise of a life restored and renewed in Him.

It is hard to speak of healing and restoration without sounding glib and as if we are making excuses for a God who seems somewhat arbitrary in his choice of who to heal and who not to. There is no “penny in the slot” solution to human suffering – if the Church, if Christians, held a magic formula by which we could alleviate all pain and suffering then we would have used it by now – in fact humanity would have turned to God a long time ago for its own selfish reasons – if simply believing in God was a source of health and wealth then a lot more people would find it an easy path.

But whilst the kingdom which Jesus ushers in is revolutionary it is not instantanious. The healing miracles are witnesses to the truth of God's restoration but they, in themselves, are not that restoration. Just as material wealth or social status are not simple proofs of God's favour.

Mark makes it clear that whether you are a community leader or an outcast the thing that makes a difference is faith and the ability to come forward in that faith to Jesus – this is never an easy thing and healing is a sign of that process for some people. It will not be until after death that God takes away tears and sorrow and crying, “there will be no more pain,” promises the Book of Revelation “ for the former things have passed away” and God dwells with God's people (Rev 21).

But we are not living in that time of perfection and unity yet – we are living in a world where we are called to witness to the possibility of the kingdom and to show its in-breaking in this very ordinary world in which we live.

In the morning on a bright day light pours in through Olivia's window and dances all over the Lady Chapel. The window itself tells a story but through that story comes a life and a beauty which is daily and goes beyond the simple face of things.

We too have a story. There are so many contrasts in the stories which we all bring to Jesus in faith. We are people of power and poverty, or status and of rejection. We are people who have held our heads high and people who have fallen into the mud and somehow we all weave into the Good News of Jesus Christ, whether in joy and laughter or mourning and fear.

Whilst all of the stories are important in themselves as witnesses to the truth of the Kingdom of God what is even more astonishing is that through the panels and pictures of our lives the light and life of God can shine. Through our lives God can sparkle and show the truth of a reconciling and healing kingdom to the world.

Jesus did not simply walk around Palestine healing everyone who he came across. Yet we all have that temptation to slide into thinking that when things do not go the way we would like, when we or those around us are not miraculously healed, that we have not prayer hard enough or our faith is not strong enough. The sort of faith which is required of us is stronger even than the faith of Jarius and the woman, it is a faith that healing is more s magic return to health, it is about restoration to relationship and being those through whom the Good News of the Kingdom still shines. Without that hope and trust our faith becomes dull and the light begins to fade.

Somehow God is ushering in a kingdom of reconciliation – but we are not sure how or when that work will be completed. There is a certainty for each of us and that is that, where ever we are in illness or health Jesus reaches out with healing a hope of a kingdom which goes beyond the easy explanations which we might like to assign to it.

There are no glib answers to the how and why of these things which we simply do not understand, things which can seem arbitrary and unfair. But somehow, even in the most tragic of stories there is hope and the light can shine through the lives of those who offer themselves in simple faith.