NOTES for Mar 5:21-43

In the Gospel there is a remarkable account of a "healing inside a resurrection." It is about the raising of the daughter of a synagogue ruler ("the ruler of the synagogue") and, as it were along the way, the healing of a woman who for many years had suffered from an unnamed illness involving bleeding. At first glance these events have nothing in common except that they happened at the same time. In reality, however, they are united by one common feature that is not immediately obvious.

Here is a woman who is afraid to admit that she touched Jesus. Today such fear may seem hard for us to understand, but in those days it was fully justified: the issue is bleeding, and according to the norms of the Torah a person suffering from bleeding is considered unclean; touching such a person defiles. Meanwhile the woman touches the Teacher, risking defiling Him if... if only she is not healed. Here it is either healing, or a very serious offense bordering on a crime. Something similar is true with the ruler's daughter: while a person is alive, he can and should be treated, if that is possible, but if he has died, touching his body defiles.

Traditional Yahwist ideas, briefly stated, come down to the understanding that a person is defiled by any contact with anything that diminishes the fullness of his life. Whenever, in modern language, entropy is visibly triumphant, a person is defiled because participation, whether voluntary or involuntary, in such a process is incompatible with another process that is always unfolding in God's presence: the process of sanctification.

Jesus, however, is able each time to turn entropy back, to force it to retreat, even where it seems to triumph irreversibly, as in the case of physical death. For the Kingdom there is no defilement at all: the very presence of its power, its breath, destroys defilement, making the process of becoming defiled impossible in principle. Such is the surpassing life of the Kingdom that Jesus bears in Himself. The only way to be defiled before Christ and the Kingdom is to remain within the space of one's own deliberate sin, but that is another story.

It is hard to imagine, even in our own time, which has lost shame in many ways, a woman who would publicly admit that she had suffered for many years from constant bleeding. But in Israel at that time she also had no right to touch people. A woman with a flow of blood was considered unclean; anyone who touched her had to fast for several days and could not enter the Temple. Yet she so longed for healing and so believed that she touched Jesus, and her trust in Him was so great, that when she felt she had been healed, she decided to testify to it before the whole crowd pressing around Him.

Very often shame prevents us from coming to God, sincerely asking Him for something, and turning to Him. We are ashamed to confess, forgetting that God already sees all our sins, everything we are ashamed of, while the priest is only a witness, endowed with the authority to grant us God's forgiveness, but not endowed with authority to judge us. We have nothing to fear. We are ashamed to bear witness to Christ; we are embarrassed and afraid that people will laugh at us, although Christ said that if we are ashamed of Him, He too will be ashamed of us before the Father.

The story of the healing of the woman who suffered from bleeding shows us the Kingdom, and the relationships that bind its inhabitants to one another, from a somewhat unexpected angle. In principle, of course, there is nothing surprising in the fact that a person who comes into contact with the Kingdom is healed: in the Kingdom there can be no place for sickness or death. Something else is interesting: exactly how it happens. Of course, no sharing in the Kingdom is possible without real, living relationship with the One who brought the Kingdom into the world, without trust in Him. But in the story of the woman healed of her bleeding, that relationship was still somewhat one-sided.

That the woman who was healed trusted Jesus completely is obvious: otherwise she would never have dared to touch Him, since people suffering from such illnesses were considered unclean from the Torah's point of view, and their touch defiled those whom they touched. It took very great faith in healing to dare to do what the woman mentioned in the story did. And, of course, it took boundless trust in the One to whom she was turning for healing.

Jesus heals the woman who touched Him without even noticing her. He only senses that someone has touched Him, not the way people accidentally brush against one another in a dense crowd, but seeking healing, touching Him in order to share in that power of God whose fullness He bears in Himself. At the moment of healing, Jesus not only does not pay attention to the woman healed by touching Him, He does not even see her.

As we can see, it also happens that a person takes the first step toward the Kingdom on his own, by his own will, taking the initiative into his own hands, so to speak. It happens, then, that the Kingdom is "taken by force" in this way too. But, of course, in this case the first step is always accompanied by a responsive step toward the person by the One who brought the Kingdom into the world. It cannot be otherwise: relationships are always mutual; they are never one-sided. And Jesus, as we can see, accepts the woman who dared to do what far from everyone would dare to do. And He tells her that her faith has saved her, her resolve and trust in Him. The very things without which one cannot enter the Kingdom.

The woman with a flow of blood, whose healing we read about in today's Gospel, does something completely unlawful. Under Jewish law, blood defiles, and therefore a sick woman must keep away from pious people. All the more must she keep away from the Temple and from God. If one of the Pharisees had intercepted her as she forced her way through the crowd toward Jesus, she would have been condemned and perhaps severely punished. At the very least, she would have been thoroughly shamed: how dare you, so unclean, steeped in sin and impurity, approach the Teacher! Yet He Himself tells the Pharisees that people like her—tax collectors and sinners—enter the Kingdom ahead of the religious high achievers, because they have one important quality: they need this Kingdom desperately.

Again, as in the other miracles described by Mark the Evangelist, we see that the Lord performs a miracle by His word alone. People who have the gift of miracle-working or who claim extraordinary abilities appeal to another will: saints to God, shamans to the power of magical spells. Jesus, however, simply expresses His will, and it works a miracle, as it created this whole world. In this His divine authority is manifested. But it is no less important for us to know that the will of the Almighty is that people be healed of diseases and delivered from death. Jesus' request that no one know about this especially emphasizes it: He performs the miracle not to attract adherents to a new religion, but to deliver a specific family from death and grief.

Death. People are ready to believe in the miracles Jesus performs, that is, to acknowledge His tremendous power. But when the word "death" appears, there is no more reason to trouble the Teacher. Death is the end. Even the most terrible disease still leaves hope, but death is everything.

Yet this is precisely what turns out not to be true. Resurrection takes its place alongside the other healings. Disease and death turn out to be phenomena of the same order. Death is not something beyond the world, something we cannot fight because it is immeasurably greater than we are, nor is it something sacred in that sense. No, death is only the end of a chain of diseases that testify to the corruptibility of this material nature.

That is why the two stories of people being raised from the dead, Lazarus and Jairus's daughter, do not have a special style compared with the miracles of healing. Yes, death is a very important event. But birth is far more important, because death is only a passage. To our earthly eyes, death and birth are events of the same order in the strength of the experience; only the sign of that experience differs. And for our earthly feelings, this is how it should be. It is frightening when people do not weep at funerals out of some false religiosity. But when the soul weeps, the spirit must quietly and calmly learn new paths of connection with the beloved person now that there is no material connection between you. This is possible only if we are filled with the spirit of today's reading.

Death is not an impassable wall. There is One who always gives our dead back to us: the Lord Jesus Christ.