Sunday, 27th June: Wisdom 1:13-15; 2:23-24 and Mark 5:21-43
Up until the first lockdown, to move through London was to move among the crowds: from the tube to the theatre, Soho to Southbank, commuting and culture, Kings Road to Kings Cross.
Perhaps we miss it, or dread it: the wave of bodies passing down a street - feet, trudging; shoulders bumping. The pace of urban proximity. A pace that can become a tide of hasty, preoccupied indifference; a sea of feet.
Today’s gospel takes us onto a crowded streets - the the ebb and flow of people and of power.
First we encounter Jairus. He’s a powerful man, a religious leader, but he has no power to save his daughter. In the midst of the crowd, in the midst of the clamour and pace, he falls to his knees at Jesus’ feet.
From his position of power, he reaches out in desperation. His daughter - who is growing to womanhood - is dying. He needs help and attention, hope and restored life.
Jesus says nothing: he simply goes with him.
And the crowds continue to press in; they move with the pace of urgent curiosity with Jairus and Jesus.
And there in the crowd is someone else whose need is great. A women who has lived with erratic and persistent bleeding for 12 years.
Mark’s description of her situation might echo many a menopause documentary: she’d endured; visited many physicians; had spent all she had; and felt worse rather than better. For as long as one daughter had lived, this middle-aged daughter had bleed; the one is on the cusp of adolescence, the other becoming infertile.
She’s been locked down by pain, discomfort and fatigue; her own menstrual cycles bound by the cycles of law and purity; her own social, spiritual and economic life, depleted.
She moving towards Jesus in the flow of people, with her flow of blood; longing for life-restoring power to flow into her to make her well.
We might read or hear her story as a moment of interruption or disruption whilst Jesus is on the way to someone else’s house. He’s going to a twelve year old daughter who’s dying, at the point of death or already dead.
Dare we pay some attention to this woman, to look her in the eye as she too reaches it out in need, in faith and in hope? Some commentators do treat her story with brevity: crediting her faith, pronouncing her cured; as her isolation ends, she can move on and so do we: and quickly.
Perhaps there is more to this: the stories of women’s bodies - bleeding and dying - are intertwined. Both of them are in violation of laws on purity; yet Jesus extends himself to them as he moves through the crowd.
On the way to restore the younger one, Jesus also restores the older other. The Father of the one, makes a public claim for Jesus’ attention; she reaches out in secretly, privately.
Amongst these moving feet, there is a flow of blood and a flow of power; a flow of hope and of new life. She felt in her body that she was healed; Jesus felt in his body that power had gone out from him.
They are both aware of their own embodiment, their own physical reactions.
This says something about who Jesus is: the fullness of his humanity but also the fullness of God dwelling in him. God abiding with us in flesh of our flesh.
Yet, this moment of need, of trust and of healing also becomes a public moment of recognition: she is to take heart for her faith has made her well; she becomes a witness to Jesus - as she tells of how she was healed, he affirms her testimony.
If we refuse to skip over this disruption, and instead pay attention to this woman, what do we find? There is no return to youthfulness or “normal” cycles of fertility; and yet, as her bleeding stops, she finds her voice. May be she joins the company of those who follow Jesus; may be she returns to her community.
Either way, she is no longer depleted but full of life.
Perhaps her body can speak to bodies going through the transition of the peri-menopause and the time when bleeding stops at the menopause. How does it allow us to talk about and inhabit women’s bodies in a hopeful way - enabling us to grieve for what might have been and embrace new life?
The wideness of God’s mercy in this moment is something that raise her up, allowing her to share the wisdom, presence and time of the matriarch
But we also become aware that a different sort of biological clock is ticking: the little girl has died.
The scene shifts dramatically. The crowd is now wailing: there is an intensity of commotion as we move towards loss and grief; the heart stopping moment of death.
And yet, here power pours forth. God in Jesus does not delight, as the book of wisdom puts it, in the death of the living.
Here, as he holds her hand there is a wholesome and generative force at work; as he breathes those words ‘Taliltha cum’, life is restored; for God has made us in the image of his own eternity.
For now, food is shared; life is renewed. It gives us hope, that in the bodies of these women, young and old, we are marked for resurrection rather than death.
The church too, as Christ’s body, is moved and changed by the power of Jesus: when we touch and taste and see the fragility of what is given; the power of what is poured out. This body given for us is a redeemed life of the flesh. In the Eucharist, the power of blood and love flow - a constituting and reconstituting memory of God’s character shared with us in death and resurrection.
Rachel Mann expresses this sacramental turn vividly: ‘in the eucharist we are sustained and renewed as we take God into our guts. To be members of the Body of Christ means that we are people of compassion - of gut and womb’. Wombs that bleed and birth and dry up and yet speak of new life.
In these bodies - menopausal and adolescent - there is an opening up perhaps the power and possibility of new life and wisdom which anticipates the resurrection.
What of those other bodies, those other daughters?
How often do we make eye contact with the person who’s made their home, pitched their tent, outside a tube station? Do we appreciate the small, but human scale, difference we make when we chat to a Big Issue vendor? Do we make time to give directions to someone who’s lost or confused about what bus to take?
May daughters of Zion rejoice: with healing, truth and justice, the kingdom comes.
Listen to The Porter's Gate: Daughters of Zion here
© Julie Gittoes 2021
