Seen and Heard and Healed

II Corinthians 8:7-15    Mark 5:21-43

June 28, 2009

A family was eating out - the whole gang of them from the grandparents on down to the youngest child, a little girl who was about 5 years old.  The waitress came to take their orders, working her way around the table from Grandma and Grandpa to Mom and Dad and Aunt and Uncle, and finally the children.  When it was her turn, the little girl told the waitress she wanted a hot dog, french fries and green beans.  Her mom chimed in at that point, saying, “she will take the chicken with mashed potatoes and peas.”  The waitress wrote on her pad, then turned to face the little girl and asked, “Do you want mustard or ketchup on your hot dog?” “Wow!” said the little girl to her family after the waitress left, “she thinks I’m real!”

One of the things I love most about Jesus is that he saw absolutely everyone as “real.”  He saw people for who they really were, not for who other people assumed them might be, not for who they must be based on their occupation or their class or their gender or age.  Jesus took each person at face value as a person of value.  Often, Jesus saw people that others didn’t even notice.  The disciples thought he was crazy when he asked who touched him in the midst of that great crowd of people.  He had to be kidding! they thought.  There were so many people pushing at them from every side, how could he possibly determine that someone had touched him on purpose?  How could he know that they had touched him with intention?  The scripture says, “At once he felt his power go out from him.”  Wow.  He knew.  He not only knew that someone had touched him with a request in their hands, but he also knew his own body well enough to know that he had already responded to them with what they needed.  His body was so tuned into healing and was so much a part of his compassionate way of being in the world, that he felt his body respond without having to consciously do anything.

The healing techniques I have been studying for the past few years encourage us to see ourselves as being “a hollow reed” through which healing might happen.  We are taught to allow healing to come through us, but not to imagine that we are in any way responsible for the healing nor in control of it.  We are merely willing participants in a sacred process.  I say “merely,” because there is a strange sense in which we are totally involved and necessary to the healing process and yet we are also absolutely replaceable by any other willing and open party.  When I participate in a healing, I am always amazed at the results - not always what we may have hoped for or desired, but still a healing that touches hearts and minds and lives.  I am also still new to the process, and so I don’t always know if anything is really happening.  I don’t always trust the process, nor my role in it.  So, when I read this story about Jesus allowing the healing of the woman with the blood flow, I can tell just how powerfully he was in tune with the healing that came through him.

Immediately after this, he is confronted by people who have come to say it is too late for him to heal Jairus’ daughter.  “She is dead.  You may as well turn around.  There is no reason to come anymore.” But Jesus brushes them aside, and their tragic news as well.  “She is only sleeping,” he says.  But when he arrives at her home, he tells most of the crowd to stay out of the room.  He goes in with only her parents and a few disciples.  He doesn’t do anything fancy once he gets to her bedside, either.  All he does is take her by the hand and encourage her to get up.  She does, and her parents are overjoyed.  The others outside, who had already started their mourning, must have been shocked when they found out.  They didn’t know quite what to think about this man who could raise the dead.  It seemed like a miracle, and yet why would he do this for a mere girl child?  Why would he do this for one of the rulers of the synagogue, who had not exactly been welcoming of him?

My response is that Jesus did it because he saw Jairus as well as his daughter as people of value - even if he and Jairus did not see eye to eye on spiritual matters and even if the child was a mere girl and as such not held in high regard by her society.  The woman he healed on his way over to Jairus’ house was also someone that folks would have whispered and wondered about as well.  Because she was bleeding she would have been considered unclean, but Jesus didn’t see her that way.  He saw her primarily as a child of God who was hurting.  He recognized her as a person in need of healing and in need of love.  Just the fact that Jesus did not chastise the woman for touching him was a gift in and of itself.  She had spent so much of her life shut away from other people, shut off from being able to live a normal life, that Jesus treating her with respect was in and of itself almost enough to heal what was most hurting in her.  

Most people in the medical profession these days recognize that it takes more than the right drugs or surgery to heal a person.  Healing needs roots that reach deep down into the depths of a person’s being and finds good soil with plenty of nourishment.  Many years ago now, when I was a new pastor, a woman in my church was hospitalized.  The medical staff was doing all they could to deal with whatever was wrong with her, but her symptoms didn’t really reflect a true underlying condition.  In essence, the people who knew her knew that she was sick because her son had just died and she didn’t want to live anymore.  Once, when I was visiting her in the hospital, a nurse met me in the hallway and asked if there was anything I could do or think of for them to do because it was obvious that the patient simply did not have the will to survive even though she had no real illness or disease.  They knew that she would die unless we could convince her to choose to live.  In the end, we couldn’t convince her that life was worth living and she died of symptoms eerily similar to those that her son died of, although his symptoms related to a diagnosable condition and hers did not.  The roots for healing were not present in this woman, and so even with the best medical care possible, she did not survive.  She just couldn’t do it.  I have heard equally puzzling stories about people who should have died, at least according to the best medical prognosticating available, and yet they survived and even thrived, eventually showing no more signs of the disease that had once threatened their lives.  

There is an awful lot of pain in the world today, a lot of pain that is in need of healing.  When the pain is left uncared for and the wounds fester, the situation worsens.  Aesop’s fable about the lion who was mean and ornery until a mouse pulled the thorn from his paw expresses the long-held wisdom that tells us if a person is in pain, they will lash out and cause all sorts of problems.  Sometimes dealing honestly with the smallest, seemingly most insignificant problem can open the door to amazing possibilities for reconciliation and healing.  This works for individuals as well as for communities, and even countries.  I sometimes wonder what might happen if we started paying more attention to the pain that other folks are feeling rather than focusing solely on protecting ourselves from the visible results of that pain.  I wonder what would happen if we all worked on seeing the folks that are all too easy to walk past on the street or to ignore in the community.  If we faced the pain we see in others and the pain we feel in ourselves, healing would be far more likely.  If we acknowledged and showed respect to each and every person with whom we come into contact, the healing would have a chance to stretch out beyond the personal to the communal and eventually the world level.  It really does start with the smallest things we do for one another, as small as looking into another person’s eyes.  Jesus knew this and lived according to it.  As Jesus people, we need to live by it and act on it too.

Jesus, healer of our souls, we ask you to help us reach out and be a healing influence in the world around us.  May we see one another, truly see one another.  In your name and through your eyes, Amen.