Jesus Is Distracted

 Mark 5:21-43

June 27, 2021

 

We’re only in chapter 5 of Mark.

Jesus and the disciples are just starting their ministry

out in the world and it’s picking up steam.

Jesus has healed a few people,

he’s already confronted the religious leaders,

Jesus is being talked about, no doubt.

People are seeking him out.

The disciples are, I’m sure, pleased to be

part of this movement at least for now.

 

And today, Jairus asked Jesus for help.

His daughter is dying and he doesn’t know where else to turn.

 

Jairus is a leader of the synagogue.

He must have been desperate to come to Jesus.

He’s an important, powerful man.

 

This is exactly the type of person

that the disciples were waiting for.

This is just the kind of person that would

give their ministry the boost that it needed.

If Jesus could help Jairus,

they might be able to really make a change in this town.

They might be able to be a strong and powerful group

instead of the ragtag group they were.

And Jairus is surely loaded, that couldn’t hurt.

Not that we’re out for that, of course, but it could really help.

 

Okay Jesus, let’s go and heal that man’s daughter.

(I mean, of course, we’re concerned for her), but

this is the chance we’ve been waiting for.

We don’t want to keep the leader of the synagogue waiting.

 

Jesus started to walk with the disciples and the powerful man

in the right direction, moving through the crowds.

But then he stopped and said, “Who touched my clothes?”

 

And you can hear the disciples annoyance.

“Who touched you? Are you kidding?”

There are about a hundred people around you.”

Forget about all these people and get to the important one,

come on, Jesus.  Jairus is waiting.”

But Jesus won’t leave. He stops what he’s doing for this woman.

A woman who has been hemorrhaging for 12 years.

 

At this time, when women were menstruating,

they were seen as unclean and would have been

separated from the community.

She would have been separated for 12 years.

She would have been a pariah.

Not just forgotten, but hated.

People would have been scared of her

maybe they would catch what she had,

Maybe whatever bad spirit was on her

would have rubbed off on them.

She was someone, not just to be ignored, but actively avoided.

 

And she was so pushy. She just came and touched Jesus

His power went out from him without his consent.

She didn’t ask, she just took it from him.

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She had no right to do that.

And she had no status to warrant it.

 

She was just the kind of person
that the disciples didn’t want

to be seen with. Someone who would

bring down the ministry, cheapen their reputation.

Someone who should not keep the
important mission at hand waiting. 
Come on, Jesus, let’s go!

 

You can tell by the annoyance in the disciples

voice that they would have preferred him to move on.

And I’m sure that Jairus would have preferred

for Jesus to move on and get right to his house.

 

But Jesus doesn’t. It doesn’t seem fair,

Jairus was more important. And Jairus came first.

But Jesus stops to find out who touched him.

Who took his power. He talks to her,

she tells him her whole truth, which had to take a little while.

And then he tells her that her faith has made her well

and she could go on healed of her disease.

And in that time Jairus’s daughter died.

 

Now, most people would have moved on.

Either annoyed by the woman’s presumption,

or motivated by the task at hand,

They would have gone to the house of the important man

and left the crowds and the woman behind.

At least to make a show to the important person,

that they were trying their best to help them.

 

Maybe we would have come back to the

unnamed woman later,

after we were done with the important person.

She had been waiting for 12 years.

What would one more hour mean to her?

 

I think that  everyone at one time or another,

has moved on from a situation in front of us,

and pressed on with whatever we were planning on doing.

Sometimes it’s annoyance, sometimes it’s not wanting to get involved

sometimes we’re focused on our own priorities.

But often in pressing towards something we want

we miss what’s right there in front of us.

In Ohio I did work with the Synod

for churches that were in conflict and crisis.

And a lot of churches have found themselves,

in the last decade, in conflict because

of the decline in worship numbers and income,

they tend to blame the pastor,

or this group or that, or changes in culture,

They get into fights about who should have done what.

 

So often in these churches, the lament I hear is that

the people remember  the way the church was

around 20-50 years ago, with huge Sunday Schools

and all their friends and families attending.

And so many people spend all their minds and effort

pining for those days and trying to figure out how

to get back to make things they way they were again

(I mean they don’t want to change anything,

but they just want those times to come back)

 

But they’re so focused on that, getting back to their

former power and glory that they miss

the opportunities that God has put right in front of them.

 

One congregation that we went to,

the members were hyper-focused

on the dwindling Sunday School numbers.

The council was spending all their energy trying to get

kids back into the church and into Sunday School?

And at the same time the council was complaining

about the constant influx of homeless people

coming to their door and asking for bus fare and food.

 

There was another church that couldn’t figure out

what to do with themselves besides fight with each other.

They didn’t know what they were going to do at all.

 

In the middle of working with them, we asked them casually,

what’s being built on the land next door?

The city was actually building a food bank and pantry

on the land right next door to the church. Hmmm.

Maybe God is trying to tell them something?

 

It’s way easier to see these things from the outside.

That’s why they bring other people in.

 

Churches these days have a difficult task.

We are always trying to figure out how to

do our regular church business:

keeping the lights on and the bills paid, etc.

and also, how do we respond to the immediate needs

that are around us in the world.

The great need that we see in our world every day.

 

Some churches do that by forgetting about the world

around them, they only focus on their own church

and their own members and they never let anything

take their focus off of building their infrastructure

and their own power.

 

They avoid the need and act like it’s not

any of their business to respond to the world.

They just deal with church business and take care of their own.

Or they just circle back to it when they get their own house in order.

I don’t think those are the answers that Jesus

would be advocating for based on this story.

 

As Christians, we follow Christ’s lead and logic

which doesn’t usually follow common logic.

 

Jesus was not concerned about his infrastructure

or his longevity or even the future of his own ministry.

He was not worried about his own notoriety,

or his reputation, or who he was seen with.

He was not worried about building his own power.

 

Now those are all things that we have spend some time on in

this world in order to survive.

But sometimes those things turn into a church’s whole ministry.

We can be so focused on our own that we forget

about the ministry that God has put in front of us.

Sometimes we worry about increasing

and maintaining own power and we forget

how Jesus used his power.

 

Jesus became powerful, only so that he could give his power away

to nobodies and nothings like that woman who touched him,

and stole his power from him. That’s what he was there to do.

The power that was in him, he gave away to the less powerful.

But the more he gave away to others, the more he had in the end.

Real power, Godly power, is found when

when we let  people who have none take it away.

 

The powerful man and his daughter would have to wait.

There was a need right in front of him which required Jesus attention.

But in the end of the story, Jairus’s daughter is saved too.

Even though he was too late to restore her health,

he used his power to raise her from the dead.

 

We are not the church we once were.

We are not as powerful, and not as pretty,

we are not as polished, not as accepted, not as respected,

not as rich and profitable, we are not as full.

 

But we are also not as arrogant,

not as blind to the suffering of others,

not as disconnected from the world,

not as oblivious as we once were either.

 

God is reforming us, more fully into Christ’s image

able to do God’s mission in the world.

Able to engage with the world around us

and share God’s power and healing with

those who are right in front of us.

And that is Good News

for the church and the world.