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Your faith has healed, you, go in peace.
One of the hard things about preaching on the Bible is that there is so much in it. The two stories we've heard today are full of interest. We could go on for hours considering the tenuous chain of providential co-incidences by which Isaac came by his wife - without which there would have been no people of Israel, and among other things, no Bible. Or we could think about the feelings and hopes and faith of Jairus the respectable churchwarden, putting his daughter's life in the hands of a noted troublemaker. It would also be interesting to think about what it was like to be God Incarnate. When you think about it, being both "God from God, true God from true God", and also a human being like you and me, is odd and paradoxical: God knows everything and is everywhere, and human beings don't and aren't, for example. If I can do it without digressing too far I'd like to draw your attention to one hint in this passage for your later consideration about what that was like. "At once", St Mark writes, " Jesus realised that power had gone out from him". I think that's interesting. He turns round and asks "who touched my clothes?" - he doesn't know who has touched him. But he does know, first that he has within him a power which I don't think of any of us has, and that some of it had gone out from him.
Now, as I say, I don't want to go on about this topic too much. It's interesting enough for a long sermon. I commend it to you for private study. I hope that brief excursus, though, helps you see what I mean about there being so much in these passages that if we did justice to them we'd be here all night. Luckily, the lectionary brings them round again regular as a football tournament, and much better worth waiting for. So let's make a date - same place, same time, three years from now, to talk about God Incarnate. And three years after that, Jairus. And so on. We'll work through them all in the end.
This evening, however, I want to concentrate on the woman who came out of the crowd to touch Jesus's cloak - and what her experience might be able to tell us about how prayer works.
Let's review the story. Jesus is in the middle of the two or three year period when he went about healing and preaching, mostly in northern Israel. He was very famous by the time of our story, and as the story opens he has just got out of the boat in which he's sailed back from the far side of lake Galilee, where he has been casting out demons on a grand scale - the story of the Gadarene swine comes just before this passage. At once a huge crowd gathers. We can guess this is in Capernaum, or one of the other towns where he had already done great things. Some sharp-eyed loafer on the quay may have seen him out on the lake and, as the boat was rowing into shore, run off to the market to be the first with the news. By Jesus is on dry land again, most of the town is there. Many come out of curiosity, some not knowing what the fuss was about, others remembering what Jesus is famous for and wanting to be there in case he does anything else memorable. Some will have come to hear him speak. And also in the crowd were many suffering from illness, or whose friends and relatives were sick. They would have been filled with hope - and perhaps also the fear of disappointment that often comes with hope - when they heard Jesus was back.
We meet two of this people. Jairus I've already mentioned. He comes right up to Jesus and one can imagine the crowd parting for a well known member of the community. Jairus's believes that Jesus can bring his daughter back to life, and Jesus agrees to go with him. But also in the crowd is a much less prominent citizen. A woman - and women did not have a prominent place in the world of the time. But worse than that, a woman, as it says in our passage, "who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years". If you refer to Leviticus chapter 15 you will find detailed regulations about how to deal with a woman suffering in this way. Leviticus, of course, was the backbone of the Jewish law by which the people of the time were living. And the summary of what Leviticus says about the woman in our story is, she is ceremonially unclean. What did that mean? At a practical level it meant there were lots of things she couldn't touch, and other people were ill-advised to touch her for fear of themselves becoming unclean. Beyond that, many of her friends and relations may well have taken the attitude that "there's no smoke without fire" - that her physical uncleanness was part of a larger spiritual uncleanness. For all these reasons she must have led a lonely life for the previous dozen years. No crowd was going to treat her as it treated Jairus - they might shrink back from her in loathing once they found out who she was, but they wouldn't open a path for her out of respect. So instead of throwing herself at Jesus's feet, or even speaking to him, she gets as close as she can and reaches out to touch the hem of his cloak.
It would be fascinating to know more about her. The hem of the cloak was where pious Jews then (as they do in a different form today) wore the tassels made of blue cord that we read about in the book of Numbers - "to look at so you will remember all the commands of the Lord". So she may have had a superstitious feeling that this was the most holy part of Jesus she could touch. But however much or little she understands exactly who Jesus is, she is quite sure that there is power in him that will heal her. She worms her way through the crowd and reaches out and touches him without his being aware of it. And the exact thing she believed in, and for which she hoped, happens - she feels at once that she is freed from her suffering.
Jesus stops at once and wants to know who has touched him. Perhaps at this moment she feels afraid. She just wants to go off and enjoy being healed. Twelve years of being unclean have made her want to keep out of the limelight. But because Jesus calls her she comes forward. This time the crowd does part - they respect her now, because Jesus wants to talk to her. She falls at his feet, trembling with fear, probably expecting some punishment. Maybe she feels that in reaching out for healing without being called she has stolen something. But Jesus is calling her forward to put her mind at ease. "Go in peace", he says - don't go off feeling guilty as though you've stolen medicine from the apothecary, no, this medicine was meant for you. And he also says the saying which I want to recommend most highly to your attention this evening: "your faith has healed you."
Let's stop a moment and think about that. Her faith hasn't healed her: God, in Jesus, has healed her. No human action could do it; the doctors have tried for twelve years. Nothing about her can have been responsible for the cure. Yet Jesus says "your faith has healed you". So both these things must be true: God healed her, and her faith healed her; and on the face of it that seems like one thing too many. But I think it may be like one of those children's tricycles with a long handle for the mother or father to hold, to keep the child safe and to push the tricycle along. The parent pushes. The child pedals. In a sense the parent is doing all the work: but on the other hand, if the child hadn't wanted to go for a ride nothing would be happening. God has given us legs to walk with, and souls to pray with. In both cases, without God we are nothing. Nevertheless my legs are my legs and my soul is my soul. If we move our legs we will get somewhere. Likewise, prayer is an active power in the human soul.
The "faith" that healed the woman was an example of this movement in the soul by which fallen man can sometimes share in the supernatural power of God. What kind of movement are we talking about here? The Bible has a good deal to say about this, and the woman in our story typifies a lot of what we learn. Read further in Mark's Gospel and you find the familiar episode in which people bring their children for Jesus to bless, and the disciples don't want the Lord to have to be bothered with screaming kids, but Jesus rebukes them saying "anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it". Receiving the kingdom of God like a little child: that was what the woman in our story was doing. Have you ever seen a babe in arms in being passed back to its mother - instantly it recognises the mother's face and at once confusion becomes contentment? That was how the woman in the story saw Jesus: she didn't think it through too much: she just saw him and recognised that he had what she needed. Or to take another example: turn to the psalms and read, say, "out of the depths I cry to you O Lord". Again, the woman in our story has this quality of dependence on the Lord. She's exhausted every other resource. She doesn't have a Plan B. It's Jesus or nothing. She depends on him entirely.
It's impossible to be cut and dried about the kind of faith by which the woman was healed of her twelve years' suffering. But it is something worth aspiring to. And I think we are warranted in believing that it has something to do with simplicity, and something to do with dependence. This may be why we in the western world and the twenty-first century see relatively few miracles. Our habits of mind are against unquestioning dependence on higher powers: we like to think things out for ourselves. I have met people who grew up, for example, in mission hospitals in the back of beyond, who report daily miracles as though they were commonplace. Perhaps in a less scientific society, the faith that heals has more chance to flourish. I myself cannot claim to have seen or been part of a miracle that went against the laws of physics. But the closest I have got to seeing that happen has been occasions - for example when I was working in Afghanistan - when I have been furthest from home and most abjectly dependent on the Lord. Perhaps one of the disadvantages of the comfortable lives we lead is that we seldom fall far enough for God to catch us. The woman in our story had fallen all the way to the bottom, and God did catch her. Now, two thousand years later, I pray that her experience could be one that sheds light on our own lives today and in the week to come.