Fifth Sunday after Pentecost (B) 2012

+ In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti + Amen.

Text: Mark 5:28
Theme: Hope and Life

Dear friends in Christ Jesus,

She still had hope. He clung to a desperate prayer. She was intimately familiar with her grief caused by 18 years of suffering- a personal ongoing saga. He faced the loss of His daughter- painful, heart-wrenching, a suffering external to his own person. Both looked to Christ- Jairus, the synagogue ruler, and the woman who bled- neither were disappointed. Where there is life there is hope. And in the case of Jesus, even where there is death He calls forth life.

Miracles are not just proofs of Christ’s divinity; they are consequences of His presence. That is, they were not just carefully chosen displays of omnipotence as much as they were organically consistent expressions of God’s existence in human flesh. That is not to say that in the person of Jesus the Godhead isn’t still veiled. Never was Jesus’ majesty and glory fully unleashed- mortals simply couldn’t bear it. Even the transfiguration was only a shadowy preview. Still, Christ always exuded restorative power. His compassion could not be contained. Everywhere He went the reversal of the fall was in progress. Even during His arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane Jesus restored the ear of Malchus that had been severed by Peter in the initial melee.

Today Jesus addresses sickness and death. We tend to think we are only victims of sickness and disease. But in fact, sickness is part of the tangled pathology of sin. We are beset by sickness and death because we are sinners, not simply by chance. Though we rejoice in the knowledge God gives to mankind to address the vast range of physical and psychological dangers that confront us, as Christians we can never be duped into believing we will achieve the ultimate cure for the human condition.

Otherwise we would be in denial of the potency of original sin. Here we can only take God at His word. People will always be drawn more naturally to humanistic philosophy than they will biblical revelation. Yet sin is a chasm we have no means to bridge, power we have no strength to defeat, and a sickness for which we have no cure. Every effort to ignore or downplay the seriousness of our conundrum as sinners undermines what we should really be doing- repenting! You and I are sinners and that is something we must keep confessing until the Second Coming of our Lord makes it no longer true. Sin is the sickness of humanity. But Christ has the resources of divinity.

Today the suffering woman was restored just by touching Jesus’ garment. Jesus knew that power, healing strength, restorative energy, had gone out from Him. It was not spent on a curiosity seeker or skeptic. Nor is it possible to snatch something from the Almighty that He is not willing to give. We are told, “She had suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors and had spent all she had, yet instead of getting better she grew worse.”1

When her secrecy was shattered she came trembling to confess and revealed her plight. Christ allowed this for the advantage of the crowd not because of His own ignorance. His response was life-changing, “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.”2 The situation with Jairus’s daughter was even more stunning. The young girl had died. The commotion and wailing precipitated by death had already commenced. It was no barrier to Christ’s compassion and power. Nothing is insurmountable for Him who creates, redeems, and restores.

Now, what is the consequence of this peace and freedom that He grants? It is not something we are entitled to abuse. It is a privilege we exercise. The Scripture warns about those “who change the grace of our God into a license for immorality and deny Jesus Christ our only sovereign and Lord.”3 Forgiveness, that holy and precious gift, remains just that- a gift. It is never a tool we can manipulate.

Less than four months after his inauguration in 1881, James Garfield, the 20th President of the United States was shot twice at a Washington railroad depot. One grazed Garfield's arm; the other lodged in his abdomen. A leading Washington doctor came and inserted a metal probe into the wound, turning it slowly, searching for the bullet. The probe became stuck between the shattered fragments of Garfield's eleventh rib, and was removed only with a great deal of difficulty, causing great pain. Then Bliss inserted his finger into the wound, widening the hole in another unsuccessful probe.

Leading doctors of the age flocked to Washington to aid in his recovery, sixteen in all. Most probed the wound with their fingers or dirty instruments. Though the president complained of numbness in the legs and feet, which implied the bullet was lodged near the spinal cord, most thought it was resting in the abdomen. Garfield's condition only got worse. The doctors reopened the wound and enlarged it hoping to find the bullet. They were unsuccessful.

By the time Garfield died on September 19, his doctors had turned a three-inch-deep, harmless wound into a twenty-inch-long contaminated gash stretching from his ribs to his groin. The famous inventor, Alexander Graham Bell even invented a metal-detecting instrument to try and find the bullet. This was later found to be unsuccessful because of the metal bed frame the president was lying on.

If we keep probing our spiritual wounds sin festers and the wounds will not heal. And yet why do we return again, and again, and again? Is it not because we more easily gravitate to that which we are familiar with? We dwell in the past because that is where we are comfortable. Sin chains us to the hurts and pains, the decay caused by that which remains unforgiven. We keep probing the opening in hopes we will find justice, revenge, or validation. Perhaps we try to play the martyr in secret hope of being recognized. But only Christ can give us release. Forgiveness can and does heal fractured relationships because Christ has reconciled us to the Father. No human relationship can be broken beyond repair because the sacrifice for humanity’s affront to God is complete. The crucifixion is the unalterable expression of divine love and grace that cannot be surpassed. The risen, living, and ruling Lord Jesus Christ is the eternal testament to this truth.

Dear friends, God knows our sufferings. His concern for our suffering is not a matter of abstract knowledge. Jesus Christ embraced the fullness of our human condition, experiencing everything we endure, yet remained without sin. He knows the dark places we’ve been. He has been to the edge of the abyss and beyond. He will not abandon you in your sickness, uncertainty, or despair. He reminds you that the trouble of this life is short. He focuses you on the promises to come- the resurrection of the body and life everlasting.

The healing of the woman who bled and the raising of Jairus’s daughter were previews of what is come; examples of the body being healed in view of the soul. But here where the Spirit is at work the soul is healed in view of the body. In holy baptism the mortal wound of sin is absorbed into the life of Him who was mortally wounded for us. In baptism your decaying soul is regenerated by the same life-giving Spirit who attended Jesus’ own resurrection. He gives you too His own body and blood as a participation in the covenant of life that He instituted.

Where there is life there is hope. Where Christ is even death, the final sickness, has no power to do us any harm. Amen.

+ In nomine Jesu +

Fifth Sunday After Pentecost
1 July 2012
Reverend Darrin L. Kohrt
1 Mark 5:27
2 Mark 5:34
3 Jude 4