SIXTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST - THE REV. FRANK C. SENN - JUNE 30, 2024
Proper 8B. Gospel: Mark 5:21—43
Today is the Chicago Gay Pride Parade. This doesn’t seem like a good year to shorten the parade and limit participation. Yes, Obergefell v. Hodges legalized same-sex marriage throughout the United States. It seems to be supported by a majority of the American people.
But, at the same time LGBTQ people are being targeted in ways not seen since Anita Bryant’s infamous 1977 “Save Our Children” campaign when gay men were all depicted as pedophiles. In recent years state legislatures have banned drag queens reading books to young children, gender-affirming care for minors, the teaching of sexual orientation to children, and the removal of books treating LGBTQ issues from public and school libraries. Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas cast doubt on the legality of Obergefell v. Hodges, and evangelicals are once again spreading fears of homosexuals “grooming” children. These actions suggest that for many Americans there is reaction and revulsion against LGBTQ people.
Today’s gospel reading has nothing to do with homosexuality, but similar reactions of disgust and revulsion are a key aspect of the story, and we need to recognize this to make much sense of the story. Actually, it is two stories combined. This is another example of Mark’s story telling technique that whereby he begins one story, breaks from it to tell another, and then returns to the first one so that the two stories shed light on each other.
In this case, the first story is about the sick daughter of Jairus, a prominent leader of the local synagogue. Jairus comes to Jesus and asks for his help for his sick daughter who is at the point of death, and Jesus sets off with him to see the daughter. Then the story is interrupted.
A desperate woman reaches out to touch Jesus in the crowd, hoping to be healed simply by touching him, and she is. But Jesus stops and speaks with her for long enough that when the first story resumes, the sick girl has died. Jesus goes to her anyway, and taking her by the hand, he raises her back to life. As well as this technique of telling one story framed by the other, there are other things that alert us that these stories are meant to be read as linked. There is the number twelve. Mark emphasizes that the girl was twelve years old, and that the woman had been suffering from a bleeding disorder for twelve years. There is the word “daughter”. Jairus seeks help for his beloved daughter, and when Jesus speaks to the healed woman, he addresses her as “daughter”.
There is a lot going on in this story and many different angles that could profitably be preached on, but I’m going to try to limit myself to just one: the sense of revulsion. The world where these stories took place was one that had very strong religious rules about purity and impurity. It wasn’t too hard to know whether you were among the officially “clean” or among the “unclean”, the “impure”, the “untouchables”. The rules were clear and well known, and as is usually the case with these kinds of things, the rules become deeply ingrained in the way we think and so we take them for granted and imagine them to be simply natural and universal and we can barely even imagine any other way of viewing things.
Now there are two big ticket items of “uncleanness” in these stories, and they are things that still cause a fairly high degree of revulsion for many people today: menstrual blood, and dead bodies. In ancient Jewish society, a woman was not allowed to have any social contact with other people when she was having her period. This was dictated by both people’s feelings of revulsion and by religious law. Many people are still pretty squeamish about any contact with the blood. But this story is set at a time when both feelings and law dictated that a woman who was bleeding avoid all contact with others, and this woman has been bleeding continuously for twelve years. She is literally an untouchable, because anyone who touches her will also be officially unclean and will also have to be quarantined for a week. So, no wonder she sneaks through the crowd and tries to touch Jesus’ garment without being noticed. If she had been caught deliberately touching people and making others unclean, she would have been at risk of being stoned to death. So you can imagine her fear when Jesus starts trying to identify who has touched him.
Another thing that could get you declared unclean and sent to quarantine for a week was touching a dead body. We may have gotten over thinking of it in terms of rendering one ritually impure, but an awful lot of people still have the same squeamish fear of dead bodies that probably gave rise to these rules in the first place. For many people it is now worse than it once was, because we have so thoroughly professionalized and sanitized the funeral industry that we usually no longer even have close contact with the bodies when our own family members die. Dead bodies could be contaminated by a disease.
So you can see how the religious rules against contact came about. There is first a fear of physical contagion. We naturally fear catching the illness from the sick or recently dead.
In the modern world that is often more nuanced now. We can know which illnesses are contagious and which are not, and for most of us that will enable us to get over our fear of the sick person or dead body and engage with them if we know we are safe. But the fear of contagion has always gone further than just the fear of bacteria and viruses. As the ancient image of being rendered unclean or impure suggests, what we also fear is that moral impurity is contagious; that we will be corrupted by contact with those who are under God’s punishment. And then that fear can be hidden under a cloak of “righteousness” by regarding our shunning of the people as our cooperation with God’s purposes in punishing sinners and seeking to bring about their repentance and reform. At the Pride Parade today there will probably be a group with signs saying, “All homos are going to hell,” and citing 1 Corinthians 6:9, which doesn’t actually say that.
A codified religious system of pure and impure, clean and unclean, may no longer exist in the way it once did, but the impulses that drove it still drive much of what goes on in our churches and communities today. Fear of contact with those who are sick still exists. And fear of those who may be physically healthy but are seen as morally corrupt continues to mark much of our engagement with both people and issues. And so, people picture in their minds what homosexual lovemaking might involve and have a huge gut-churning ‘yuk’ reaction and make the assumption that that ‘yuk’ reaction is a reliable moral compass, but it isn’t. Isn’t it interesting that it was called sodomy after what people think the men of Sodom MIGHT have done if the two angels hadn’t blinded them.
Finally, I want to note that after Jesus raises the dead girl to life, he instructs those standing around to give her something to eat. We hear the same invitation today. “Take and Eat. Take and drink.” I like the symbolism of going to the perimeter of this space to be fed and nourished rather than coming to the table. It’s on the margins that we need the strength which our Lord supplies. Amen.
Frank C. Senn