Salvation is primarily a restoration back into community.
- Discussion Outline
- Discussion Audio (1 hour 15 minutes)
- Text: Mark 5:21-43
This passage is a perfect example of Mark’s use of his “sandwich rhetoric” in which the first story is interrupted by a second, and then the first resumes after the second.
“… What Mark has joined together the preacher should not put asunder.”[1]
In the two stories we find first, a daughter of a synagogue ruler who is sick to the point of death; secondly, an adult woman who has been suffering from menstrual hemorrhaging for twelve years.
Both stories deal with the issue of impurity: death and menstrual bleeding. Impurity meant a person was cut off from regular social contact and from access to the Temple and God’s presence. For Jesus, it is not merely physical healing that matters, it is whole-life wholeness. That is what he brings to both women.
Having crossed geographical boundaries to release a gentile from bondage to the Destroyer, Jesus returns to Jewish territory where his healing power crosses traditional impurity boundaries to restore life to two suffering women.[2]
In both stories the one who suffers is female.
Both stories are also, of course, stories of women, and belong to Mark’s focus on Jesus’ regard for and attention to women.[3]
In the first, the father is an advocate; but in the second, the woman has no advocate. Jesus stops first to work with the one who is the lowest of the low, the one who has no one to speak for her.
“Twelve years” is common to both. The girl is born around the same time the woman begins to have her health problem. Twelve years is also the age at which Jewish culture recognized a girl becoming a woman.
Jesus instructs both the woman and the father on the topic of faith. For the woman, it was her faith, not her touch, that gave her healing. For the father, Jesus encouraged him to continue to have faith in spite of the reality of death.
His response, "fear not, only believe," was a call for intense faith. Jairus had exercised faith when he came to Jesus in the confidence that he could save his daughter. He had witnessed the healing of the woman which demonstrated the relationship between faith and divine help. But he was now asked to believe that his child would live even as he stood in the presence of death. Such faith is radical trust in the ability of Jesus to confront a crisis situation with the power of God.[4]
Both women are called “daughter” by Jesus. It is an affirmation that both have been fully integrated into family. But whose family? Their biological ones, or Jesus’? Or better perhaps, the answer is both.
Jesus as a healer who integrates people more fully into community… The woman is one of several figures in Mark whose healing by Jesus enables them to be (re)integrated into various dimensions of society… The primary effect of Jesus’ healing is thus not personal but social… The salvation or wholeness that the bleeding woman experiences (“Your faith has saved [sōzō] you”) is social and communal (v. 34; cf. v. 28). Jesus’ healings are one of three strategies he employs to (re)integrate social outcasts into community.[5]
In both stories, Mark’s narrative emphasizes that it is faith, not rituals, that is the basis of God’s power. For the bleeding woman, she had a semi-magical view of Jesus which he corrects by bringing attention to her faith For the daughter, his act of restoring life to her involves on lengthy ceremony, ritual, or incantation, but a simple command.
“Fear not, only believe…” The present tense of the Greek imperative means to keep believing, to hold onto faith rather than give into despair. With respect to his daughter’s circumstances, Jairus’ future is closed; but with respect to Jesus it is still open. Faith is not something Jairus has but something that has Jairus, carrying him from despair to hope.[6]
[1] Feasting: Mark, location 5621.
[2] Reading Mark, 4:1-5:43.
[3] Feasting: Mark, location 5473.
[4] NICNT: Mark, 5:35-37.
[5] Feasting: Mark, locations 5775, 5790, 5805, 5807.
[6] Exploring Mark, page 125.
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