The gospel for this Fifth Sunday After Pentecost was Mark 5: 21-43. It's a little long to repeat here but you can read it through that link. Suffice it to say that Jesus encountered a couple of interesting situations. First a Jewish religious leader came and begged him to come and heal his daughter, as she was sick and near death. Jesus dropped everything and came, a crowd of people who had come to see him following in his wake on this detour. On the way a woman from the street touched him. She had been hemorrhaging for a dozen years and couldn't be cured. When she touched his cloak her condition disappeared. But while Jesus and his followers were sorting that out news came from the leader's house. His daughter had died. They could forget about coming. But Jesus told the leader to have faith, went anyway, and raised his daughter from the dead.
All you need to know about these two stories is this: both of the situations Jesus encountered were signs of ritual uncleanness, insurmountable barriers to holiness. A bleeding woman was not supposed to enter the temple or approach God until her blood had ceased. If another person touched her while she bled, then that person was also considered unclean and had to ritually purify themselves before they could approach God. When the woman in the street (already a questionable character in an "upright" society just by virtue of being a woman and interacting with people in public) touched Jesus technically she was supposed to make him unclean. Those were the rules. Instead he made her clean! His love and his holiness were more powerful and far-reaching than any obstacle, personal or societal or legal or ANYTHING. Nothing people said or thought about her, no condition, nothing about her could drag him down. Instead he lifted her up, and in doing so revealed the truth of who she was: not a bleeding woman but a child of God.
So, too, with the dead child. Touching dead bodies also made a person unclean and unfit to be before God. Ritual cleansing was again required. Not to mention the insurmountable nature of this particular obstacle. Who could overcome death? What could possibly be this powerful? Not only was touching that girl supposed to make Jesus unclean, it was supposed to defeat him utterly. "Don't even bother coming" the people said to him. They laughed at his foolishness when he arrived. And yet what happened? Jesus touched her and again he was neither brought low nor defeated, but she was lifted up and restored.
How many times do we judge people by their sins instead of God's intention for them? How quick are we to believe ill of people and the world instead of good? What do you remember in a day, fifty people who were nice or one who was rude? What sticks with you, the hundred times someone told you that you were beautiful or the one time someone told you that you were ugly?
Why is it that whatever is most wretched, fear-provoking, ill-mannered, titillating, or rude seems the most powerful and true to us while love and compassion seem weak? It's the other way around! Love is the only strength and Jesus would not let anything defeat it. We should believe the good, share the uplifting, follow those things which are compassionate and restorative. Those are God's gifts to us, yet so often we leave them by the roadside while pursing things that seem more powerful and end up more futile.
We are more than our weaknesses and faults. We are strength and we are love. Nothing can overcome that.
How beautiful it was to hear this message and then come forward for Communion, bringing all of our shortcomings to the altar, being touched by Jesus through body and blood, and leaving strengthened and whole! How wonderful it was afterwards to share a fellowship meal and converse for hours! This message is alive every day if we bother to heed it. God has such love in store for us!
Follow that love this week. Look for it, hold it dear, and share it with your friends and neighbors. You will see the world in a different way and so will they. It's much better being strong in love than being weak in anything else.
--Pastor Dave (pastordave@geneseelutheranparish.org)
No comments:
Post a Comment