Trinity 5 2024

 Trinity 5 2024

I expect we’ve all been aware in the news over the last week or so of the  search for Jay Slater, the 19 year old who went missing in Tenerife, especially coming hard on the heels of the death of Dr Michael Mosley in similar circumstances. It’s hard not to fear the worst as the days pass.  We’ve seen too, the desperate pleas of his family, in particular his mother, for more help, more action, more feet on the ground to look for him.  The local search and rescue teams probably are doing all they can, but I am sure we can understand and sympathise with the feeling that the family want to throw all they have at this in order to find Jay. Who among us would feel any differently about someone we love?

We meet a parent with that kind of desperation in our Gospel reading today. Jairus, one of the leaders of the local synagogue, comes to Jesus to ask him to help his twelve-year-old daughter who is “at the point of death”.  Jairus is a respected, significant man in his local community, but he thinks nothing of throwing himself at the feet of this carpenter from Nazareth, begging “repeatedly” we are told. But he didn’t need to beg, because Jesus very willingly responds and sets off with him to his house. I am sure Jairus feels a huge surge of relief.

But as they hurry towards his house, just as Jairus thinks a chink of daylight is dawning on the darkest day of his life, Jesus stops, and looks around him, saying that someone has touched him. What’s he on about? They’re in a crowd. Of course someone has touched him. But Jesus won’t be hurried. He waits until a woman steps forward reluctantly, and admits it was her. He listens as she tells him her story - “the whole truth” – and my experience is that can take some time – before he sends her on her way, healed and blessed and restored to her community, which would have considered her unclean because of her illness. 

Can you imagine what Jairus might be thinking and feeling as all this plays out? After all, this woman’s condition was hardly urgent. She’d been ill for twelve years, coincidentally – or perhaps not - the whole of his daughter’s lifetime. Couldn’t she have waited another few hours, another day? For his daughter, every second counts.  

And sure enough, when they reach Jairus home, they find that those seconds have counted, and that she is already dead. The mourners have turned up, and all the rigmarole leading up to a burial, the weeping and wailing, is well underway. If only Jesus hadn’t stopped to heal that other woman, he might have saved her. After all, Jairus has seen that he has the power to heal. He just hasn’t been in time to heal his daughter, because he was healing someone else. 

And who was that other woman anyway? Jairus was a leading figure in his community, and his daughter had all her life before her. The anonymous woman was a nobody, even in her own eyes – she didn’t want to be noticed at all. She’d been marginalised by her condition, and bankrupted by her attempts to find healing. 

But, Jesus seems calm, unhurried, as he takes control of this chaotic, grief-stricken crowd, sending them away firmly, and taking just a small group of the family into the girl’s house. “She is not dead but sleeping” he says.

Biblical commentators argue about whether this was literally true or not. It could have been that she was just so deeply unconscious that she had been taken for dead; we don’t know. But either way, Jesus brings her back to life, back to health, back to her family. All had seemed to be lost to Jairus, as the minutes had ticked away while Jesus’ attention was elsewhere, wasted on this other women, but Jesus knew what he was doing. He knew there was time enough for both of these suffering individuals, and most of all, he knew that in God’s eyes, each was as important as the other, neither deserved attention more, or less, than the other. 

Suffering is a great and incomprehensible mystery. Why do bad things happen to good people? Why do some recover, and some not, even with the same treatment?  When we are ill, or a loved one is, we often say that “it isn’t fair – what have I done to deserve this?” We might appeal to science – “I’ve always eaten my five a day, walked my 10000 steps”. Or we might appeal to faith “I’ve always been a good person and helped others”, but underneath it there is an assumption that health or illness are rewards or punishments doled out in the game of life to those who have passed some test or other and are judged more, or less, worthy. 

Whatever else these stories tell us, they knock that idea firmly on the head. In the eyes of their society, Jairus’ daughter is worth more than the woman with the haemorrhage – and if we had to ration their healthcare, I wonder what choice we would make. She is certainly, and understandably worth more to her father. But the woman whose healing delays Jesus is also someone’s daughter, as Jesus points out. Jesus calls her daughter – the daughter of God – just as beloved to God as the child of this wealthy and influential leader. 

There is a deep human tendency to look at life as a competition, one we are desperate to win, but we don’t have to compete for God’s love, these stories tell us. Jairus’ desperate demonstration – throwing himself at Jesus’ feet and begging repeatedly – were no more or less persuasive than the quiet act of a woman who just reached out her hand in a crowd to touch Jesus cloak, hoping never to be noticed. Jesus had the time to give them the time they needed. 

The last verse of Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, which we heard earlier, underlines this. He has asked the church in Corinth to help their fellow Christians in Jerusalem, where there is a famine. They have said they would, but then just haven’t got around to making good on their promises. Paul thinks he knows why, and he’s probably right. They are thinking “if we give our money away, what if we need it ourselves?” But as they dither and procrastinate, people in Jerusalem are dying. 

Paul reminds them of the story of the Manna in the Wilderness, God’s provision of daily food to those who were trekking across the desert with Moses on their way out of slavery in Egypt. Every day there was enough for everyone to gather what they needed, but if anyone tried to gather more than that, they found their hoard would be full of worms the following morning.  Gradually they learned that it wasn’t a competition; “the one who had much did not have too much, and the one who had little did not have too little.”

We live in an unequal world. That is not God’s plan, and all the studies show that inequality damages us all in the end. We are called by the Gospel to change that, and the change starts I think, by taking on board that health, wealth and status are not signs of people’s worth to God.

The good news of these stories is that God doesn’t love you more than me, or me more than you. He doesn’t love the young more than the old, or the rich more than the poor, or even the good more than the bad. He doesn’t need to make these calculations. He doesn’t need to ration his love, or his time and attention, because they are inexhaustible, there for all of us.

Amen