NewCreation

Homily for Sunday 13 in Ordinary Time Year B

Welcome, my sisters and brothers, to this, the homily for the 13th Sunday in Ordinary Time. We have one of the glorious passages from Mark's Gospel, one of the most beautiful and rich passages. It's simply wonderful that it's a passage for Pride Week, for reasons which I hope will become clear to you as I talk. But it's not an immediate continuation of last Sunday's Gospel. It's the continuation leaving out the incident of the Gerasene demoniac. Last week, remember, Jesus was in the boat and telling the wind and the sea to be still. After that he went to the land of the Gerasenes, performed a miracle and came back to the Jewish side. So here he is back on the Jewish side and we get this wonderful triptych. Two women who together represent the daughter of Zion, the one who is going to be married to the bridegroom. We have this wonderful diptych about the coming into the midst of the people of the great high priest who is also the one who is setting up the possibility of the marriage between the Lord and Zion, and how this breaks through all fear of death and impurity. The great things that kept people away from the Holy of Holies, such that only the high priest could go in, and only the high priest after he'd been separated from any sort of death and from any sort of impurity. Very high on the list of impurity, if you look at the relevant books, were different sorts of menstrual and other female bleeding, something particularly upsetting to the sense of purity and the sense of separateness. So let's follow the story. Jesus is teaching, a great crowd around him, he's in the boat, and one of the leaders of the synagogue — that's not a religious leader, that's the practical leader, this is, as it were, the parish council leader — he came, named Jairus, maybe a bearer of light, a bearer of enlightenment, came and when he saw him fell at his feet. Now, interesting: "fell at his feet" is a term used by Mark to refer to the demonized. The demonized fell at his feet; it was the demons that fell. So Jairus is not demonized, but interestingly Jairus seems to think that his daughter is. Jairus came and when he saw him fell at his feet and begged him repeatedly: "My little daughter" — and he uses the term "little daughter" even though she's 12, that's to say only half a year short of maturity as it was understood in that time. Twelve and a half: that was understood, you were menstrual by twelve and a half, marriageable by twelve and a half, you would start to reach maturity. So he's holding on to her as a little girl: "My little daughter is at the point of death, she's at her last literally — come and lay your hands on her so that she may be made well and live." In other words, he analyzes her as having some sort of evil spirit. Jesus appears to analyze her, as we will see, as having what we would now "call conversion symptoms" and we'll look at that, because it's a fascinating, fascinating account of what's going on. So he went with him. So Jesus is going with the parish council leader, remembering someone who would bring up his daughter in very strict separation from boys, and who's now coming terribly close to the moment when she is about to be marriageable. And as many, many young women in Middle Eastern society at that time — and maybe still, and in other societies — that is a real crisis point: the time when you can suddenly become marriageable, and perhaps you don't even have any choice about the matter, especially if you're in a religiously conservative household. Such as being in an archi-synagogue and synagogue leader's household, you're not going to choose; you're going to be forced to be married off. You're not sure whether you want to enter into that world. So developing a catatonic stupor and refusing to carry on living is a recognized conversion symptom under those circumstances. Others do the reverse. The reverse of this kind of anorexic shutdown is done by eating far too much, bloating — again, trying to avoid becoming marriageable. And a large crowd followed him and pressed in on him. Now there was a woman who'd been suffering from hemorrhages for 12 years. Okay, so here we have a mature woman — the one who'd been suffering from hemorrhages for 12 years. Very soon we will see that the little girl was 12. So that's very deliberate, Mark is showing. This woman for 12 years has been unable to be married, unable to enter into any sort of tactile relationship with anybody, because she is ritually impure constantly. She can't be made pure. She can't go to the synagogue, she can't marry, she can't have sex, she's untouchable — quite literally can't be touched because of her condition. She's tried the doctors, the doctors can't do anything about it, she's made herself poor in this way. "But she'd heard about Jesus and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, for she said, 'If I but touch his clothes I will be made well.'" And there are all sorts of references here to the garments of the Lord, the garments of prophets. The garment of Aaron was considered in some of the Targum to be the bearer of a healing unction, but the notion that if Jesus was a priest she couldn't possibly touch him, because that would be imparting impurity. But what we're going to discover is that something goes out of Jesus. "So immediately her hemorrhage stopped and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease." So she knows that it's happened; she knows that her flux, her inappropriate bleeding, has been stopped. "Immediately aware that power had gone forth from him." One of the things about the Hebrew understanding of holiness was that things that were holy, things that had been made holy, and there were things that imparted holiness. Of course, the one who imparted holiness was the Most High. In the most holy place, something had gone out from him and made her pure, made her holy. So power had gone out from him. In other words, this is not only a priest who could be polluted by being touched; this is the original, the definitive High Priest, the one who actually makes holy. Jesus turned to the crowd and said, "Who touched my clothes?" And his disciples said to him, "You see the crowd pressing you — how could you say, 'Who touched me'?" He looked all around to see who had done it. And it's interesting that in English we can't pick this up, but in Greek it's a feminine — to see who, feminine, had done it. In other words, he knew it was a woman. He knew that it was a woman who had done this, a woman who had had faith. But the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came in fear and trembling, fell down before him, and told him the whole truth. She didn't fall down and touch his feet; she fell down before him and told the whole truth. Now, please notice what's happening here. Jesus is in the midst of a crowd. He's with the leader of the synagogue, who's called him to lay hands on a daughter who he — the leader of the synagogue — thinks is suffering from some sort of evil spirit. And suddenly a woman comes and touches Jesus, which makes Jesus, from the point of view of the synagogue leader, impure. And yet she tells the whole truth. And Jesus says to her, "Daughter." He uses not the term "little girl"; he uses the term "daughter." "Your faith has made you well. Go in peace, and you will be healed of your disease." And he's not treating it as though he is a father; he's using the term "daughter" to indicate she is daughter of Zion. We'll see the importance of this — daughter of Zion, with a little girl — in just a second. While he was still speaking — so he's just made himself impure, if you're the synagogue leader, but he's told the woman that it's her faith that has made her whole; while she is now going to be marriageable, she's now able to enter into the marriage banquet between the Lord and Zion, what we call the marriage supper of the Lamb — while he was still speaking, some people came from the leader's house to say, "Your daughter is dead." Okay, so it's no longer a case of a spirit possession; she's dead. "Why trouble the teacher any further?" They call him "teacher." A bit of a — again, bit of a joke there — that's a downplay: "Don't bother the guru, don't bring him along, why trouble him any further?" But they're also saying, "Don't bring him into the house." The house is now an impure place, and of course he will be made impure if he comes into the house. But overhearing what they said, Jesus said to the leader of the synagogue, "Do not fear, only believe." Now, in other words, For Jesus to take the synagogue leader into the home, the synagogue leader is going to have to have believed what happened to the woman whom he would have barred from his synagogue, and agreed to go into his own home — which is now an impure place — with Jesus, in faith. It's faith that's going to make him whole. In other words, the woman cured from her bleeding is the example of faith that he's being asked to accept to go forward. It's the daughter of Zion who's at work here. He had no one to follow him except Peter, James, and John, the brother of James. In other words, he's not trying to do things to whip up a frenzy. When they came to the house of the leader of the synagogue, he saw a commotion, people weeping and wailing loudly. In other words, all the panoply of death. If there's one thing that always annoys Jesus, it's the panoply of death — people paying too much attention to death. The whole point of the Most High is that he knows not death, as it tells us in our first reading today. So when he had entered — noticing, he says, that when he had entered, he's gone into the house, he's not concerned about it being an impure place — "Why do you make a commotion and weep? The child is not dead but sleeping." In other words, you're even wrong that it's an impure place. He's sticking with what seems likely, and what very probably was the case: whether she was dead or not, that it was a catatonic stupor produced by conversion symptoms. It's perfectly possible she might be dead, might be a catatonic stupor, but he's saying she's not dead, she's merely asleep. And they laughed at him, reasonably enough. Then he put them all outside and took the child's father and mother and those who were with him — that's the three disciples, Peter, James, and John — and went in to where the child was. It says in our version "the last Greek text is where the child was laid," and the verb used for "laid" is very interesting, because it's a verb with two meanings. It can mean "was laid out," as a corpse is laid out — meaning that they'd washed her and laid her corpse out — or "was reclining," and the same verb is used to recline as at a banquet. In other words, it's a very, very clever use of a verb there, to indicate that both of those might be the case. Because after all, this is the one who had died just short of becoming marriageable, in just the same way as the other had been locked into an impossibility of marriage. He took her by the hand — which is always the sign of an invitation to marriage — and said to her, "Talitha," which is Aramaic, "little girl, arise." It's straight out of the Canticle, the Song of Solomon, the Canticle of Canticles: the daughter of Zion who has been told to arise because the bridegroom is coming. And immediately the girl got up and began to walk. about. She was 12 years of age. So here Mark tells us her age. Obviously this whole business of getting up, of growing up and becoming marriageable had been too much for her. It's stressful circumstances, a bound-down religious atmosphere, marriage impossibility, inability to flourish — all of that has been solved by the arrival of the bridegroom. "At this they were overcome with amazement. He strictly ordered them that no one should know this, and told them to give her something to eat." Why should no one know this? Well, because otherwise he would produce a rash of girls having fainting fits all over the territory if the promised bridegroom was going to come and free them from the threat of unwanted marriage. You can imagine the knock-on effect of that. And to give her something to eat — maybe because she had been anorexic and that was part of the problem, but in any case as part of the sign of the banquet that is to come. So in today's Gospel we have the bridegroom, the Lord, the high priest, come into the midst of the daughter of Zion to call her to life, to break through the fear of death and of blood, of impossibility and impurity, to bring to life impossibility and marriage — that is what the Lord comes to undo. A wonderful message for Pride Week. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.