Both of today’s gospel stories – the one about the little girl Jesus
brought back from the dead and the one about the woman who suffered from
the hemorrhages – are perfect illustrations of the teaching set forth in
the first reading from the Book of Wisdom: that God is on the side of
life, not death. It’s a teaching that may not be all that apparent to us
since we so often have to deal with death. It’s all around us, isn’t it?
We can never escape it - the death of a loved one, the sudden tragic
deaths in that building collapse in Florida, the death that comes from
natural disasters, the death brought about by war and poverty, and
sometimes by nothing other than the sheer human perversity that is so
evident in mass shootings and all the senseless gun violence.
Death in all its many manifestations makes it
difficult for us to affirm, along with the writer of the Book of Wisdom
- and with the witness of the scriptures reaching all the way back to
Genesis - that God the creator, the source and fountain of all life, is
always on the side of life, never of death; that death, which made its
entrance into the world through what the reading from Wisdom called “the
envy of the devil” – is the very opposite of what God is about. Sadly,
however, we humans often put ourselves on the side of death by our pride
and arrogance.
Jesus came in order to turn all this around. In
the two stories from Mark’s gospel, death and life come face to face in
the ministry of Jesus and in each case, it’s life that gets the last
word, not death. There is simply no contest.
Take the woman who had suffered from
hemorrhages. She was as good as dead. Mark tells us that she had “been
afflicted for twelve years, suffered greatly at the hands of many
doctors, spent all she had, yet was not helped, but only grew worse.”
little aside: with all due respect for any of you who are physicians, I
think Mark was having a little fun here at the expense of doctors. He
was poking fun at them because they don’t always have all the answers.
The reason I say that is that, when Luke tells this same story in his
gospel – Luke, the physician – he doesn’t say a word about all the money
wasted on doctors…!
I won’t belabor the point. It’s enough to
observe that the poor woman was in dire straits. But she had one thing
going for her: her faith. She had heard about Jesus and his healing
powers and she believed that if she could just touch the hem of his
garment she would be healed. And she was right. Her flow of blood dried
up the moment she did.
But the story didn’t end there, did it! The
healing would have been enough, but she also got an encounter with Jesus
who clearly wanted this to be more than just an anonymous display of his
power. The woman must have been frightened to death when Jesus asked who
it was who had touched him, but he quickly put her at ease and in their
brief encounter, he opened up for her a whole new horizon. He not only
told her that it was her faith that had saved her, he also called her
“daughter.” That’s significant because that’s the only time in all
Mark’s gospel that Jesus uses language like that. In calling her
‘daughter,’ Jesus was telling her that she was one of his very own, he
was making her part of his family. He was telling her that the life she
received from him was the same life he received from his Father.
But there is even more here: if this woman was
‘family’ to Jesus, that makes her ‘family’ to each of us who reach out
to him for help, knowing that in touching him, we are touching life.
And now to the other story – the one about the
little girl, daughter of Jairus, the synagogue official. It’s a life and
death story, too. But unlike the woman with the hemorrhage who was as
good as dead, this little girl apparently was dead when Jesus finally
arrived at the house. The people were weeping and wailing loudly, and
when Jesus told them the girl was asleep, not dead, their weeping and
wailing turned to derisive laughter. They ridiculed him, we are
told. Jesus was unfazed. Serenely in charge, he gently took the little
girl by the hand and told her to get up. Did you notice that in this
story, much like in the story of the woman with the hemorrhages, the
healing – the meeting of life with death – involved touch? The woman
touched the hem of Jesus’ garment; Jesus took the little girl by the
hand. A word from him would have sufficed but no, we got both: word and
touch.
My friends in Christ, that healing touch of
Jesus and his encouraging word are not only to be found in the pages of
the gospels; they are ours for the taking in the sacramental life of the
Church. We encounter both every time we celebrate or receive one of the
sacraments. In the sacraments there is always touch and there are always
words: from the flowing water and words of Baptism, to the breaking of
the Bread in the Eucharist, to the laying on of hands in Reconciliation,
Confirmation and Ordination, to the Anointing of the Sick, to the
joining of hands in Matrimony – there is always touch and there are
always words. And both become channels of life – both become paths to
life – amazing gifts from the God who did not make death and who, in
Jesus, always leads us to life, new and abundant life!
That life is ours for the taking today and
every day when we come forward to receive the Body and Blood of Christ
in the Eucharist!
Father Michael G. Ryan
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