Stepping into the Tardis of Mark’s gospel
Sermon – 24th July 2022, Sunday Evensong
Deut. 30.11-end and Mark 5.21-end
I was quite a Dr Who fan when I was growing up. I am just about old enough to remember when John Pertwee was the doctor, followed by Tom Baker and Peter Davison. I remember spending plenty of episodes hiding behind a cushion on the sofa in the scary bits. My favourite thing in the series was the Tardis, that familiar 1960’s blue police box that seemed like home to the doctor.
The Doctor Who website says this about the Tardis:
“TARDIS stands for ‘Time and Relative Dimension in Space’ and it is the Doctor's ship, their home and their friend. It has been the one constant through all their lives; an impossible blue box, bigger on the inside than the outside, taking them not necessarily to where they want to go, but very often where they need to be. It can reach any time or place, and with it the Doctor has shown the universe to a rich variety of companions.”
As we explore this evening’s passage from Mark, it’s a bit like entering the Tardis. From the outside it looks like two stories of healing and yet, as we go through the doors, we discover a much more expansive and rich landscape with extra dimensions of meaning. In fact in these 23 verses, we find the whole gospel within the gospel, a story within a story. So let’s see where it takes us!
What we find in this passage is one story wrapped around another. We start with the synagogue leader Jairus asking Jesus to come and heal his sick daughter, then break off from that to go to the woman with the haemorrhage and her being healed, before returning to Jairus’s daughter, who by this time has died and Jesus raises from the dead – a much more spectacular miracle than it might have been originally. It’s tempting to focus on just one of the stories but if we do that, we lose something of the wonder at how the Biblical text weaves together giving us something much richer than we first thought.
This wrapping one story around another is a narrative technique that we see in a number of places in Mark’s gospel. The idea is that one story illuminates the other, one story interprets the other.
There are some early clues that point to these stories being connected: the woman had been ill for 12 years, and the young girl is 12 years old. The number 12 was significant in that it pointed to the 12 tribes of Israel. Meaning that this story related to the Jewish people. Jesus has just come from healing the Gerasene demoniac, a miracle done in Gentile territory, so Mark is showing that the salvation to come will be for the whole world – Jews and Gentiles.
The other linking factor is the word ‘daughter’. There is Jairus’ daughter by blood and Jesus calling the woman his daughter. This is about becoming part of the family of God, a family that goes beyond blood ties.
Let’s look first at the woman with the haemorrhage. The haemorrhage is thought to have been menstruation, which was considered ritual defilement in those days, going back to God’s curse on Eve in Genesis. Women having their period were not allowed to participate in worship or social gatherings. They were considered unclean and anything they touched was thought to be contaminated. She would have been an outcast from society and her faith community. She was at her wits’ end, having spent everything she had on doctors and remedies over the past 12 years and nothing had worked.
It was very courageous of her to come up and touch him, knowing that she would be seen to be contaminating him. Perhaps this is why she approaches him from behind and only touches his cloak. When Jesus discovers who it was, far from scolding her or being repulsed by her, he calls her ‘daughter’. We are often so familiar with bible passages that we don’t notice the power or significance of things. That word should stop us in our tracks. The term ‘Daughter’ is used for no one else in this gospel. This woman who had been beyond the pale for so very long is not only suddenly and completely healed, but brought into the family and welcomed. And in one fell swoop, Jesus breaks the taboo around the perceived curse of menstruation which has gone on for centuries.
This radical act underlines yet again Jesus’ unconditional love and acceptance – from tax collectors to lepers to ‘unclean’ women. It shouts to us today too, challenging all our prejudices and judgements about people, our treatment of the stranger, our thoughts about the asylum seeker, the homeless person - all the people we might unconsciously file in the ‘unclean’ drawer in our minds.
There’s a sense of reciprocity with the woman, because later Jesus will go on to stand in solidarity with her and be the ostracised one himself. He will be cast out of society as he hangs on a cross beyond the city walls, rejected, alone and forsaken.
Moving to the story of Jairus’ daughter, we start with a sick daughter at the beginning of the story and move to her dying while Jesus was dealing with the woman. Touching a dead body was also considered unclean and usually demanded a period of quarantine and ritual washing, so when Jesus took her hand and spoke to the young girl, he was again stepping beyond the bounds of convention. At 12 years old, she would have been at marriageable age and old enough to be menstruating herself, so here again, his touching her was overstepping the mark in terms of what was deemed acceptable. He tells her to get up. The word translated as ‘get up’ is the same as for ‘resurrection’ in Greek so in addition to demonstrating his divine powers of healing, his raising her from the dead points to his own resurrection to come and the salvation he will bring to all.
So this story within a story gives us a supreme example of Jesus’ unconditional love and desire to draw everyone to himself and magnifies it somehow by wrapping it up in the bigger picture of the good news of Christ’s resurrection and salvation to come. It also invites us to hear Jesus calling us ‘Daughter’ or ‘Son’. What does it feel like to really hear that being said to us? To know that in declaring our faith in Christ, we are not joining a club or becoming a paid-up member of a society, it’s far more intimate than that. We are being welcomed into God’s family, in which we are fully seen and known and loved in spite of everything. And there can be no better news on earth than that.
Amen.