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I hate being late. I think it’s disrespectful to whomever I’m meeting with. The delay is frequently the time it takes to bribe our dog to get out of the garden, with whatever item it’s just pinched and knows it shouldn’t have, and back into the house before we can leave. But it could also be unplanned or unpredictable interruptions. Either way, it puts me on edge.

How well do you cope with being interrupted? Do you manage to serenely glide through the unexpected, seemingly unperturbed? Or do you start to panic, ever such a little, if your carefully laid plans start to unravel? I won’t ask which of those you are – but perhaps I’ll ask those closest to you instead!

My work

The Dutch priest and theologian, Henri Nouwen, wrote: ‘… my whole life I have been complaining that my work was constantly interrupted, until I discovered that my interruptions were my work.’

Will Willimon, retired United Methodist Church bishop, said this about our Gospel passage today: ‘Having witnessed a healing and a resurrection, I am dying to get back to my study and write a sermon. As I pack up my books, already composing the sermon outline in my mind, Jesus stops me and says, “Forget the sermon. Get in the kitchen. Give the girl something to eat.” When you’re trying to keep up with Jesus, things never go quite as planned.’

Set-piece

There are many possible ways of looking at our Gospel reading today. Firstly, it’s part of a big miracle set-piece by Mark. If you follow the Lectionary, then last week we saw Jesus stilling a storm. Later he restores a man afflicted by a legion of spirits. Now we have the healing of a woman who has bled incessantly for 12 years – and the bringing back to life of Jairus’s daughter. Jesus can calm the forces of nature – and he can do the same to the mental and physical health of human beings. Nothing, it seems, can resist the rule of God embodied in Jesus.

Until, that is, we get to the next chapter of Mark, when Jesus goes home. Mark tells us: ‘He could do no deed of power there’ because of their unbelief. So, a theme for today could have been faith. Jairus and the woman with the haemorrhage showed their faith before the healing. The man with the demons showed his faith after the healing. The disciples showed their lack of faith when they were afraid in the boat. We could learn much about faith by looking at each of these stories in context.

Purity

Or should we think today about purity? In this chapter, Jesus, the Jew, first goes into unclean Gentile territory, encounters unclean spirits which he drives into an unclean herd of pigs. Then he is touched by a woman made unclean by a continuous flow of blood. Then he takes a dead girl by the hand, making himself unclean in the process. On the face of it, it’s pretty much a job-lot of ritual uncleanness. Yet Jesus brings life-giving power to them all, removing and over-coming the uncleanness. ‘The politics of purity replaced by compassion’, as one author puts it.

But I don’t think that’s the point here. The purity laws were really to protect the holy, sacred, places within the Temple in Jerusalem. Our action takes place in Galilee, which is several days journey away. If Jesus is rendered unclean, then so what? He’s not going to the sanctuary in Jerusalem any time soon. But more telling is that the crowd don’t keep their distance from the woman with the bleed. In a small, tight-knit, community she would have been well-known before the encounter with Jesus. If the locals weren’t bothered, then should we be? Surely the more important point is that the sick and the dead are now well and alive.

Pre-figure

Or should we go a bit left-field and say something about how these stories of the woman and the girl show a pre-figuring of Jesus’ own suffering, death and resurrection? Mark describes the suffering of the woman using some very particular Greek words that he only uses elsewhere about the suffering of Jesus (8:31, 9:12). Mark only refers to blood twice – here and in reference to Jesus (14:24). The woman is said to tell the truth, again, in a way only used elsewhere about Jesus (12:14, 32).

And the story of Jairus’ daughter has references to death, weeping, mocking, then the dead raised and the great astonishment of the onlookers (5:42 and 16:8). Do you see any echoes here of another death and resurrection? That of Jesus himself?

Courage

Perhaps we should look at the importance of touch in these stories? Or do we talk about how the woman finds the courage and faith to take matters into her own hands, after years of not just suffering from the illness itself but also suffering from the treatment given to her by the doctors too. She bravely takes responsibility. She reaches out to claim her healing.

But then she shows courage a second time when Jesus asks who touches him. In fear and trembling, she risks public rejection by owning-up – yet instead she gets an affirmation. And, so, the healing happens twice – once physically through her touch and the second, more holistically, through her telling the whole truth. Jesus affirms her role in the healing. The story might encourage us to act courageously on our own behalf – and to support others as they struggle for healing and wholeness. To tell the truth and to see what happens next.

Wrapped around

All of these are possible approaches for today’s reading and perhaps one or more of these speaks to you? Meets you at a point of need. But, having been distracted by all these other possible approaches, I want to focus on where I started, with interruptions. Our Gospel has two stories, one wrapped around the other. One healing interrupted by another.

In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus is often interrupted. Here he’s on his way to help Jairus, a prominent local religious official who is desperate enough to fall to his knees in front of Jesus and all the people and plead for his daughter. The man is high-status and important enough to be named. But on the way through the crowd to the house of Jairus, as the people press in on him, Jesus allows himself to be stopped by someone at the other end of the social spectrum. A nameless woman made destitute by her illness. Her touch was enough to heal – job done you’d think – yet Jesus stops to talk and to restore her to the community. He stops.

Anxious

You can feel the disciples, and almost certainly Jairus, getting increasingly more anxious as Jesus asks: ‘Who touched me?’ It reminds me of God in the Garden of Eden: ‘Where are you?’ and God to Cain: ‘Where is your brother?’ God already knew the answers but, in those instances, he didn’t get the entire truth in reply. There were snatches of truth. Evasions of truth. But here we’re told the woman gives the whole truth. Jesus gives the nameless woman a voice. A chance to speak her truth.

Jesus says to her: “your faith has made you well”. Last week he said to the disciples, when they were in the boat, that they were “without faith”. In his acknowledgement of her, the older woman herself becomes the ‘daughter’ at the centre of the story. And she’s told to go in peace. To go in shalom.

Perhaps the ‘whole truth’ that she has to tell was a long story, for in that delay Jairus’s daughter dies. Jesus restores that daughter too. A daughter born 12 years before, at the start of the woman’s illness. Both, now, back to health. And he restores the girl to the family circle. This is no ghost & she needs food!

Intertwining

Two healings, two individual stories, become bound together. An interruption becomes an intertwining. A bigger story made more whole than the sum of its parts. And, in listening to it, our own stories, stories which are still being told, join with it.

Jesus’ compassion is indiscriminate. How often do we inadvertently discriminate? How often do we not stop to give time to someone because we’re on our way somewhere else? Somewhere else which we think is more important? By doing so are we denying that person the chance to tell their truth? Denying their restoration, their peace, their shalom?

Decide how to respond

It seems a distant memory now, but I wonder if we thought about covid and lock-down as an ‘interruption’. Did we hurry on when it was all over, annoyed at the delay to our ‘normal’ lives, on our way back to however we were doing things in the first place? Or did we reflect on what we’d done with it and how it might have, or should have, changed us?

Next time that you’re interrupted… just pause a second… before you decide what to do next. Before you decide how to respond. After all, Moses was taking his sheep for a walk when he was interrupted by a burning bush. It changed both his life and the life of a whole nation. Who knows how significant the next interruption that you get will be? But you need to allow it to happen. For your story to be intertwined with someone else’s.

Jigsaw

I want to finish with a poem which is about the unknown, but possibly life-changing, consequences of what may seem like chance encounters with other people…

The Jigsaw Poem – Lawrence Kushner

Each lifetime is the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

For some there are more pieces.

For others the puzzle is more difficult to assemble.

Some seem to be born with a nearly completed puzzle.

And so it goes.

Souls going this way and that.

Trying to assemble the myriad parts.

But know this. No one has within themselves

all the pieces to their puzzle.

Like before the days when they used to seal

jigsaw puzzles in cellophane.

Ensuring that all the pieces were there.

Everyone carries with them at least one and probably

Many pieces to someone else’s puzzle.

Sometimes they know it.

Sometimes they don’t.

And when you present your piece

which is worthless to you,

to another, whether you know it or not,

you are a messenger from the Most High.

‘Dealing with Interruptions’ was delivered by Ian Banks at Dearnley Methodist, on 30th June 2024. It was based on Mark 5:21-43.

References:

• Gench, F.T. (2004). Back to the Well. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press.
• Kushner, L. (1977). Honey from the Rock. Harper & Row.
• https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-13-2/commentary-on-mark-521-43-4
• https://paintedprayerbook.com/2012/06/24/i-will-be-made-well/