The Healer Touches and is Touched – 27 June, 2021
Mark 5:21-43
In both of today’s Gospel healing stories, the Gospel writer lifts up a point that often confuses God’s people, namely the chicken-and-egg debate about whether faith follows the miracle or the other way around. It seems that for Mark the faith Jesus demands—faith that he is the Messiah—is a precondition of miracle, not the result of miracle. The woman with the hemorrhage “had heard about Jesus and ... said, ‘If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well.’” And before he ever walks into Jairus’s house Jesus says to the distraught father, “Do not fear; only believe.” Like some universal principle of physics, fear and faith cannot both occupy the same space at the same time in the soul. Faith is opposed to fear and it is fear that eclipses miracle. What that might mean then, is not that miracles don’t happen; but that we’re too full of fear to either see or receive them. . . .
The woman with the hemorrhage is marginalized by the mainstream because she is made ritually unclean by her flow of blood. So too is Jairus’s daughter unclean, if she is, in fact, dead. Jesus should not be touched by the one nor touch the other.
What part of your soul suffers in the margins, reaching, reaching for the intuited source of healing? Or consider Jairus’s daughter. . . Who is she in you? Another way of giving her some reflection is to ask: what is it in you that is just trembling on the brink of maturity and needs to be raised up and restored to health? . . .
In today’s scripture we discover [Jesus] as the restorer of life, the healer of all that is not healthy or whole within us or the world around us. Christ is the One who invites us, not to wallow in the fears we know but to believe in the possibilities that only faith can imagine. –– L. Ann Hallisey
2 Corinthians 8:7-15
In verses 1–6, Paul has reminded his readers of their abundance and the need they have to share with the church in Jerusalem, particularly citing ‘‘the churches in Macedonia,’’ which have given of their resources even though enduring “a severe ordeal of affliction” (v 2). Our pericope follows and, without this context, makes for a less specific application. Paul’s central argument is found in verse 9 in which he argues of Christ’s grace that “though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor,” motivating the believer (specifically, the congregation of believers!) to generously give support to those in need. This portion of Paul’s correspondence is a perfect example of Paul’s use of the Gospel, not the law, as behavioral motivation. –– Amandus J. Derr
Lamentations 3:22-33
[This] psalm of thanksgiving. . . directly follows the prophet’s lament about “my affliction and my homelessness” which “my soul continually thinks of” (3:19a, 20a). In response to deli- verance, the prophet sings a song of hope and sounds a theme worth underscoring: ‘‘Although [YHWH] causes grief, he will have compassion’’ (32). Both sides of that equation are evident in the Gospel. –– Amandus J. Derr
Amandus J. Derr served for 22 years as senior pastor of St. Peter Lutheran Church (ELCA) in New York City.
L. Ann Hallisey, an executive coach and organizational consultant, spiritual director and retreat leader, licensed marriage and family therapist, was a parish priest, rector, and interim rector in the Diocese of Northern California for over thirty years, and for six years Dean of Students at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific, Berkeley.
Homily Service 42, no. 3 (2009): 48-58.