NOTES for Luk 8:40-56

Christ is already widely known among the people. They are glad to receive Him and therefore await His coming. Alas, His popularity so far has little connection with an understanding of who He is and why He came to humanity. How much we resemble the ancient inhabitants of Judea when we turn to Christ and His saints mainly with practical needs, forgetting what is more important! It is no surprise that Jairus asks Him to heal his daughter, and Christ responds to the request. But neither Jairus nor his household yet knows that He came to defeat death, so the request not to trouble the Teacher after news of the girl's death spreads is quite understandable. Still, it is monstrous that we hear laughter at this moment: even at a tragic time, people find it possible to laugh at the One who called the dead girl asleep. In this laughter we can already hear the mockery that will sound when He is seized and handed over to be killed. Yet He is not mocked with impunity; those who mocked Him were put to shame.

On the way, the woman with an issue of blood touched Him. Not long before, He had broken the rules concerning defilement by touching a leper, and now the suffering woman also broke the rules governing uncleanness by touching Him. He approves her boldness—not because, as some think, He wants to destroy the existing norms, but because His mercy is higher than ritualism pursued as an end in itself.

There is no doubt that healing and resurrection are nothing other than manifestations of the power of the Kingdom and its breath. But how does this power affect a person of this world, still living the old, untransformed life?

Here is the woman who risked touching Jesus in the hope of receiving healing. She really did risk it: her illness made her ritually unclean, and she risked defiling the One she touched if she did not receive healing from Him. And He did not even notice her; He only felt the power of that Kingdom which He bears within Himself going out from Him, going out because someone needed it, someone who did not dare address Him personally. And here is the dead daughter of Jairus, whom Jesus raises by taking her by the hand. Here too the power of the Kingdom is at work. Yet outwardly, from the point of view of the Savior's relationship with those whom He heals and raises, the situation is exactly the opposite.

He knows nothing about the healed woman until the very moment when she touches Him, and even then He understands what is happening not because He singles her out from the crowd surrounding and pressing Him on every side, but because He feels the power going out: the woman healed by Him has touched the Kingdom, has shared in its life, and the Savior immediately felt it. But Jairus's daughter, whom He raised, wanted nothing by the time He came to her: she was dead. His touch brought her back to life. In both cases, the relationship between the Savior and those He helped is initially one-sided: in the first case the initiative belongs entirely to the woman seeking healing, and in the second to Jesus Himself.

But the miracle happens when the relationship becomes mutual. And here, apparently, it is no longer so important what happens outwardly at the moment when such a relationship is established, or how this process is projected into our transforming but still untransformed world. From here it may seem to us that the Savior does not notice the one He heals, or, on the contrary, that the person He raises knows nothing about his Savior. In the Kingdom, what must happen happens all the same: those seeking salvation find the Savior, and He finds them. It cannot be otherwise, for only in this way can one share in the life of the Kingdom. And only in this way can the Kingdom enter our transforming but not yet transformed world.

The miraculous healing of the woman with the flow of blood is a very dramatic moment. Blood and everything connected with it was considered in Israel a source of ritual defilement. Because of this view, during certain periods women were considered unclean and, among other things, were not supposed to touch anything, and other people were not supposed to touch them until purification. The woman whose healing the evangelists recount had been in this state of ritual uncleanness for long years without interruption. It required great courage and boldness for her to enter the crowd surrounding Jesus. Her action could have been regarded as deliberate defilement of people, and she could have been subjected to severe punishment. But she felt that in order to be healed she, like each of us, needed to draw near and touch Christ. And so, at once trembling and bold, she makes her way through the crowd and touches not even the Lord Himself, but only the edge of His garment. The evangelist Luke says that she wanted to "hide herself," that is, to remain unnoticed in her boldness.

However much the prophets spoke about the fact that sin before God consists in unfaithfulness to Him and a lack of mercy toward neighbors, from the point of view of rabbinic Judaism, in this touch defilement passed from the woman to Jesus. And this primitive stereotype of ritual defilement belongs by no means only to Judaism. Even Christians find it hard to free themselves from it. This stereotype tacitly assumes that defilement is stronger and, if one may put it this way, more effective than purity. But here is what Christ Himself says: "I felt power go out from Me." Defilement does not go from the woman to Jesus; power goes from Jesus to her.

Speaking of Christ, the prophet Isaiah emphasizes that "He took our infirmities and bore our diseases." He bears the load of evil and suffering that would crush any of us. And therefore, when Christ says to the woman, "your faith has saved you," it does not occur to anyone to remember defilement. Besides its witness to God's mercy, the account of this healing is important for us as a witness that the power of God's love and the holiness of God in Christ are stronger than human weakness. And immediately, in this same Gospel reading, we receive confirmation of this when Christ touches the dead body of Jairus's daughter, and a dead body also defiles, and raises her.

A strange reaction at first glance: on the one hand, a multitude of people pressing from every side, yet this crowding is, as it were, not noticed; on the other hand, the touch of one woman longing for healing becomes noticeable at once... Meanwhile, if one thinks about it, there is nothing strange here. It has long been observed that a person is nowhere so lonely as in a large crowd. Even when that crowd is quite dense. One would think that everyone is pressed against one another, the closeness is complete, but it turns out that the closeness is only physical, and there is no other kind. Apparently Jesus experiences the same thing in a tightly packed crowd.

Only, unlike us, He is completely unconcerned with accidental touches caused by the density of the crowd. It is as if He does not feel them at all; for Him they are, as it were, not there. This is understandable: what matters to Him above all is personal relationship with those who are nearby, and where there is no such relationship, there is nothing to speak of and nothing to feel, even if a crowd is pressing all around. Jesus apparently perceived it as an impersonal mass in which one cannot make out an individual person, because the person in a crowd usually does not see himself either, unless he makes a special effort to do so. And although outwardly the crowd's interest was connected precisely with Him, with Jesus, in essence there was no one in that crowd truly interested in Him. An excited expectation of a miracle does not count: by itself it does not yet make a person a self-aware personality. The woman longing for help and healing, and therefore for personal communion, is different. She does not merge with the crowd. She remembers herself and, at least in part, is aware of herself. Through the negative, through a problem, through a sickness that until then had been incurable, but she is aware.

Sadly, in the fallen world it is often precisely through the negative that a person begins to become aware of himself; many cannot be awakened in any other way. And when someone touches Jesus consciously, striving for a personal and completely concrete relationship with Him, understanding what he wants from Him, He perceives the one who touches Him precisely as a person and not as part of the crowd. Then healing is possible, then that power of God, which Jesus constantly senses within Himself, begins to act, and He feels this power acting through Him. And the one seeking healing receives what he sought: he has found the One who can heal him.

When the Lord said that Jairus's daughter had not died but was sleeping, people laughed at Him. Everyone who truly believes deeply knows this special kind of laughter. To a person who is unable to believe, what we believe looks ridiculous, and we ourselves appear to him a little beside ourselves, slightly insane.

The words about laughter in today's passage look rather strange. Imagine the situation: Jesus and His disciples have come into a house where everyone is weeping, and suddenly the weeping turns into laughter - not into astonished silence, but precisely into laughter. This is hard to imagine, which means it is exactly what needs to be understood and felt. A person laughs when he feels strength in himself, when he feels in control of the situation, when he rises above it. Laughter is the opposite of sacred awe. At the same time, laughter is an ambiguous phenomenon; at times we perceive it as something good.

Let us think about this once more. In the Epistle of James (4:9) we meet these words: be wretched and mourn and weep; let your laughter be turned to mourning. Here the apostle does not say a word about some particular kind of laughter being turned to mourning. No, let all laughter be turned to mourning. Yes, the Lord calls us to perfect joy, but as long as the world is what it is, every kind of laughter is dangerous because it can turn into the laughter of the people who greeted Jesus in Jairus's house. And it is not for nothing that earthly life is often called a valley of tears in prayer.