Rev. Rebecca M. Heilman-Campbell
Mark 5: 21 – 43, Mark 15: 33 – 39
“What about my dog?” This was a question that was asked to me by a patient in the cancer unit during my summer as a chaplain. She was recently diagnosed with terminal cancer and processing what that meant. “What about my dog?” she asked. “Will I see my dog in the afterlife?” We talked about God’s hands in creation and where she sees God’s love in her dog, in her life, in her the world. And she still asked after we talked a while, “but what about my dog?” Her longing and worry that her dog, who sat by her through treatments and ill nights, who laid with her through naps and gave her something to care for beyond her own crippling body, her worry that her dog would be forsaken lingered in the air. She worried she would never get to witness his love for her again, she would never experience the playfulness of a dog again, she would never be able to care for a dog so selfless in character. She was not just asking, would God forget her dog completely, but wondering, would God forget all the colorful, carefree life that a dog has brought to her life? And so I responded with a question, do you think God would forget something so important to you? Gosh, don’t we all have these sorts of questions. Even Christ had those questions! Look at our second passage. God’s beloved son, both human and divine, a healer, a miracle worker, questioned God’s capacity in those last moments. So of course, we carry the questions as well. “My God, my God, you are such a busy God with so many people to care for, why does it feel like you have forgotten me?? I need you too. Or “My God, my God, I am so alone. I do not feel you. Why have you forsaken me?” Or “My God, my God, why me? Why do I have cancer? Why do I need yet another surgery? Why did I lose this job? Why did that surgery not work for me? Why is my child angry at me?” My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Don’t we have these questions? I know I do. All the time.
I imagine Jairus, the father of a daughter dying in our story today had the same questions. Jesus has landed again off the shores of Galilee to an excited and intrigued crowd pushing in around him, pulling at him, needing something from him. And then there is Jairus, a synagogue leader, a Jewish leader who has probably been told to avoid Jesus, doubt Jesus, and yet is here he is begging for help. Jairus falls to his knees and with desperation repeats over and over again, “My little daughter is at the point of death. Come and lay your hands on her, so that she may be made well, and live.”And so Jesus follows Jairus towards his home.
As we know, it is not an easy commute to Jairus’s home. The crowd is pressing in on him. They are so close that hips are bumping into hips, shoulders into shoulders, feet stepping on toes. And within this crowd, there is a woman, who has been bleeding for 12 long years. It’s important for us readers to understand the context of what’s culturally at play in this story. While Mark does not specifically say how the woman is bleeding or that she’s unclean in any way, the culture says differently. Many people who practiced Judaism during this time would be concerned about the contamination by contact with blood, which they see as the source of life. This means, meat was cooked fully and women were separated due to their monthly menstruations. During this time, the woman and anything the blood touches is seen as unclean. But she hasn’t always been considered unclean. According to the Greek, the woman was wealthy at one point and because of her chronic bleeding condition, she suffered much due to the physicians who used her money for treatments and potential cures. AND she suffered much because of her social isolation from family, friends, and a potential partner in life.
And on top of that, we learn that her condition never got better, but only worse, along with her status in society, her loneliness in life, and her shame of uncleanliness. This woman was isolated from her community, forgotten, overlooked, an outcast seen as unclean and ultimately, unwelcomed. Forsaken by her own people. Additionally, it would have been her civic duty to ensure that she did not allow others to touch her. Her duty to stay in her social class, to not rise too far above what’s deemed to be her placement. She knew she would never be welcomed in the community as her full self, whole self, whole story, and whole bleeding condition. No one would want to welcome her in. It would disrupt the order of the religious and Greco-Roman system. She knew her placement.
And so our woman today, after 12 years of medical treatments and doctor’s visits, all the energy she has put into finding a cure, she, she reaches out and touches Jesus’s clothes. Not his leg, not his feet, but his clothes. She, like Jairus, repeats her desperation over and over again, “If I touch even his clothes, I will be saved.” Here in lies a story of faith and salvation, where Jesus does not express an intent for healing, but the woman initiates it herself. And “immediately,” instantly, her hemorrhage stops and she, who has been feeling the uncleanliness and burden of her blood, feels in her body that she has been healed of her disease. After the woman’s touch, Jesus stops and asks, “who touched my clothes?” And the woman tells him the “whole truth.” Not the partial, not the short version, or the abridged. The “whole truth.” Her story. All that made her unclean, and outcast, and all the faith that makes her whole. Jesus doesn’t pull away or keep on walking because of a task at hand, but instead, he draws her into relationship, and says, “Daughter, your faith has made you well.” She is no longer forgotten, forsaken or abandoned, but claimed and seen as a child of God.
But what about the daughter of the Synagogue leader? Has Jesus forgotten her? She’s actively dying and there is an urgency in Jairus’s presence. And here Jesus is talking to an unclean woman. What is he thinking? There’s no time for this. He has forgotten my daughter, my dying daughter. This woman can wait. And so while Jesus is still talking with the woman, Jairus gets word that his daughter is dead. And as if in giving up, they say, why bother the teacher any further? What’s the point? She has been forgotten. At least that’s what they think. Does God ever truly forget what is most important to us? Never. Jesus says, “Don’t be afraid; only believe.” She is raised from the dead while people weep outside, my God, my God, why. Never forsaken.
Each of these stories in detail shape the human life – the emotions of wandering the status quo of a group and society, the reality of being different and shamed as an outcast, the hopelessness and hopefulness of healing and a new life, the grief of a dying child, the anger and sadness that comes with being forgotten. All of these details point us to the realities of life, of what we experience each day in this complex world. And the power of Jesus on the cross, as God, crying out as we do, My God, my God why have you forsaken me? is his way of showing God understands. God knows as much as we do what it means to suffer. John Calvin says, “they call on [Jesus] to prove his divinity by coming down from the cross, but [Jesus] shows it precisely by continuing to suffer.”[1] And Cart Heyward reminds us that “Jesus did not come to reveal God’s power, God’s might, God’s victory. Rather, Jesus came … into the pain, the passion, and the wonder of creation itself. Jesus accepted the vocation of being truly human in the image of an [mysterious] God.”[2] And so if Christ asks my God, my God why have you abandoned me? It’s okay if we do too. And look at it this way, each story told today happened because of faith – from the woman reaching out for healing, to the father begging to for his daughter, to Christ on the cross asking God a question we all have deep within in us. Each of these stories happened because of faith. We don’t walk this faith journey with all the answers. We walk it amid questions. It’s what makes our faith stronger, even in the end. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Don’t shame yourself when this question bubbles within. It’s a faithful question, beloved.
[1] Placher, William C.. Mark: Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible (p. 231). (Function). Kindle Edition.
[2]Placher, William C.. Mark: Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible (p. 231). (Function). Kindle Edition