Sermon preached at Christ Church, Georgetown
Washington, D.C.
June 27, 2021 / Fifth Sunday after Pentecost
Mark 5:21-43
In the Name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
In the collections of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, there is a book of cut-and-pasted segments of the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The cutting and pasting begins with the story of Jesus’ birth and ends with the story of his body’s being laid to rest in a tomb. In between, the pasted verses recount many of Jesus’ teachings and describe a version of his life, but any references to miracles, the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, and our Lord’s resurrection are wholly absent. The teachings are in; the miraculous is out.
The compiler of this redacted volume of Scripture, as some of you of course will know, is none other than Thomas Jefferson.[1] In 1820, during his long retirement, Jefferson sought to free our Lord’s moral teachings from what Jefferson viewed as the apostles’ later additions to or misunderstandings of the events of Jesus’ life. No supernatural acts at all are included in the collection, and if necessary to exclude the miraculous, Jefferson would even cut the text in mid-verse.[2] Jefferson regarded the supernatural as unreasonable and absurd, and therefore as an obviously mistaken addition to the record of Jesus’ life and activities.
This is a very enlightened position, to be sure. The Jesus of Jefferson’s edition has a great deal to say, many words of wisdom to offer, much for us to consider at our leisure – on a Sunday morning, perhaps – and incorporate into our own philosophical postures. Like Jefferson, we might be interested in a pointer here or there from a famous man. We might even take Jesus seriously, given his notoriety and the wide dissemination of his teachings.
But neither the leader of the synagogue, nor the woman with the issue of blood, comes to Jesus seeking lofty words of wisdom. What they seek is his power.
In this morning’s passage from St Mark, we first hear about a Jewish notable who fell at Jesus’ feet in front of a large crowd, begging him for help. This is “a ruler of the synagogue;” it’s a member of the vestry, a person of importance. There were those among the authorities who dismissed Jesus as an impostor or worse, but there were also those who, when trouble brought them face to face with reality, could not help admitting our Lord’s power and authority over the forces of life and death, and appealing to that power. “My little daughter is at the point of death,” Jairus says. She is beyond the help of her own immune system, beyond the help of medical intervention; she is, therefore, beyond the help of any human assistance, beyond any earthly or natural actor. The man’s request attests to his believe that in Jesus there is a supernatural power, one which can only be derived from God, since it can (as he says) cause his daughter to “be made well, and live.”[3]
On the way to the house, as we heard also, the party is interrupted by a woman who had been suffering from a continuous hemorrhage – for twelve years. Like the man’s daughter, she too is beyond all natural and human possibility. In a particularly contemporary detail, we hear that she has been to every doctor there is, and that she has spent all of her money doing it. The only hope remaining for her rests with the God “who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist,” whom she sees manifested in Jesus, the hem of whose robe she reaches out in desperation to grasp.[4]
As we hear, she does exactly that, but the episode does not end there, as if Jesus were some kind of inert magic balm. He knows “immediately” what has happened; though he is besieged by a crowd, he is aware of a single touch, of the particular encounter with the woman, which completely baffles his disciples.[5] It stands to reason that the woman should then come forward in fear and trembling. It’s one thing to hope to be healed by an encounter with this divine man; it is quite another thing to be immediately and completely cured of a twelve-year-long ailment. And Jesus says to her, “your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.”[6]
The interpretation of the woman’s deed and healing in terms of faith provides the pivot back to our main story, of Jairus’ daughter. During the intervening episode, the man’s daughter has died. Unlike the woman with the hemorrhage, both the messenger who bring the news of death and those who gather around the man’s house, weeping, are without hope.[7] “Your daughter is dead; why trouble the Teacher any further?” By contrast with such hopelessness, the father is encouraged to have faith, like the woman, to “not fear, only believe.”[8]
At the very beginning of the gospel of Mark, those who witnessed Jesus’ dealings with demons were astonished at his authority over them.[9] Last week, we heard the disciples’ wonderment at Jesus’ calming of the storm: “Who then is this,” they said to themselves, “that even the wind and the sea obey him?”[10] And now we see that Jesus has power over even that final nemesis of humanity, which is death itself. The God who created life out of the void, the same God who is pleased to dwell in Jesus Christ, commands the little girl to live, and she lives.[11]
For most Christians, such reawakening as the daughter enjoyed will not come in the course of this world. But here, in order that the disciples – and that includes us – may believe, such new life is brought forward into human history, to be witnessed by a small group of faithful men and women who would understand and testify to its significance.[12]
It should go without saying that our long lesson this morning from the Gospel of St Mark is NOT included in what Jefferson called The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. In Jefferson’s edition, Jesus does not heal the sick, and he does not raise little girls from the dead. But that is an error on Mr. Jefferson’s part. Because what Jesus had to teach us was not only that we should love our neighbors as ourselves or that the meek shall inherit the earth. Everything our Lord said, and everything he did, every bit of his life and morals was designed to teach us the lesson of who he is.
I can assure you, that if Jesus Christ were no more than the passages contained in Jefferson’s text, none of us would ever have heard of him. Our Lord is the king of glory, the everlasting son of the Father, who, when he had overcome the sharpness of death, did open the kingdom of heaven to all believers. That teaching of the person and identity of Jesus Christ, that he is the one obeyed by demons, the winds and the seas, and even by death itself, that moral is the lens through which all others must always be read.
AMEN.
[1] Thomas Jefferson, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, Extracted textually from the Gospels in Greek, Latin, French, & English, 1820, National Museum of American History, PL.158231.
[2] Paul K. Conkin, “The Religious Pilgrimage of Thomas Jefferson,” in Jeffersonian Legacies, ed. Peter S. Onuf (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 40.
[3] Mark 5:23
[4] Romans 4:17
[5] Mark 5:31
[6] Mark 5:34
[7] “… as men without hope,” 1 Thessalonians 4:13
[8] Mark 5:36
[9] Mark 1:27
[10] Mark 4:41
[11] Colossians 1:19
[12] D.E. Nineham, Saint Mark (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1977), 158-60.