Point of Death

Mark 5:21-43

June 28, 2009
One does have to be careful with sermon titles and I hope that today’s has not caused any concern. A few years ago I preached in one of my former congregations and was asked to send the sermon title ahead of time. The Lectionary reading was from the Letter to the Hebrews, chapter 11, in which the anonymous author recites the heroes of faith, one after another, building up momentum.

When the author comes to Abraham, the patriarch is celebrated for his patience and faith, for from this one man, although he was “as good as dead,” descendants as numerous as the stars of the heavens and the grains of sand by the sea were born from him. If you know my sense of humour in determining sermon titles, you know what I sent on to the church secretary - “Good As Dead.”

She emailed back and suggested that might not be a wise choice for they had several older members of the congregation fighting cancer and “good as dead” was perhaps too close to the truth for some of them. I changed the title to “Something Better,” another short phrase in that same chapter of Hebrews.

I am going to risk it again “at the point of death,” the situation in which Jairus’ beloved young daughter is announced to Jesus. As we have heard it was not a simple matter for Jesus to go heal her and when they arrived she was likewise “as good as dead.” She turned out to be good, not dead. I hope this is not distressing talk, but the Gospel is all about resurrecting people who were as good as dead, and at the point of death. Otherwise, it’s just a bunch of nice tales.

The only thing Jesus seems to have been doing lately is riding in a boat back and forth across the Sea of Galilee. There really does not seem to be a pattern to his travels, but whenever he lands on shore, something seems to happen, people arrive in droves, and Jesus ends up teaching and inevitably healing. This time he must have come ashore near a sizeable community, for the synagogue leader, Jairus, was one of those who greeted him as got out of the boat.

There are a few other Jairuses in the Gospels, people who were in positions of traditional power - leaders of synagogues, Pharisees and members of the Sanhedrin or religious council - people who in the normal course of human affairs would perceive Jesus as a threat to their situation. Jairus saw Jesus as a possibility for life at the point of death. His daughter was gravely ill, and whether or not Jairus perceived Jesus as a last chance or the first real chance, he was convinced Jesus could heal his daughter. You don’t bow down at someone’s feet if you believe he is only a travelling magic show. Jesus offers no verbal response; the two of them just go.

But you can’t get to a resurrection that easily. For one, everybody wanted to come along. They heard Jairus, knew him and his daughter, perhaps knew about that fever that had been making its deadly rounds. So a huge crowd not only followed Jesus and Jairus, but in their excitement to see something really spectacular they thronged about Jesus, crowding him.

Not everyone was there for the show. A woman who had been having a discharge of blood for twelve years had heard about Jesus. She had seen countless physicians who from the sound of it had probably exercised all sorts of excruciating cures and bloodlettings, none of which worked, but seemed to make her condition worse. Worse, they made sure they took her last denarii. She too was at the point of death, both literally and spiritually. When someone is at the point of death, they are not clinically dead, but neither are they alive in any meaningful sense. Certainly, this woman’s spirit was barely flickering, having been told nothing is wrong with her, or as customary in that culture, she obviously had done something terribly wrong and this was her sentence.

Yet here was Jesus within a few feet - if only she could just touch him, even touch his clothes. It was both easy and hard to get that close to him - at least no one would particularly notice - and she grazed her hand on his coat.

If you remember your geometry, a point does not possess any real mass or space, or if you are referring to time, no real duration in seconds or minutes. At the touch she was no longer at the point of death. She felt and knew that she had been healed. She was alive, resurrected from a living death. She is not recorded saying anything, but could anyone attach words to what had now been restored to her?

This is the only place in all the Gospels where Jesus felt power going out from him, on the edge of magic power. Jesus reacts, “Who touched my clothes?” The disciples were worried about Jesus’ mental balance, for it was almost laughable, everybody and nobody was touching you. Jesus knew the difference and the healed woman knew the difference. Jesus could feel the intentionality of her touch, and it was her intentionality that unleashed God’s power. In fear and trembling she bowed down before him and told him the whole truth, her whole story. “Daughter, your faith has made you well.” Jesus says this a lot, making the point that it is not him, not Jesus, but God who performs the healing. At the point of death, she retained a faith-full relationship with God that changed her whole being.

What do you think Jairus was thinking right about now? A funny thing happened on the way to the forum? On the way to heal my daughter, Jesus healed a random woman, and then before we could collect our thoughts a messenger came from home telling me my precious daughter had died, and don’t bother wasting the Teacher’s time anymore. Jairus now was at the point of death.

It seldom happens, but in the tiny footnotes in your Bible there is a variant reading that shifts the atmosphere of the action. In the Revised Standard Version, Jesus is said to “ignore” what he has just overheard from the home messenger. The footnote says that other New Testament manuscripts have Jesus simply “overhearing.” It seems like ignoring what he had overheard is the sense here, for he reassured the ruler of the synagogue, “Do not fear, only believe.” Notice the narrator didn’t refer to him as Jairus, a human being like you and me with a personal name, but identified him as the ruler of the synagogue, a title of power, power in the spiritual realm. Only believe, Jesus says to power, and that’s power.

When they finally arrive there’s an uproar of hysteria all about the place, and Jesus says, “What’s going on with all of this, she’s not dead, only sleeping.” And they laughed at him. Shouldn’t we be horrified, people laughing at Jesus? “He’s an idiot!” Jesus cleared the house except for the parents, and simply took the girl by the hand and said, “Talitha cumi - little girl, get up!” Immediately she got up and walked - a point in time in which death passed to life. Jesus told them not to tell anyone about this - that was laughable considering the crowd and circumstances - and to give her something to eat. When Jesus appeared to the disciples after his resurrection and they were paralyzed in fear and trembling, he asked them for something to eat. Anyone who eats is no longer at the point of death.

Some hear this story and what they hear are miracles, and that’s what they want, miracles to fix their lives. What I hear is resurrection, and despite the incredible events on the way to and in Jairus’ house, it is more common to be resurrected than to be part of a miracle. Most of you are probably saying, “Coming back from the dead is miracle enough for a lifetime!” But it’s something more like this.

I often cite William Willimon, the former chaplain of Duke University, who writes and preaches a lot on just about everything. He is a Methodist and the United Methodist Church decided to really fix him a few years ago - they made him a bishop. Part of a Methodist bishop’s job is to appoint pastors to churches, and sometimes that means sending a minister to a very difficult, conflicted, and contentious congregation. Recently, one minister was resisting his appointment, saying, “That church is hopeless! There is no way to turn around its downward slide. I just can’t go there!” The District Superintendent responded directly to the minister, “Well, I’ll tell the bishop what you said. But I need to warn you, this bishop truly believes that the resurrection is true. He actually believes that Jesus bodily, really, truthfully rose from the dead on Easter and he thinks that Jesus still raises the dead. So you need to know that when you say something like, ‘that church is dead,’ it really doesn’t impress the bishop because he believes in Easter.”

At the point of death, in this church, in your family, in your life, I declare too that we are at the point of life. To that I say Amen, and may all of God’s children, say Amen!

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan