Hebrews 2:2-10; Luke 8:41-56
An unprecedented number of
people are being drawn to the Orthodox Church in our society today. This development is a great blessing of God
for which none of us may take credit. No
matter whether we have grown up in the Church, entered later in our lives, or
are now in the initial stages of encountering Orthodoxy, we all need to
consider what we are seeking and why we are doing so. In our individualistic and consumeristic
culture, it is tempting to make even our commitment to Christ and His Church a way
of getting what we want on our own terms.
If we are embracing the Orthodox
Christian Faith with integrity, we will learn that the real test of whether we
are finding the healing of our souls is not whether everything is going
according to our plans. It is, instead, whether
we will respond faithfully when deep challenges break our hearts and disappointments
tempt us to despair.
In today’s gospel
reading, Jairus and his wife were put to the ultimate test when the Lord said
of their daughter, “Do not fear; only believe, and she shall be
well…[and] “Do not weep; for she is not dead but sleeping.” Jairus was an upstanding Jewish man who was
responsible for the good order of a synagogue.
He was surely respected by his neighbors and thought to be righteous,
but we have no idea what Jairus had thought about Christ other than that he
knelt before Him and asked Him to come to his house, where his daughter was
dying. After she had died, whatever
faith he had was surely stretched to the breaking point.
Jairus
and his wife had at least enough faith to
go into their house with the Messiah Who had promised to save their daughter if
they believed and did not fear. Mourning
and weeping had already begun, and others laughed at the Savior for saying, “Do
not weep; for she is not dead but sleeping.”
In the midst of their terrible grief, Jairus and his wife somehow found
the strength to trust in Christ’s promise, which enabled them to receive a miracle well beyond all expectations when their
twelve-year-old daughter returned to life.
Something similar occurred
with the woman who had been bleeding for twelve years. She had impoverished herself by spending all
her money on physicians who could not heal her. There was no medical cure for
her condition, which also made her ritually unclean. She was isolated, poor, and miserable. Her religious and social standing were
completely different from that of Jairus, who was at the center of the Jewish
community; she was very much on the margins.
All that we know about her attitude toward Christ is that she reached
out and touched the hem of His garment in the midst of a large crowd. She did not want to draw attention to herself
by asking for healing and or to risk rejection from Him, for anyone who touched
her would have been considered unclean also.
When the woman reached
out for the Lord’s garment, she was healed immediately, but Christ knew that someone
had touched Him; her secret was out. Instead
of running away in fear or becoming defensive or angry, the woman then “came
trembling, and falling down before Him declared in the presence of all the
people why she had touched Him, and how she had been immediately healed.” That was surely not what she wanted to do, and
it took great courage. Then the Lord said,
“Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace.”
As different as Jairus
and this woman are, they have in common that they were both tempted to fall
into despair. The number twelve being
used with reference both to Jairus’ daughter and to the woman reminds us of the
twelve tribes of Israel and that they were both Jews. It did not matter that one was part of an
upstanding religious family and that the other was an outcast. Questions of how observant they were of the
Jewish law or of what people thought about them had become irrelevant, for they
could see no way out of the tragic circumstances they faced. To their credit, they were not paralyzed by fear
and grief. Instead, they humbly offered
the deepest pains of their lives as best they could to Christ for healing
beyond what they could expect or even understand. They entrusted their brokenness to the Lord
without reservation and, thus, opened themselves to the healing of the human
person that He has brought to the world.
The woman did not say anything at all until
after her healing, which came through the only gesture of faith that she had
the strength to make: reaching out to
touch the hem of the Savior’s garment in the middle of a crowd. She was healed instantly, but spoke only
after she had been found out. She did so
with fear and trembling, falling down before the Lord and stating publicly why
she had reached out for healing. That
was likely the most difficult and embarrassing moment of her life. In response, the Lord said, “Daughter,
your faith has made you well; go in peace.”
The Savior did not relate to her as a bundle of impurity, but simply as
a beloved child of God.
The pain felt by Jairus and his wife was in
no way lessened by their respectable position among the Jews. Jairus had asked Christ to come to his
house where his daughter was dying, but he and his wife surely struggled to
believe that the Lord could actually raise her from the dead. After He did so, “her parents were
amazed; but He charged them to tell no one what had happened.” Their faith, however weak and imperfect, was
all that the Savior needed to work an extraordinary miracle. Christ was made unclean neither by the touch
of the bleeding woman nor by His taking the hand of the girl as He raised her
from death. To the contrary, He shared His
gracious restoration of the human person with them both.
The Lord showed
mercy throughout His earthly ministry to suffering people who offered their pains,
sorrows, and afflictions to Him for healing, regardless of where they stood in
the religious and social pecking orders of the day. He praised the spiritual understanding of a
Gentile woman and cast a demon out of her daughter. (Mk 7:24-30) He said that
no one in Israel had greater faith than the Roman centurion whose servant He
healed. (Lk 7: 1-10) He restored the broken life of St. Photini, the Samaritan
woman, by disregarding the prejudices of the time through His shocking
conversation with her. (Jn 4:1-42) The
Savior did not treat them according to their social standing, religious
observance, or moral purity, but according to His great mercy.
Only the God-Man,
fully divine and fully human, could transform the terrible suffering of those
who bleed, die, and mourn into joy. As
we read in today’s epistle lesson, “As it is, we do not yet see everything in
subjection to Him. But we see Jesus, Who
for a little while was made lower than the angels, crowned with glory and honor
because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God He might taste
death for everyone.” That is how He conquered
Hades and the tomb, making even the worst tragedies of the human condition
points of entrance to the blessedness of His heavenly kingdom.
No matter what first
drew our attention to the Church, we must all learn to see that we stand before
Him just as did Jairus, his wife, his dying daughter, and the bleeding
woman. We have maladies of soul and
body, as well as disordered relations with others, that we lack the power to
heal. The point of all our spiritual
disciplines is not to get what we want from God or to achieve any earthly goal. It is, instead, to help us gain the humility to
have the faith necessary to entrust even our deepest pains and fears to the One
Who conquered death itself to restore us in His image and likeness. To acquire
that kind of faith, we must allow our self-centered agendas and vain delusions concerning
religion and everything else to be destroyed as we learn to entrust ourselves,
our loved ones, and our world to the Lord.
He graciously accepts faith even the size of a mustard seed, like that
of an outcast woman who secretly touches the hem of His garment or of parents
who can barely believe that death has not had the last word on their daughter. If we can acquire the humility to offer
ourselves to Christ as they did, then His words will apply to us also as
members of the Church, His bride: “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go
in peace.”
