Hilton Head Island, SC – March 10, 2013
The Chapel Without Walls
Luke 8:40-48; Luke 8:49-56
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – And a woman who had a flow of blood for twelve years and could not be healed by anyone, came up behind him, and touched the hem of his garment, and immediately her flow of blood ceased. – Luke 8:43-44 (RSV)
4) THE ANSWER TO BEING AN OUTSIDER
In today’s Gospel readings, we have two healing narratives. First, we are told that there was an important member of a Galilean synagogue, perhaps in the town of Capernaum, whose young daughter was dying. He came to Jesus asking that Jesus come to his home to see if Jesus could help her. On the way there, a woman with a uniquely devastating health problem came up and touched Jesus’ robe, and immediately she was healed. We shall look first at the woman’s situation, and later at the circumstances of the young girl.
According to the Book of Acts, Luke, the writer of both the Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts, was a physician. That doesn’t mean he had the astonishing bag of tricks which a contemporary doctor has, but he was trained to administer whatever medical assistance was available in the first century, which probably wasn’t very much. However, because Luke was a doctor, he seemed especially interested in the details of many of Jesus’ healing miracles. We get a hint of that in the narrative about the woman with the – quote – “flow of blood.”
Luke doesn’t tell us precisely the nature of this continuous hemorrhage. Because he deliberately avoids telling us what it was, we can infer its likely origin. It was gynecological.
I am not going into any more the particulars of this case than Luke did, because he may not have known the specific physical cause, and I certainly don’t know it. However, 21st century Christians need to understand why this Jewish lady had an enormous religious and social problem. We cannot appreciate what happened in this healing narrative without understanding why her condition was so disastrous for her.
According to the Torah, the law code of the Hebrew Bible, during the few days of the month when a woman was menstruating, she was considered ritually unclean. She was forbidden to engage in sex with her husband, and she was also supposed to stay away from everyone else. For lack of time, and to maintain a bit of homiletical decorum, I won’t go into the other prohibitions she faced because of this, but suffice it to say she was something of a persona non grata for those few days every month. Nevertheless, it is yet another example of how biblical males made life even more difficult for females by treating them like pariahs because of a very a natural and necessary reality for the perpetuation of the human race. What can I say: Ladies, you must keep your eyes on the men, because they will thrust you into an inferior status in every way possible. Males are a most dubious sex, and don’t you forget it.
With all that delicate beating around the bush, can you imagine what life was like for this particular woman? She didn’t have a periodic gynecological problem; she had a permanent gynecological problem. I have no idea how she could be faced with such an affliction, but face it she did. And because of the structural conservatism of first century Jewish society, she was forced to face it alone. No man would marry her, for obvious reasons, and because they were ashamed, her family had probably given up on her as well. So she was virtually an outcast. Perhaps even her mother or sisters or aunts or female cousins would have nothing to do with her. And the worst of it all is that she had done nothing whatever to deserve this treatment.
With that as background, now we can better comprehend why she did what she did. When she saw Jesus, there was a large crowd following him, as there seemed to be much of the time during his three years in the Galilee. Obviously she was not about to come up to him and say, “Jesus, I have this unique female condition, and I’d like you to fix it for me.” Apparently she knew something about Jesus’ power to heal, however, so she thought to herself, “Perhaps if I just touch the fringe of his prayer shawl, I will be made well.” What a blessing that would be! She who had been an outsider for her whole adult life would finally be welcomed into the House of Israel as a proper Jewish woman!
Luke tells the incident with the shortest of descriptions: “And immediately her flow of blood ceased.” Immediately! Instantaneously! Her status as a social and religious pariah was over! Free at last, free at last; praise God Almighty, she was free at last!
No sooner did she realize her hemorrhage had abated that Jesus loudly asked, “Who touched me?” The disciples said to him, “Master, the crowd is pressing in on you; many people have touched you. What difference does it make?” But Jesus knew that healing power had somehow left him, and he wanted to know why. He wasn’t angry; he just wondered who it was who had touched him and had been healed of an infirmity.
With this the woman fell at Jesus’ feet, telling him and everyone else that she had been instantly healed. Since many people presumably knew her, they also knew what her situation was, so the secret was out. Rather than scold her, or tell her it wasn’t fair for her to presume on his miraculous powers, he said, as he so often said after this kind of episode, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace.”
None of us is really capable of feeling the gratitude and relief and love that woman felt, because we simply do not live in the kind of restrictive society in which she found herself so unjustly imprisoned. But we may be certain that for her, from that day forward life became infinitely richer and fuller, and all because she merely touched the fringe of Jesus’ garment.
The answer to being an outsider is to become an insider. This Jesus did for her, as he would do for all others who found themselves outsiders looking in. No one is permanently excluded by God or Jesus; no one. That is the good News of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Everyone is welcomed in.
Most of the people of Hilton Head Island and Bluffton are non-natives. We weren’t born here. There are three kinds of outsiders who come here: older people who come in retirement, younger people who come here to work, and the children of those younger people. Some people probably underestimate how much income is required to live in a community as affluent as this one, and once they’re here, they may feel like outsiders. God will not miraculously drop some money down a divine funds funnel, but He can and will help all of us believe we too fit in, even if we are not on a fiscal par with many of our friends and neighbors. Being either an outsider or an insider is often just a matter of what goes on between our ears anyway.
Genuinely hospitable people always welcome outsiders in. Jesus was unusually hospitable, especially to those who were religious or social outcasts. His heart reached out to such folks, because he knew how excluded they felt. No doubt he himself also felt like that at times, so he knew how much they longed to be accepted into the inner circle of Judean life.
I confess that I have never really felt like an outsider. Our family moved several times when I was a child, but I always managed to make friends quickly. Maybe that was because I was the last of four sons. I always forced my way into my brothers’ activities and friendships, subconsciously thinking, I suppose, that if I didn’t, I would forever be an outsider. My sister-in-law has reminded me many times of a situation regarding my proclivity to shove my way into other people’s lives. When I was about ten, my oldest brother enlisted in the Navy, and when he came home on his first furlough, after having been gone for a year, he said he was going to take Marilyn for a ride. I instantly said I would go along, so Bob and I went to get her. I being I, and therefore dense, I sat between Bob and Marilyn as we went for our spin. She had pictured a romantic drive around town snuggled up to the man she was going to marry, but there was his little brother sitting between them, oblivious to the disappointment he had prompted in his future sister-in-law. Frankly, I remember none of this, but if Marilyn said it happened, I’m sure it did.
Insiders often take their status for granted, but outsiders deeply feel their status. If you carefully read the Gospels, you will discover that many of the people whom Jesus sought out or who sought out Jesus were outsiders. Their behavior or social class or religious inferiority or physical infirmities put them on the outside looking in. They knew it, and Jesus knew it. Therefore he went out of his way to demonstrate that they too were beloved sons and daughters of God, and that God would not abandon them, even though they felt everyone had done so.
At the beginning of this sermon, I said there were two healing narratives associated with this one episode. The second one came in the middle of the first one. Now to the first we return. We are told that a ruler of a synagogue came and fell at Jesus’ feet, begging him to come to see if he could help his young daughter, who was dying. It was on the way to Jairus’ house that Jesus healed the woman with the hemorrhage. Immediately afterward, people came from Jairus’ home to tell him that his daughter had died. But Jesus said to Jairus, “Do not fear; only believe, and she shall be well.” When they got to the house, Peter, John, James, and the girl’s parents came in with Jesus. Everyone knew the girl had died, but Jesus told them she hadn’t. Listen to how Luke describes it: “But taking her by the hand, Jesus called, saying, ‘Child, arise.’ And her spirit returned, and she got up at once” (Luke 8:54-55).
This is an amazing story. But there is an important added detail in Mark’s account of this same incident. Tradition says that Peter told Mark the stories about Jesus, and Mark wrote them down, because Peter could not read or write. When Peter was recalling this narrative to Mark, he remembered exactly what Jesus said when he brought the child back to life. Jesus did not speak Hebrew as such. Instead he and his disciples spoke Aramaic, which is a closely related Semitic language. Therefore Peter, remembering this astonishing account from so many years earlier, quoted exactly the Aramaic words which Jesus uttered: “Talitha cumi,” which means, “Little girl, arise.” That very specific memory has always struck me as a vital authenticating detail that indicates this episode from the life of Jesus happened exactly as Peter, via Mark, reported it. Talitha cumi, Talitha cumi. We can all remember events from our own lives where someone said something we shall never forget, and Peter would never forget Jairus’ daughter and what Jesus said to her.
Many Negro spirituals address the issue of being outsiders. “Deep river, my home is over Jordan.” “Swing low, sweet chariot, comin’ for to carry me home.” Many slaves not ever having had proper shoes, they sang, “I got shoes, you got shoes, all God’s children got shoes. When I get to heaven, gonna put on my shoes, gonna walk all over God’s heaven.” Cowboy songs often expressed the same theme, because cowboys were essentially outsiders. “O give me a home where the buffalo roam, where the deer and the antelope play.” When they were driving cattle, cowboys were painfully aware they had no place to call home. “When I was out walking the streets of Laredo, when I was out walking Laredo one day, I spied a young cowboy all dressed in white linen, dressed in white linen and riding away.” It was a vision of a dead cowboy, riding home to heaven.
Perhaps people who feel themselves to be outsiders want more than anything else to be insiders, to come in from the cold which has frozen them out of the warmth they know exists in the inner circle. The answer to being an outsider is to become an insider. Jesus did that for many of the people whose stories are recorded in the Gospels. The Gospel is Good News to everyone, but especially to those who have always seen themselves to be permanently on the outside.
The story of the raising of Jairus’ daughter from death is a prelude to The Story, to the Christian Story. The most astounding claim of the Christian Gospel is this: Though we all shall die, yet, afterwards, shall all of us live. The life of Jesus leads inexorably to the death and resurrection of Jesus. He died, but God raised him from the dead. We shall die, but God also shall raise us from the dead. The story of Jairus’ daughter comes early in the Gospel, in Mark 5 and in Luke 8. It is a preview of what is coming later on Easter.
Death puts all of us ultimately outside. No one can be more outside this world than when we die. We are gone forever. Except, if the Gospel is to be believed, we aren’t gone! To human sight and sound and sense we are gone, but not to God! No one is outside God’s love, and therefore no one is ultimately an outsider. We are all in. Talitha cumi; Little girl, arise. Young man, middle-ager, old man, old woman, arise; come in. Don’t stay outside. Don’t stay dead, live again. Live inside!
Our last hymn was my father’s favorite hymn. I don’t know why; it certainly isn’t a well known hymn. I can’t ever imagine anyone ever liking unfamiliar hymns; can you? It somehow seems so unnatural. But there it is; it was Dad’s favorite out of many hundreds of hymns.
The poem, or text, for “Immortal Love, forever full” was written by one of America’s best known poets, John Greenleaf Whittier. I chose it to close this service because of a phrase I remembered from the hymn: “We touch him in life’s throng and press/ And we are whole again.” Surely Whittier was thinking about the woman who touched Jesus’ robe in the midst of the crowd. Maybe I also inherited an ability to recall useful bits of poetry from my father. If so, for that, as for many other things, I shall be grateful as long as I shall live.
There is only one answer to being an outsider. It is to become an insider.