On the surface, this seems to be a story about power. A story about how the power of Jesus is strong enough to overcome all illness, all sickness, even death, seemingly without any effort on Jesus’ part. After all, the woman touches Jesus, and she is instantly healed, and he revives the dead girl by simply saying, “Little girl, get up.” In each of these two intertwined stories, the power of Jesus is made manifest before the eyes of the disciples, and, in the case of the healing of the woman, before the eyes of the crowd as well. But the deeper story is about not so much about power as about relationship, about a willingness to engage in genuine encounter with the Other, because in relationship, in encounter, is the heart of the Kingdom of God.
It was probably a big moment for Jesus. Remember, he’s an itinerant preacher, drawing large crowds, but not receiving respect from the religious establishment. And now a leader of the synagogue, Jairus by name, one of the most respected men in town, is asking for his help. While there is, of course, concern for the little girl who is sick, I’m sure the disciples at least, if not Jesus himself, also feel some kind of triumph in the moment. After all, if Jesus can save the little girl then her father will surely use his considerable influence to assist Jesus in gaining respect and acceptance among the powers that be.
But then the second story interrupts the first. Another person approaches Jesus, as Jairus did, but she is as far from Jairus in every other respect as it is possible to be. On a scale of power and influence Jairus was near the top, perhaps below the occupying Roman powers, but within his own community, he was considered a “leader of the synagogue.” This means that he was held in high respect by the people of his town, that he was considered ritually pure, or very nearly, and that he was probably rich. The woman, in contrast, was, first, female, which put her lower down the scale than most men, second poor, because we read she “had spent all she had on doctors,” and third, was ritually unclean, which meant that she was cut off both from the rituals of her tradition and from the community of believers because of the “flow of blood” or “hemorrhaging” that had plagued her for over a decade. In other words, she has none of the resources, none of the power, none of the influence that Jairus has. She does not, as the story is told to us, even have a name.
The only thing she seems to have in common with Jairus is an unshakeable trust that, somehow, an encounter with Jesus will breathe the spirit of life back into her broken world, into her broken body. She shares with her much more powerful fellow villager the imperative to reach out beyond herself for help, to reach out toward Jesus, to reach out toward, what is, in the end, a relationship of love, not merely of power. To reach out for healing, for an experience of God beyond her imagination or understanding.
And Jesus responds to her. To the immense frustration of his disciples, intent on pursuit of Jairus and his power, Jesus senses her presence, her trust, and he slows, stops, looks around. Somehow, it almost seems that the world slows with him. The earth slows on its axis, the cosmos holds its breath, as Jesus searches for the one who reached out to him. In some way, although her body is already healed, the act remains incomplete. And so he searches, heedless of the time that could have been spent hurrying to Jairus’ house, and when he finds the woman, Jesus completes the encounter, returns the relationship, “Daughter, your faith [not my power, is what] has [truly] made you well” (Mark 5:34).
In that incompleteness of the moment just before Jesus find the woman, we see once again that Jesus is not just another power-seeker in a me-first world. In the absence of relationship, all the power in the world is merely force, holding others down in interactions characterized by either blunt coercion by force or subtle coercion by manipulation, the giving and withholding of favors not for the good of the other but for the good of the giver. But for Jesus, the expenditure of power is, in truth, a secondary matter. The relationship is primary. The relationship, the encounter, is everything.
I have a friend who works full time for an outreach program based in a different country. As you might expect, most of the program’s funding comes from various charitable foundations, churches, and individuals. And one day she told me a story of a group that had come to visit her program in the country in which she lives and works. Now, this particular group was bringing a large number of people, including some who were genuine experts in the work they were doing. They also had a great deal of money, and had brought with them a large amount of material that they intended to leave with the program when they returned to the U.S. But from the first moments, my friend said, she realized that this particular group came not to find grace in a new environment, not to enter into a genuine encounter that might broaden their experience of the Kingdom of God, but merely to ‘enlighten the savages.’ They would never have stated it so bluntly; indeed, such a phrase may well be an exaggeration, but much of the travelers’ attitude suggested that the people who lived in-country had little, if anything, to offer. They ignored advice, suggestions, from their hosts, and even refused small gifts, such as prepared meals. Their behavior implied that they believed their hosts to have nothing of value to offer, either in terms of material or experience. Just get out of our way. And my friend, in a moment of compelling honesty, admitted that the people in her host group were not blameless either. One of her co-workers was trying to encourage her in her dealings with this difficult group several days before they were due to leave, and she said to my friend, “Just a few more days, and they’ll be gone and we’ll have all their stuff.” The travelling group seemed to be treating their hosts as empty vessels, bereft of anything that might be worth receiving. But the hosting group also seemed, in their own way, to view the travelers not as genuine guests, but as a trial to be endured for the sake of getting “stuff.” Both groups effectively refused to open themselves to the presence of the Holy Spirit that might be made manifest in genuine relationship, in true and deep encounter with the Other.
I’m sure that much was physically accomplished during that particular group’s visit to my friend’s program. But I cannot help but mourn how much was missed on both sides. One of the primary, most long-lasting benefits of any travel, of any mission work such as Glory Ridge, such as our S.O. Fun work week we did last week with about 20 middle schoolers, one of the primary benefits is not the physical labor performed but the transformational power of the relationships the participants engage in. In the relationships formed between the young people I worked with last week and our hosts, in those relationships lies the deep power to transform lives. In encountering the Other, their heart understanding of God, and of the Kingdom of God expands and deepens. If those young people who travel see the Body of Christ in people who live in another country, or in the mountains north of Asheville, where Glory Ridge is, or right here in Greensboro, then they carry some of that experience with them, which in turn affects all the people they have relationships with, even if we can’t diagram the effect with a series of neat little lines.
As followers of Christ, relationship, encounter, is part of our calling. That’s why we play games together in youth group. That’s why we share celebrations and concerns, or as the young people call them, pows and wows, in our small group gatherings, whether those are youth group meetings, Servant Leadership classes, or Wisdom Circles gathered to read and reflect on the upcoming Sunday’s Gospel. That’s why we always make time for our young people to talk to the folks they work with out in the community here or at Glory Ridge, and why we create foyer groups that meet for dinner one per month and family events within our church community whose primary purpose is fellowship, relationship. The conversations, the encounters, are often the most transformative moments we have.
But entering relationships doesn’t have to take place only on mission trips or within the context of other formal church events. I once went to a conference that was keynoted by Christian writer and Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor. In the course of the conference, she spoke about various spiritual disciplines, and one of them that she encouraged us to engage in was what she called the spiritual practice of encounter. She described this practice as “coming face to face with another human being [preferably someone different enough from me to qualify as a capital ‘O’ Other] and at least entertaining the possibility that this is one of the faces of God.” She went on to say, “this practice requires no special setting, no personal trainer, and no expensive equipment. It can be done anywhere, by anyone who has a mind to do it.”1 For each one of us, the practice of encounter may manifest itself differently. It may mean a willingness to open ourselves to the stranger at the grocery store, the one who is ringing up our groceries for us, long enough to look them in the eye and say “thank you” when they recite the obligatory line about how much money we have saved by shopping at whatever brand name store we are shopping at today. It may mean a moment in which we pause long enough to make eye contact with the person we might normally slide past in the hallway, because their stories tend toward the rambling and mundane. It might even mean engaging with someone who is so different from us as to feel truly alien. Encounter is not always easy, because of the very difference of the Other. Encounter takes time, time that we could perhaps use oh so productively for other things. But when we are tempted to breeze past the person, to ignore the gifts they may have to offer, perhaps we can remember that even when it frustrated his followers, Jesus took this time, offering himself equally to a woman with no status, a man with great status, and an utterly helpless little girl.
The Kingdom of God, you see, lies in the relationships we have with each other, because, seen or unseen, God is present in each one. In those relationships, if we are open to genuine encounter, we may catch glimpses from time to time of some aspect of our God who is so far beyond our expectations as to be forever outside the reach of our mind and imagination. In our encounters with the Other we are drawn beyond our preconceived notions of who Jesus is, who God is. Our heart-level understanding of God deepens and matures. And as we grow together the Kingdom of God that Jesus shows us in his life, death and resurrection, and most especially today in the healing of both Jairus’ daughter and the unnamed woman, that community of relationship comes more fully into being.
Amen.