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Mark 5:21-43

²¹ When Jesus had crossed again in the boat^* to the other side, a great crowd gathered round him; and he was by the lake. ²²Then one of the leaders of the synagogue named Jairus came and, when he saw him, fell at his feet ²³and begged him repeatedly, ‘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.’ ²⁴So he went with him.

And a large crowd followed him and pressed in on him. ²⁵Now there was a woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years.²⁶She had endured much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had; and she was no better, but rather grew worse. ²⁷She had heard about Jesus, and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak,²⁸for she said, ‘If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well.’²⁹Immediately her hemorrhage stopped; and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease. ³⁰Immediately aware that power had gone forth from him, Jesus turned about in the crowd and said, ‘Who touched my clothes?’ ³¹And his disciples said to him, ‘You see the crowd pressing in on you; how can you say, “Who touched me?” ’ ³²He looked all round to see who had done it. ³³But the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came in fear and trembling, fell down before him, and told him the whole truth. ³⁴He said to her, ‘Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.’

³⁵ While he was still speaking, some people came from the leader’s house to say, ‘Your daughter is dead. Why trouble the teacher any further?’ ³⁶But overhearing^* what they said, Jesus said to the leader of the synagogue, ‘Do not fear, only believe.’ ³⁷He allowed no one to follow him except Peter, James, and John, the brother of James. ³⁸When they came to the house of the leader of the synagogue, he saw a commotion, people weeping and wailing loudly. ³⁹When he had entered, he said to them, ‘Why do you make a commotion and weep? The child is not dead but sleeping.’ ⁴⁰And they laughed at him. Then he put them all outside, and took the child’s father and mother and those who were with him, and went in where the child was. ⁴¹He took her by the hand and said to her, ‘Talitha cum’, which means, ‘Little girl, get up!’ ⁴²And immediately the girl got up and began to walk about (she was twelve years of age). At this they were overcome with amazement. ⁴³He strictly ordered them that no one should know this, and told them to give her something to eat.

Do not fear, only believe. 

I honestly can’t believe how lucky I am to get to talk about this scene from the Gospels, which I have always loved - not the least because there’s a beautiful Sam Cooke song about it. But reading this story again and trying to see it with fresh eyes was extremely surprising to me. I had always remembered the woman who was healed by touching Jesus’s cloak, but had completely forgotten two crucial elements of the story.
 
The first was the woman’s motivation for touching Jesus. In my dim recollection of the story I always grouped this healing in with Jesus’s healing of the paralyzed man and the man with the withered hand. But reading these stories now it feels important to note that Jesus doesn’t heal people simply because it’s a nice thing to do; in both of those other cases he’s proving a point to onlookers, using a miracle just like a parable - to provoke a discussion. 
 
When the woman approaches Jesus to touch his garment, she is not doing this because Jesus heals indiscriminately. Jesus doesn’t have a special cloak, he hasn’t said that anyone who touches his cloak will be healed, there isn’t a long line of people touching his cloak and being healed. In fact, the space is so crowded that Jesus is constantly being pressed and jostled, to the point where the apostles are surprised he would notice a particular touch - but none of the other members of the crowd receive any miraculous benefit. 
 
When this woman touches Jesus, however, she instantly feels that she is healed. It’s an incredibly beautiful and very private moment - unlike Christ’s miracles up unto this point, there’s no indication that anyone else notices or could notice. She feels her body heal, and he feels the power moving through him. Why does she receive this blessing, which is so spontaneous it seems to surprise Christ? We don’t know whether she was a good person, or whether she was a committed follower of Jesus. All we know about her is that she was suffering, and she had faith - she says, ‘If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well’ - and Christ replies, ‘Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.’

The second thing I forgot about this miracle is that it happens entirely inside the story of another, arguably greater miracle! This entire scene occurs while Jesus is on his way to perform another miracle - raising a young girl from the dead. And it honestly seems a little strange, narratively, for these two events to happen one after the other, especially when one is kind of weird and the other fits a familiar pattern - where Jesus says something a little difficult to understand and then performs a miracle to make his point. But there is something different about this second miracle. 
 
When Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead he did so in front of a crowd, explicitly stating that he was doing so in order to show that he was the son of God. But here he leaves the crowd outside, wakes the girl gently, tells her family to feed her and to not talk about what has just happened. The scene feels very gentle and very private - exactly how you would want to wake a child who has fallen asleep.  

I think that these miracles are bound together because they are both quiet, private miracles. A wound deep in the body is healed; a terrible loss in a family is restored. Something very important is changed, in a place that very few people can see, and it is changed by faith. I am not certain if we get any of the big ticket miracles anymore but I think these private ones can be just as impactful.

Six months ago it would have been impossible for me to imagine how much of a difference Holy Apostles has made in my life - it was almost impossible for me to imagine going to church, much less praying and reading the Bible on a regular basis. I didn’t come because I had a spiritual awakening or epiphany or felt I desperately needed a relationship with God. Something deep inside me simply changed, quietly and without any obvious outward signs. 
 
Right now I am feeling a lot of fear. I cannot predict what tomorrow will bring - I honestly can’t tell you what the next six hours are going to bring. What a perfect story for us to read right now.
Do not fear, only believe. Do not fear, only believe.
 
P.S. If you liked the Sam Cooke song Basia Bulat also has an incredible cover!

Mark 5:1-20

⁵They came to the other side of the lake, to the country of the Gerasenes.^* 2And when he had stepped out of the boat, immediately a man out of the tombs with an unclean spirit met him. ³He lived among the tombs; and no one could restrain him any more, even with a chain;⁴for he had often been restrained with shackles and chains, but the chains he wrenched apart, and the shackles he broke in pieces; and no one had the strength to subdue him. ⁵Night and day among the tombs and on the mountains he was always howling and bruising himself with stones. ⁶When he saw Jesus from a distance, he ran and bowed down before him; ⁷and he shouted at the top of his voice, ‘What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I adjure you by God, do not torment me.’ ⁸For he had said to him, ‘Come out of the man, you unclean spirit!’ ⁹Then Jesus^* asked him, ‘What is your name?’ He replied, ‘My name is Legion; for we are many.’ ¹⁰He begged him earnestly not to send them out of the country. ¹¹Now there on the hillside a great herd of swine was feeding; ¹²and the unclean spirits^* begged him, ‘Send us into the swine; let us enter them.’ ¹³So he gave them permission. And the unclean spirits came out and entered the swine; and the herd, numbering about two thousand, rushed down the steep bank into the lake, and were drowned in the lake.

¹⁴ The swineherds ran off and told it in the city and in the country. Then people came to see what it was that had happened. ¹⁵They came to Jesus and saw the demoniac sitting there, clothed and in his right mind, the very man who had had the legion; and they were afraid. ¹⁶Those who had seen what had happened to the demoniac and to the swine reported it. ¹⁷Then they began to beg Jesus^* to leave their neighbourhood. ¹⁸As he was getting into the boat, the man who had been possessed by demons begged him that he might be with him. ¹⁹But Jesus^* refused, and said to him, ‘Go home to your friends, and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and what mercy he has shown you.’ ²⁰And he went away and began to proclaim in the Decapolis how much Jesus had done for him; and everyone was amazed.

I recently went vegan, so this passage was interesting. I feel like little piggies got a bad biblical wrap (and in the Torah..and Koran).These little piggies never made it to market. Also, I recently started a trolley ghost tour company in Brooklyn, and we talk a little about exorcisms. So much came up for me in this reading. On the surface, the vegan thing popped up and the thought "of course the ghost tour guy gets the passage loosely describing some sort of exorcism". But something else came up, too. The Legion, referred to in this passage, to me, are the mentally ill, the forgotten, the lost. Or anyone in shackles both literal and figurative. The spirit and the man. And today, like in the time of Gerasenes, they are treated like animals. And perhaps our treatment of animals on this planet can be seen a transference (in the psychological sense) of how we treat those deemed weaker than us. We possess them. Because we can. 

I read a statistic recently that "human activity" has caused more than half of the documented species on the planet to go extinct in the past 50 years. It makes me think that we're collectively experiencing this crescendo of human experience, and none of us can hit the pause button so as to enjoy it, because it's overwhelming. Perhaps not even enjoyable. 

This season of Lent offers up a number of particularly complex paradoxes. We’re experiencing a moment where we’ve created a world of such incredible abundance. We're able to provide unprecedented basic needs to every living soul on earth. Yet, we might be killing the planet. We have achieved this heightened level of individual expression, independence, and convenience through technology. Yet we seem collectively crippled under the tangled weight of power structures and the few people that wield them. We keep advancing medicine and our smartest scientists postulate that death will be the last human disease that we will need to cure. Yet we’re in throes of a global pandemic and we’ve entrusted our health to a greed riddled and broken system shielded by corrupt governance. Proverbial shackles.

So perhaps what’s old is new again. Another paradox. Those pigs belonged to the rulers. Let them take your burden. Yes, they’ll die. But go into town and tell them why they did. And how. And for what purpose. And let it not be in vain. Jesus, the master of paradox. In the midst of this pandemic (of which I will not name, because it’s all we see on our various screens all day), may we have the hope and clarity of mind to cast our modern Legion of disease and inequality into the metaphorical deserved pigs, and let them take a turn at carrying our burden and counting their losses. 

And maybe eat less piggies!

Mark 4:35-41

³⁵ On that day, when evening had come, he said to them, ‘Let us go across to the other side.’ ³⁶And leaving the crowd behind, they took him with them in the boat, just as he was. Other boats were with him. ³⁷A great gale arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already being swamped. ³⁸But he was in the stern, asleep on the cushion; and they woke him up and said to him, ‘Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?’ ³⁹He woke up and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, ‘Peace! Be still!’ Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm. ⁴⁰He said to them, ‘Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?’ ⁴¹And they were filled with great awe and said to one another, ‘Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?’

Oh, how many times have I wished to be taken away from the crowded madness around me! From the demands of children, family and work; from today’s near constant attack on the environment, justice, and democracy; and from the voices inside myself judging my efforts and dampening my dreams. Please, Jesus, take me to the other side for just a little while and let me leave these crowds behind!

Reading this scripture, though, I was reminded of a moment when I yearned for the crowds, not the relief, and was unexpectedly taken to the other side.

At the time, I was younger and feeling very alone in NYC. My loneliness had grown so large and feverish that I did everything I could to avoid being by myself. On this day, I had joined a hiking meet-up group, looking forward to being in the woods (my happy place) and having some company. The group was extremely large, though, and the banter of 50+ people quickly drowned out the voice of nature. To make matters worse, the leader was a poor fit for the role: He disparaged slower hikers, reminding everyone of his need to catch a 3pm train back to Manhattan, and he failed to mark the turns. Our large group quickly splintered into several smaller groups based on pace. And though I was in the middle group, I was concerned that the slow group (including a woman who’d somehow lost the sole of her boot) would not be able to catch up and find their way. Thinking that I knew mine, I turned back to guide them.

But I made a wrong turn. At once, I had no idea where I was. I’d lost the group in front of me and behind. I had no cell service, and I was utterly alone.  I began to panic.

Then, I stopped! Sitting on a rock, I pulled out my lunch and breathed. I decided not to think for a while. A deer walked into the clearing and gazed at me. The light shimmered through the foliage like a waterfall. The leaves swirled lazily down to the ground. In that holy moment, it seemed that God was right there with me.

When I rose to leave, still not knowing how I’d get out of the woods, astonishingly, I immediately ran into the woman with the broken boot and her friend. The friend had managed to telephone her mother – who’d contacted the state police, and we were ‘rescued’ in minutes.

In the poetic irony of that day (seeking a crowd, finding God in solitude; trying to save someone with a broken sole who ended up saving me…), it was if God was saying to me, ‘Why are you afraid? Have you no faith?’ 

God’s ways are bigger and more glorious than we can imagine. Let us be still and allow Him to be with us.