Taking one of the four gospels and reading it all the way through, from beginning to end, is a valuable thing to do every now and then. And one of things you might notice when you read a gospel, is how much of Jesus’s time was spent not preaching, not recruiting disciples, but healing, finding some of the sick and the troubled in every town either because they seek him out or he seems to seek them out, and touching them, and relieving their pain.
Today we have two stories in the gospel. Story number 1: this man called Jairus, whom this translation calls an official of the synagogue. He was not a priest, but someone who got all the affairs of the temple organized, a prominent job. He was so well known in the area perhaps that is why we have his name here, passed down to us. And yet this man went out by the shores of the Sea of Galilee, forced his way through a crowd, and threw himself down at the feet of a little known teacher. It would be like an affluent local executive showing up at a revival tent in North Philadelphia and falling down on his knees to ask for help.
Story number 2: this woman without a name, who suffered for years with what’s called here a hemorrhage, but whatever it was, we know that it was a problem that doctors could not fix, a problem that made her unclean, one she was so ashamed of and frustrated with that she could not even say out loud what it was, in what must have been a noisy crowd shouting out demands for just about everything. She had nowhere to turn. All she could go was try to touch Jesus.
What these two intertwined stories remind us is that everyone in this world needs healing. The rich and the prominent need it, the poor and unclean need it. The crowds of people surging around Jesus are just a hint of how many people even today would suddenly come forward and ask for what they need if they had the faith or the courage to say it out loud. With some people, it’s blindingly obvious what they need — the sick, the mentally ill, refugees. But everyone who walks in this world is damaged goods somehow, all of us, everyone has some grief or sadness or failure that we can never entirely conquer, some hole the world can’t fill up. Some of us manage to function pretty well in this world, and look good doing it. But the fact is, without people to be the healing presence of Jesus for us, without people who have touched our lives and given us strength, we’d all be in that crowd, begging for help.
Why are we told these stories about Jesus healing people? First, of course, because they tell us about the way God is — God does not want us to suffer, God wants us to come forward as these people in the reading have, to find healing, to ask for it until we receive it. But there’s another reason we hear these stories. It’s to remind us how great the need for healing is in this world, and also that the hands-on work of healing is our work, too.
It’s intimidating to think about trying to heal another person. We aren’t Jesus, after all, and even at that, Jesus was not able to heal everyone. But the importance of healing to him means healing is our business. If we want to follow Jesus, we will be healers, people who have an eye on the crowd wondering if there is a place where we are the person, no matter how little we think we can do, no matter what flaws we have or maybe even because of them, where we are the right person who can help with the healing that needs to happen.
There are plenty of people doing healing work in this world, there are spectacular people in war zones, and unspectacular people in counselors’ offices. But the example that has stuck with me for the past few months is my college roommate Steve.
Steve teaches English at Notre Dame in Indiana, although I have to say that when he was my roommate, I saw enough of his slack behavior that it was not at all clear to me then that anything like that was in his future. Maybe everyone’s college roommate is like this. I had another roommate who became a doctor, and believe me, based on what I know about him, I still live in fear that some day I’ll be in some emergency room somewhere looking up, and it’ll be him looking down at me. Frightening. He’s not around this area, don’t worry, you’re safe. But what’s important about Steve is that yes, he teaches Shakespeare to college students, and people say he’s very good at it, but on his own, he also goes downtown and teaches Shakespeare to homeless people. He shows films, teaches them how the poetry works, has them read out the parts, gets them talking, asks them why the characters do what they do. Your reaction might be, that’s crazy, isn’t Shakespeare about the last thing homeless people need? And yet when you think about it, what they do need is a sense that they are not worthless and excluded, someone to tell them that the blessings of life are still within their grasp? Steve is doing something unusual, that makes no sense to the world, but in a way he is just someone doing what he is the right person to do, and finding a way to do it that brings healing to others.
We all need to find our way of doing that, doing something that is our task, our work, and at times finding a time and place to do it that helps make someone else stronger and better.
Only you know what that is for you, or might be some day. But for now, maybe it’s enough to remember that because we live in the love of God, we are filled with more power to bring that love to others than we usually think we have. Nothing brings us closer to the presence of Jesus than a person who isn’t afraid to be a healer.