Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
30^th of June 2024

2 Corinthians 8:7-15
Mark 5:21-43

Today’s gospel story tells the well-known tales of the healing of the daughter of Jairus, and the healing of the woman with uncontrolled bleeding. The way the stories are told is an example of a ‘Markan sandwich’: we begin with Jairus; his story is interrupted by the healing of an unknown woman; and we then return to Jairus and see his plea being answered. The two sandwiched stories share key words: the twelve years of the woman’s bleeding and of the girl’s life; the daughter of Jairus and the woman addressed as ‘Daughter’ by Jesus; the faith of the woman that makes her well and Jesus’ demand of Jairus that he have faith; both healings occurring ‘instantly’. The shared language indicates that it is no mere accident of timing that the healing of the haemorrhaging woman interrupts the healing of Jairus’ daughter. Mark has placed the two stories together so that they can illuminate each other.

The first person to be healed in this story is a nameless woman. She has been bleeding for twelve years, so it may be that she has considered herself, and been considered by others, to have been ritually impure for those twelve years. No one has been able to touch her. She may once have been rich, but Mark tells us that she has spent all she had on useless doctors. She feels unable to approach Jesus directly, but instead tries to secretly touch his cloak. When she is discovered, she is afraid. In the society in which this woman lives, she is an outcast.

The second person to be healed is the daughter of Jairus. Unlike the woman, Jairus has a recognised role in the community. He approaches Jesus openly, although humbly, kneeling and begging Jesus for help. The ‘commotion of people’ mourning outside his house may have included professional mourners, which suggests that Jairus is well off. The woman and Jairus are united in their faith in Jesus, but they are divided by their gender and class. Jairus is an important man. The unnamed woman is marginalised and possibly unclean.

The story begins with Jairus’ request. If Jesus were sensible, he would hurry to Jairus’ house and cure his daughter, a child of privilege. Jesus does set off with Jairus. But he is then sidetracked by the need of a low-status woman. Jesus not only cures her of her bleeding; he welcomes her into his family, addressing her as ‘Daughter’. Jesus gives priority to the marginalised woman over the privileged man.

Last time I preached on this passage I pointed out that while Jairus’ daughter would have had privilege as the child of a respected and wealthy father, she is as nameless as the woman with the bleeding. She may also, like that woman, be considered unclean now that she has died. Jesus may be ‘defiling’ himself by touching her dead body, just as he was ‘defiled’ by being touched by the haemorrhaging woman. Three years ago I pointed out that the woman and the girl are connected in their need of Jesus and in their marginal status, and that Jesus crosses the boundaries between the sexes, and between the pure and impure, to touch them and heal them.

This time I want to focus on the differences between them, because in Jesus’ world, as in our own, women can be divided by class and wealth as well as be united by gender. The haemorrhaging woman is given the status of ‘daughter’ by Jesus when he addresses her, but the daughter of Jairus is already a daughter of the parents who love her and of Israel. Jesus’ healing is not giving her a new status; for the same twelve years in which the haemorrhaging woman has been isolated from her community and spending all she had, the daughter of Jairus has been, we can assume, enjoying a life of relative privilege. Jesus’ healing of her enables her to reclaim her old life, while we can hope that the haemorrhaging woman now goes forward into a completely new one.

Each ‘daughter’ receives from Jesus what it is they need. While the delay caused by healing the haemorrhaging woman makes it appear that Jairus’ request has been denied: ‘Your daughter is dead. Why trouble the teacher any further?’ both daughters are healed. The time and power Jesus gives to one is not taken from the other.

Having said that, it will not surprise you that I am now going to turn to today’s passage from Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians. The Apostle Paul, as you know, did not have a good relationship with the church in Corinth. The reason we have the absolutely beautiful reflection on what love is in Paul’s first surviving letter to the church (1 Corinthians 13) is that the Corinthians were demonstrating the opposite of the sort of love that is patient, kind, not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. Between the sending of that first letter and the sending of this one, things got worse. Paul visited the Corinthian church again, as he said that he would. (1 Corinthians 16:6) This was a ‘painful visit’. (2 Corinthians 2:1) Paul then wrote a letter ‘out of much distress and anguish of heart and with many tears, not to cause you pain, but to let you know the abundant love that I have for you’. (2 Corinthians 2:4) What we are hearing now is yet another letter, in which Paul promises to visit them again (2 Corinthians 12:14) and, in the meantime, distinguishes himself from those he calls ‘false apostles’ (2 Corinthians 11). In the passage we hear today, he also reminds the church in Corinth of a promise they have previously made – to support their fellow believers in Jerusalem.

At first, Paul tries to inspire the Corinthians by telling them how generous the church in Macedonia has been:

We want you to know, brothers and sisters, about the grace of God that has been granted to the churches of Macedonia; for during a severe ordeal of affliction, their abundant joy and their extreme poverty have overflowed in a wealth of generosity on their part. For, as I can testify, they voluntarily gave according to their means, and even beyond their means, begging us earnestly for the privilege of sharing in this ministry to the saints. (2 Corinthians 8:1-4)

We do not hear this part in the lectionary reading, probably because there is something unseemly in trying to inspire people to be generous in competition with others. Fortunately, this is not Paul’s only argument.

Why should the wealthy Gentile church in Corinth give a donation to the impoverished Jewish church in Jerusalem? Paul has several reasons. The first is as a response to the many gifts the Corinthians themselves have received: in faith, in speech, in knowledge, in utmost eagerness, and in Paul and Timothy’s love for them. To demonstrate that they also have the gift of generosity would simply make sense. This is because of the second reason Paul gives. The Corinthians have before them the greatest example of generosity, far beyond that of the Macedonian church – the generosity of Christ himself, who ‘though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich’.

Paul’s letter to the Corinthians reminds us that Christians are called to be generous, especially to other Christians. Being part of the body of Christ means sharing, which is why every week we offer to God a proportion of what we have, for the use of others who have less. To believe in Christ is to seek to be like Christ, and that requires a willingness to share.

Paul is much more realistic than Jesus himself was. Jesus told the man who asked him what he must do to inherit eternal life to: ‘Go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.’ (Mark 10:17-22) Paul does not want the Corinthians to give all that they own to the members of the church in Jerusalem; he wants them to share. ‘I do not mean that there should be relief for others and pressure on you, but it is a question of a fair balance between your present abundance and their need, so that their abundance may be for your need, in order that there may be a fair balance.’ The aim is not to replace the rich and poor with the poor and rich. The aim is a balance in which one group’s need is relieved by another group’s abundance. Paul then quotes the story of the bread from heaven and the quails in the wilderness to support his argument. (Exodus 16)

We are lucky to live in the sort of modern country in which a lot of sharing of abundance and fulfilling needs is done through a taxation system. We may complain about paying taxes, but I do not think that any of us would want to go back to the days when only the wealthy were able to receive an education, or be treated in a hospital, or even have a decent sanitation system, while those without wealth simply had to hope that the Ebenezer Scrooges of the world would ‘make some slight provision for the poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time.’[1] But no taxation system is perfect, and it does not require, for instance, that wealthy churches share that wealth with their poorer church siblings. The genuineness of our love still needs to be tested by our willingness to share what we have, when we have an abundance, and by our willingness to accept the help that we need when that is our part to play.

Jesus healed both the poor marginalised woman and the child of privilege. Taking the time to heal the one did not deprive the other of help. Similarly, imitating our Lord Jesus Christ means both giving and receiving, so that the one who has much does not have too much, and the one who has little does not have too little. This should not be hard for us to do, since the Apostle Paul is so clear that our gifts are acceptable according to what we have, not according to what we do not have. He seems to have convinced the Corinthians, in his Letter to the Romans he writes:

… I am going to Jerusalem in a ministry to the saints; for Macedonia and Achaia have been pleased to share their resources with the poor among the saints at Jerusalem. They were pleased to do this, and indeed they owe it to them; for if the Gentiles have come to share in their spiritual blessings, they ought also to be of service to them in material things. (Romans 15:25-27)

Achaia was the Roman province in southern Greece which included Corinth, so we can assume that the church in Corinth had contributed to Paul’s collection for the saints. Let us imitate those badly behaving Corinthians in our generosity, so that our love may truly be genuine.

[1] Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (1843).