Today’s readings: Wisdom 1, 13-15; 2, 23-24; 2 Corinthians 8, 7.9.13-15; Mark 5, 21-43
In the entire gospel journey, it recurs very often that Jesus was contesting the religious framework of Judaism. In order to be a religion worth its name and really enabling people’s way to God, Judaism had to embrace the faith of the kingdom. Otherwise it was doomed to irrelevance. Whenever religion closes in on itself and puts priority on its rules at the cost of people, then it stops serving its purpose and is no longer useful.
This is what basically transpires about Judaism from today’s Wisdom reading and from the gospel stories. At the time of Jesus, false conceptions were still being perpetuated and Jesus wanted to correct them. “Death was not God’s doing,” affirms the book of Wisdom. And in the double healing narrative, Mark confirms that love is stronger than death. This is what religion should be about.
The healing of Jairus’s daughter, framed around the healing of the woman with blood flow, also addresses class status as upheld by Judaism. Mark portrays the two main characters in this episode as archetypical opposites in terms of status, one being a synagogue ruler and the other an anonymous woman who simply reaches out from the crowd.
Both the woman, who had suffered for 12 years, and the 12-year-old daughter of Jairus, were dead, the former socially, the latter physically. In both cases, Jesus is the restorer of life.
Perhaps the saying from Wisdom that God made everything to exist, that mostly needs to be reaffirmed today. God is still too much blamed for being too tolerant and for being weak in the face of death, suffering and violence. But in many cases, religion is mainly to blame for the misconceptions that unfortunately continue to be perpetuated in the popular perception.
We find it even in ancient and rich religious traditions that life is simply endured and that for the religious man, leaving this life should be desirable. This is corrected in today’s scriptures. Life is a gift and God takes no pleasure in the extinction of the living. Jesus himself in the New Testament is presented as the antidote to what Wisdom in the Old calls the “fatal poison”.
In the gospel of Mark, the restoration of bodily wholeness is of utmost importance and characterises the entire Jesus mission. The woman, who by the nature of her condition was perpetually segregated, is restored to social as well as physical wholeness. She is even given priority by Jesus over the request of the synagogue leader.
The God we need to proclaim today is a lover of life. If there is a God, if life is born out of His love, then our living and dying should make perfect sense. As believers in Jesus Christ, we hold fast to the truth of his word and to his loving presence as coextensive to all ages, not only to his days in Palestine.
He himself, moving steadily towards his own death, feared death as something horrific and unnatural. Because death is always the negative side of life, that which should have not existed. The stories we read from Mark today give us an insight into the mystery of Jesus and call on us to question seriously the depth of our faith and religion.
It is a double call: not to fear and to keep the faith. Even in our faith communities we can easily be carried away by the general sensation and attitude that is dominating our culture today. We can become cynical in the face of life’s issues or sceptic when it comes to really experiencing the power of the risen Lord who still works miracles.
If only we still, like the anonymous woman with the incurable haemorrhage, we can conserve in the depths of our hearts the dream that Jesus can cure us. She believed that touching his clothes would be enough. Such was the quality of her desperation. But that was also the depth of her faith. And she was granted what she had hoped for.