Listen or read the following transcript as D. A. Carson speaks on the topic of the Miracles of Christ from Mark 5:21-43
“When Jesus had again crossed over by boat to the other side of the lake, a large crowd gathered around him while he was by the lake. Then one of the synagogue rulers, named Jairus, came there. Seeing Jesus, he fell at his feet and pleaded earnestly with him, ‘My little daughter is dying. Please come and put your hands on her so that she will be healed and live.’ So Jesus went with him.
A large crowd followed and pressed around him. And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years. She had suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors and had spent all she had, yet instead of getting better she grew worse. When she heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, because she thought, ‘If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed.’
Immediately her bleeding stopped and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering. At once Jesus realized that power had gone out from him. He turned around in the crowd and asked, ‘Who touched my clothes?’ ‘You see the people crowding against you,’ his disciples answered, ‘and yet you can ask, “Who touched me?” ’ But Jesus kept looking around to see who had done it.
Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell at his feet and, trembling with fear, told him the whole truth. He said to her, ‘Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.’ While Jesus was still speaking, some men came from the house of Jairus, the synagogue ruler. ‘Your daughter is dead,’ they said. ‘Why bother the teacher any more?’
Ignoring what they said, Jesus told the synagogue ruler, ‘Don’t be afraid; just believe.’ He did not let anyone follow him except Peter, James and John the brother of James. When they came to the home of the synagogue ruler, Jesus saw a commotion, with people crying and wailing loudly. He went in and said to them, ‘Why all this commotion and wailing? The child is not dead but asleep.’ But they laughed at him.
After he put them all out, he took the child’s father and mother and the disciples who were with him, and went in where the child was. He took her by the hand and said to her, ‘Talitha koum!’ (which means, ‘Little girl, I say to you, get up!’). Immediately the girl stood up and walked around (she was twelve years old). At this they were completely astonished. He gave strict orders not to let anyone know about this, and told them to give her something to eat.”
This is the Word of the Lord. Let us pray.
May the words of my mouth and the meditation of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our Redeemer. Through Jesus Christ our Lord, amen.
Sometimes those of us who have been reading our Bibles for many years gain a kind of general acquaintance with a text that actually prompts us on occasion to overlook something that the text says. Our comfortable familiarity with the Bible’s stories may mean that we read them with ease but without any probing questions anymore. “Been there, done that. Read that. Bought the tee shirt.” As a result, the familiarity means that we no longer push.
Especially, I think, are we unlikely to push if we read only one short account a day in our devotions. If we read just one story, then the next day read the next story, then the next day read the next story, and then the next day read the next story, what we might start missing is the way things are linked, the way they hang together to form a theme. Then we lose some of the big pictures, the underlying emphases.
For example, in Mark’s gospel, as everybody knows, he has a lot of miracles of Jesus scattered hither and there throughout his entire book, but when Matthew writes his account, he takes many of these same narratives and puts them together into a topical arrangement in Matthew 8–9. In other words, Mark preserves the historical sequence. When Matthew takes them, he groups them into a couple of chapters on Jesus’ miracles.
The effect, even though each story is more or less the same, is quite dramatic. In Mark’s case, each of those miracles is tied thematically to what Jesus is saying at the time, to the utterances, to the confrontations at that time. In Matthew’s arrangement, precisely because it’s topical, there are other themes that are highlighted, other sequences that come to light that you might not think about if there were not that sort of topical arrangement.
Here, in the passage I’ve just read, is what some have called a Markan sandwich. Mark has quite a few of them, where he begins a story, and then the story is interrupted by something, and then you get the rest of the story. So you have a slice, and then something in the middle, and then the other slice.
As in the case of a sandwich, you sometimes describe what the sandwich is by what’s in the middle. A ham sandwich is not defined by the bread, by the slices, but by the ham in the middle. What distinguishes a ham sandwich from an egg sandwich is not the bread, which can be diverse, but the stuff in the middle, whether it’s ham or egg.
Likewise, in some ways, the account of this entire double healing is really defined by what’s in the middle, namely the healing of the woman with this hemorrhage for 12 years. Right at the middle of the middle is Jesus’ question, “Who touched me?” Thus suddenly that question begins to shed light on the entire narrative, and if we had more time we could show that that narrative itself is linked with the rest of the accounts on either side too.
Thus, in verses 21–24, we are introduced to Jairus, the synagogue ruler; his daughter; and to Jairus’ desperate plea for help. Then in verses 25–34, the account of the healing of the woman with the hemorrhage, and then in verses 35–43, we go back to Jairus and his daughter. Now note some of the similarities between the two accounts. These are not accidental. They’re carefully put together by Mark, brought along by the Spirit of God, so that we’re forced to think about connections.
Both are stories of a female restored by Jesus’ touch, a younger woman and a more mature woman. In both, the women are addressed by Jesus as “daughter” or similar affectionate diminutive. Both the duration of the woman’s illness and the age of the daughter are given as 12 years. In both accounts there are scoffers who laugh at what Jesus is doing. In verse 38, it’s the disciples themselves. In verse 40, it’s the professional mourners at the deathbed of the young woman.
In both instances, Jesus comes in contact with someone unclean. According to the ritual of the day, the hemorrhaging woman was unclean and shouldn’t have been in a crowd at all. By the ritual of the day, the young woman who is now dead is defiled too. To touch a corpse means that you are unclean until you go through certain ritual purification. In both cases, it is not Jesus who thus becomes unclean, but Jesus makes the unclean clean.
I think it will help our understanding if we follow the entire narrative twice, once slowly and once rather rapidly, but each time from a slightly different perspective. First, two people of faith. We begin with Jesus in verse 21 on the west side of Galilee. He has just crossed over from the east side. On the east side, there are more Gentiles and there is often more distance. On the west side, there are more Jews and there are substantial crowds.
Then in verses 22–24, we’re introduced to Jairus, a synagogue ruler. A synagogue ruler in the first century was not a paid professional clergy or something like that. A synagogue ruler was the president of the synagogue and had overall insight, but the synagogue ruler was almost always lay.
The synagogue ruler, the president, was responsible for the building, for maintaining the scrolls in good repair or obtaining new ones if the old ones wore out, for making sure on the Sabbath that there were readers to read the appropriate readings that were prescribed for the day, and to make sure there were people set to pray and to organize who was doing the preaching.
Such people were known for their probity and piety, ideally. Often they were quite influential in the community. They were largely and widely respected. By and large, they were more commonly well to do, looked up to in the community for more reasons than simply their piety. Yet this man approaches Jesus without officiousness or pomp, because he is desperate.
Here is the desperation of a parent in anguish. Verse 22: “One of the rulers, named Jairus, came there. Seeing Jesus, he fell at his feet and pleaded earnestly with him, ‘My little daughter is dying. Please come and put your hands on her so that she will be healed and live.’ ” Any parent knows the man’s anguish.
There is some measure of faith here too, as is very clear in verse 23. He expects Jesus to come and do something. Verse 24 simply states, “So Jesus went with him,” thus interrupting his public ministry for this very private, urgent appeal. One of the wonderful things about Jesus is that he is not merely a public figure. He always has time for individuals. Always be aware of mere professionals who can handle big crowds but have no time for individuals.
Then in verses 25–26, despite the fact that the whole setting is one of urgency.… Jesus really must get there because this little girl is dying. She’s literally at the point of death, the text explicitly says in verse 23 in the original. She is about to die. There is not a moment to spare. Yet we find Jesus sparing it, precisely because there’s another urgent suppliant, someone else.
You can put yourself in Jairus’ position. He has interrupted Jesus, and Jesus is rushing off to go to Jairus’ home. Now somebody interrupts Jesus again. What’s Jesus supposed to say? “Sorry, I already have an emergency.” What do you do? Jairus, I’m sure, is simultaneously wondering how Jesus will handle this woman and saying, “Good grief! Get over this one, man. I have a little girl who’s going to die.”
There’s no doubt that Jesus is slowed up by this woman, and it is right after this account of the woman that the report comes that Jairus’ daughter has died. This woman has had her problem for 12 years. She could have waited another half hour, for goodness’ sake. By making time for her, isn’t Jesus jeopardizing Jairus’ daughter? You can imagine the anguish of the man.
In verse 27, the story unfolds. “When she heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, because she thought, ‘If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed.’ ” She was the one who had suffered so much for so many years. Apparently she had some complex gynecological problem, hopeless to the medicine of the day. She had spent all of her resources trying to get help, and she had only gotten worse.
What was in her mind when she thought that she would be helped by just touching Jesus’ cloak? We don’t know. It could have been pretty close to superstition. It could have been that she had heard the reports of who Jesus was and seen something of what he had done or talked to people who had been helped, and she thought, “If I can just touch his clothes, that would be enough.”
Or it may be that she was more sophisticated. Maybe she saw that he was so much the representative of God that just as God’s altar at the tabernacle, according to Exodus 29, was so holy that if you touched that altar you became holy as well, so somehow she thought, “If I could just touch Jesus, something of what this man is will rub off on me.”
What was going through her mind is not disclosed. All we’re told very simply, without any statement as to her orthodoxy, is that she heard, she came, and she touched. There is a real measure of desperation, as there was with Jairus, and a real measure of faith. How informed we do not know. What we are told in verse 29 is that she experienced immediate healing. “Immediately her bleeding stopped and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering.”
That is typical of Jesus’ miracles. None of this graded stuff. There is only one exception to that, where a blind man sees people at first like trees walking, and then with a second touch the man is healed completely. The pattern in the New Testament is that when either Jesus or one of the apostles or someone else does a miracle, there is instantaneous and indisputable transformation. Total relief.
Then our central verse: “At once Jesus realized that power had gone out from him. He turned around in the crowd and asked, ‘Who touched my clothes?’ ” The exact psychology of Jesus knowing that power has gone out from him is not easy to figure out. One can think of parallels. Supposing you have a robust dad who’s, let’s say, 34 and a bit of a muscle man, someone who has been given to exercising strongly, and now he has a couple of weights on his arms, and he has closed his eyes and he’s doing curls. “One, two, three, four …”
Unbeknownst to him, his 20-month-old comes into the carpeted room, sees Dad, and hangs onto one of the weights. “… five, six.” He knows in himself that power has gone out of him. He knows the difference in some way, but it’s still the cherished son or daughter. He glances down, sees what’s going on, and doesn’t miss a beat. He just keeps right on going. I don’t know what the psychology of it is, but Jesus knows that power has gone out of him to transform, and he asks the question, “Who touched my clothes?”
Again, it would be very unwise to assume that Jesus doesn’t know the answer. There are some who try to infer from this that Jesus did not know, but one needs to be careful. We’ll see that there are reasons in the text itself a few lines on that suggest that Jesus knew exactly, and in any case, there are examples where God himself, who certainly knows the answer, asks questions.
For example, when Adam, after the first rebellion, hides in the garden, God coming to meet with him in the cool of the day says, “Where are you?” Do you mean God didn’t know? “I’m looking. Where are you?” The point is that the question sometimes may be cast precisely to force an answer from the party to which the question is pushed. God wants Adam to step forward and ultimately to face further the responsibility for what he himself has done.
We’ll see in a moment that there’s good reason for thinking that Jesus knows. “Who touched me?” The disciples can’t make head nor tail of that. This is a crowd, pummeling, pushing. It’s not a nice polite summer fellowship Wednesday night at Knox, where everybody is in pews and there’s at least some distance between us. Nobody is pressing on me.
If you’ve ever been in some countries where the polite distance gets down to 18 inches or even 12, and then throw in a crowd on top of that, you know very well that any speaker, whether political or religious or any other kind, can be pushed and shoved, and people want to touch you and squeeze you and give you a hug. People are all around you all the time. That’s what it was like.
The disciples see the crowd pressing against Jesus, and they say, “Good grief, man! How can you ask, ‘Who touched me?’ For crying out loud! Everybody is trying to get a piece.” But Jesus doesn’t back off. He persists in this quest. In the following verses, you begin to get the significance of his question.
“Jesus kept looking around to see who had done it. Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell at his feet and, trembling with fear, told him the whole truth. He said to her, ‘Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.’ ” This has the effect of establishing what a true encounter with Jesus is like as far as he is concerned.
Over against the mass pressure of the crowd, with everybody touching against him, one has touched who has taken away something of Jesus’ power. Over against those who merely draw close in order to gain some blessing, she wants the miracle. He wants the personal encounter. She would be quite happy to come and get the blessing and go away. So why doesn’t Jesus say, “Well, that’s another one. Thank you, heavenly Father,” and press on with the crowd? “I still have to get to Jairus’ house on time.” Instead, he slows the pace down.
This could have happened with Jesus knowing and smiling quietly to himself and saying, in effect, “Yes, I don’t have to pronounce anything. The power of the living God is upon me. The Spirit of God is upon me. He has anointed me to do these precise things. He who has seen me has seen the Father.” He could have smiled quietly to himself and pressed on. Instead, he slows the pace. “Who touched me?”
The whole effect of this is to change something from a mere power encounter to a personal encounter. She wants a miracle; he wants a meeting. She wants the answer to her problems; he wants to confront her with respect to her faith. There is a Jewish thinker, dead some years now, Martin Buber, who used to distinguish between what he called I-It relationships and I-Thou relationships.
I have an I-It relationship with my computer. I have an I-It relationship with my power tools. I have an I-It relationship with my books. I have an I-Thou relationship with my wife. I have an I-Thou relationship with my son and my daughter. Now some people want a kind of I-It relationship with God. God is the big power source. God is the supplier of what enables me to do whatever I have to do or gives me the kind of blessing I want. God is the genie in Aladdin’s lamp.
God is the ground of all of our being, but Christ won’t let it sit there. He wants an I-Thou relationship. That’s why the first commandment is to love God with heart and soul and mind and strength. It’s a whole personal being encounter with the whole personal sovereign creator God. “Who touched me?” It brings her forth, trembling and in fear, for she knows she has been the recipient of something and is already undoubtedly traumatized by 12 years of being an outsider.
Strictly speaking, she could have faced severe punishment for being in this crowd at all. A woman who was unclean by constant bleeding was supposed to be kept away from her family, and anybody she came in contact with was herself or himself unclean again until they had gone through ritual purification. Strictly speaking, anybody she was brushing up against in this whole crowd.… She shouldn’t have been there. She knew she was in trouble.
She had lived for 12 years not only with a malady but with shame and ostracism and loneliness, and now she’s being exposed to the light. “Who touched me?” She comes and speaks the whole truth, we’re told. In the kingdom of God, miracles are not an end to themselves. They lead to meeting. Discipleship is not simply a matter of getting one’s needs met. It is growing in the presence of Jesus, being known by him and following him on his terms.
She does not evade him. In verse 33, she comes falling at his feet, trembling, and she is met with compassion and not reproach. Look again at verse 34. “He said to her, ‘Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.’ ” Note four things about this verse.
First, clearly Jesus does know her. He knows about her condition. He doesn’t say, “Well, this is all rather startling. I didn’t know any of this. This is quite dramatic.” No, it sounds indeed as if he has already called her forth precisely to articulate all her need in a framework in which he knows who she is, knows that she has been healed, knows that she has been freed from her suffering.
Second, the words of Jesus are connected with his touch. If he had said nothing, she might have gone away and been inclined to think of the power of Jesus in largely magical terms. The real answer is just touching. The real answer is just getting a corner of his robe. That’s all that’s really necessary.
But no, now, by insisting that he knows the power has gone out from him and by talking about her faith and by insisting that he give this pronouncement, “Your faith has healed you,” the whole thing has become personalized. What is dispelled is any notion of God’s power as cheap magic.
Third, hers was nevertheless an act of faith. Doubtless, other ill people pressed on Jesus in a vast crowd in the first century, with people gathering around this miraculous preacher and wonder worker. Undoubtedly, other people pressed against him and were not healed. They touched, but they were not transformed. Why this one, then? It wasn’t simply the touch, as if it were a case of magic.
Maybe I have some dread disease, and I brush up against Jesus, and.… Zap! I’m cured like some cartoon character from the Marvel comics. No, she is transformed, but she does approach Jesus as an act of faith. However well informed or mixed with superstition that faith may be, she expects to be transformed by him, and Jesus acknowledges the point. He says, “Your faith has saved you.”
Lastly, the language Jesus uses, for anybody who’s familiar with the whole gospel, is pregnant with meaning. The NIV from which I’m reading has, “Your faith has healed you.” It’s literally, “Your faith has saved you,” because the notion of salvation includes not only physical transformation, which we call healing, but salvation from sin and the curse and, ultimately, in the right context, transformation of our bodies on the last day, a new heaven and a new earth.
It’s as if this healing of the woman physically is part and parcel of a bigger saving. Jesus says to her, “Your faith has saved you.” You can’t understand that in some narrow sense to refer merely to the healing, but in the light of where the whole book is going, in the light of the fact that this book brings Jesus to the cross, in the light of the fact that five chapters on, in chapter 10, Jesus himself says that he did not come to be served but to serve and to give his life a ransom for many …
In the light of the fact that not very far on, in chapter 14, we will discover that Jesus is instituting a new covenant in his blood, it’s hard not to see that this saving is more than the healing. The healing is a kind of window into the larger healing that is also taking place, part and parcel of the purpose of Jesus’ coming. Even the little expression, “Go in peace …” For us, peace often has to do with psychological well-being, but peace at that time was shalom, Arabic salaam.
It could be just a greeting, “Shalom,” but, “Peace be with you,” suggested more than that. It is often used in the Old Testament for the whole peace with God that we gain by being in right covenant relationship with him. There is a pregnant anticipation in the language that looks for more than, “Go away and be happy.” It’s not all spelled out yet. We’re still before the cross. But the language is pregnant with anticipation.
Then in verses 35–36, we come back to the slice. We’ve left the meat in the middle. We come back to the slice, back to Jairus. Now it transpires that the delay with the woman with the hemorrhage has allowed time for Jairus’ daughter to die. The healing of one has meant the death of the other. We read, “While Jesus was still speaking, some men came from the house of Jairus, the synagogue ruler. ‘Your daughter is dead,’ they said. ‘Why bother the teacher any more?’ ”
He may be a healer, but resuscitation is a wee bit beyond even him. But Jesus’ response still focuses on the issue of faith. Verse 36: “Ignoring what they said, Jesus told the synagogue ruler, ‘Don’t be afraid; just believe.’ ” Jairus at least has enough faith, enough desperation, to proceed. In part, this is the challenge of all discipleship. When circumstances become sufficiently dire, it is easy to disbelieve.
In part, the challenge of all discipleship is still to trust Christ even in the midst of loss, even in the midst of the most horrible suffering or disappointment or grief. “Don’t be afraid,” Jesus still says to those who would follow him. “Just trust.” Apparently, then, Jairus has some faltering faith that needs to be propped up. Jesus proceeds, and as is not uncommon, he takes the three of the 12 disciples who constitute the kind of inner core, Peter, James, and John, and they proceed into the house.
We’re given a vision of first-century mourning rites in verses 38–39. “When they came to the home of the synagogue ruler, Jesus saw a commotion, with people crying and wailing loudly.” You must understand that different cultures around the world have different mourning practices. For many of us, we’re supposed to keep a stiff upper lip. It’s part of the residual British heritage. On the other hand, there is another kind of heritage. From other parts of the world, you’re not honoring the dead unless you let it all hang out.
If you’ve been to some Greek funerals or Latin American funerals, then the whole idea is to let it out, and you’re not really honoring the dead unless you do let it out. First-century Palestinian life was much closer to that. It was prescribed in some Jewish codes that even the poorest family at a funeral was supposed to provide for at least two professional wailing women and a flutist. The flutist would not be playing happy ditties. The flutist would be playing dirges, and the wailing women would start wailing.
The idea was if they could cry loudly enough and long enough, then everybody else who was there would feel desperate and start crying too. That’s the way it went. Professional wailers and mourners. At a really large funeral or a really large wake, you’d have almost an orchestra of dirges and wailing women around. It could be very depressing. On the other hand, it sort of got it all out, I suppose. There was a certain kind of catharsis. It was considered part of the way you honored the dead.
This is the scene Jesus comes into. The wailing started from the moment the person died until the person was buried, and sometimes even after. Burial usually took place on the same day. So she has died. The mourning has already started. People are crying and wailing loudly. “He went in and said to them, ‘Why all this commotion and wailing? The child is not dead but asleep.’ ”
This is not a medical judgment. It is a way that Jesus often speaks of genuine death. He says something similar in the case of Lazarus, even after Lazarus has been in the tomb for four days. When there was already decay, he says, “No, he’s sleeping.” The disciples thought that was pretty strange too. It’s one of Jesus’ ways of saying, in effect, that death is not final. Death may be the last enemy; it does not have the last word. It is not final.
But they don’t understand any of this. There’s more scorn. They just laughed at him, probably the same people who were doing some of the professional wailing. Now they can laugh at him too, because it is merely professional. “After he put them all out, he took the child’s father and mother and the disciples who were with him, and went in where the child was. He took her by the hand and said to her, ‘Talitha koum!’ ”
Talitha is another diminutive, almost “lambkin,” or something like that. “Sweet child, get up.” He speaks in Aramaic. Mark doubtless gets the report from Peter himself, who was there, and puts the words in as words that came from Jesus’ own mouth, but because Mark himself is writing for a Greek-speaking audience, he then has to translate them, because none of the Greek readers would know what talitha koum means, any more than English readers know what it means.
So he puts in the translation. “(‘Little girl, I say to you, get up!’). Immediately the girl stood up and walked around (she was twelve years old). At this they were completely astonished. He gave strict orders not to let anyone know about this …” This was his regular practice in Jewish parts of the world in order to damp down messianic expectations that were often political. “… and told them to give her something to eat.”
So here we have two people of faith. We may look at the same sandwich account in another way and consider two kinds of faith. It’s two people of faith, both Jairus and the woman, but now two kinds of faith. Who are the two people who exercise faith in this long account? Jairus on the one hand and the woman with the hemorrhage. Now notice the contrast between the two.
Jairus is named. We don’t know her name. It wasn’t preserved. Jairus was a man of standing in a community, important. Not only did she not have any standing as a synagogue ruler but with her particular problem she was a castaway. She was disgraced. She had lived the last 12 years of her life in shame. He was appealing for another. She was appealing for herself.
He approaches Jesus respectfully, no doubt, not with pomposity. He falls at his feet, but from the front. She sneaks up behind, hoping to do no more than merely touch his robe. You read the account of Jairus, and although he is desperate, he has a kind of bold persistence. “Come with me. My daughter is at the point of death. You can fix it.” You read the account of the woman, and she strikes us as desperate but frightened, ashamed, utterly lacking in confidence.
Yet at the end of the day, she has faith that Jesus commends. “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Your faith has saved you. Go in peace.” He, for his part, has faltering faith that must be propped up. “Don’t be afraid; just believe.” Thus, it is precisely the sandwiched account of the woman that acts as a foil for the larger account in which it is embedded. As a result, we understand faith more clearly than we would have done if the two accounts were widely separated in different parts of Mark’s gospel.
Now do you see the bearing of this for us? Begin with what faith means on the streets of Toronto. If you were to walk across the street into the university and ask people at random, “What does the word faith mean to you?” what would people say? Unless you happen to come across a Christian, I suspect that faith for the overwhelming majority of people in Toronto means one of two things.
It’s a way of referring to religion. “There are many faiths.” In that sentence, that’s exactly the same as saying, “There are many religions.” That usage is almost found in the New Testament in one or two passages, for the Christian religion is sometimes referred to simply as “the faith” or Jude can refer to “the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints.” Even there in the New Testament, when faith is used that way, never is it used to refer to other religions. It is used only of the Christian religion.
Outside of that, it is far more common for New Testament writers to think of idolatries rather than faiths. More commonly yet in our culture, faith means religious personal preference abstracted from questions of truth. Some people are helped by their faith in Jesus, others are helped by their faith in Allah, others are helped by their faith in Krishna, others are helped by their faith in the vibrations of crystals, and others are helped by their faith in voodoo.
If it’s true for you, that’s all that really matters. The truth question in an objective sense is not on the table for discussion, because you can’t know these things in any true sense, in any case. It’s a question of personal faith, personal religious preference. “You have your faith, and I have my faith, and who’s to say who’s right or wrong? We can’t say, and it doesn’t matter anyway so long as you’re sincere. I’m quite a spiritual person, you know.” Isn’t that the way faith is used in our culture?
Thus, if you encourage people in that culture with an expression like, “You really must have faith in Jesus, you really must trust Jesus, you really must exercise faith in Jesus,” that use of faith is never, ever found in the Bible. Not once. Not even close. In the Bible, the validity of faith turns in the first instance.… It’s not the only ground, but the validity of faith turns in the first instance on the truthfulness of what is believed. It turns on the truthfulness of the object of faith.
Thus, for example, when Paul is talking about faith in the resurrection of Jesus in 1 Corinthians 15, he says, “If it’s not true that Jesus rose from the dead, then your faith is vain.” It’s not vain because of lack of sincerity. It’s vain if Jesus really didn’t rise from the dead, because then you’re believing something that isn’t true. He says if only for this life we have faith in Jesus, then we’re of all men most to be pitied. We’re believing something that isn’t true.
Worse than that, he says, the apostles who claimed that they saw him are liars. Worse than that, because we are sinners, we’re still dead in our sins. We’re of all men most to be pitied, because we have a form of religion that isn’t true. In the New Testament, in other words, faith is a God-given ability to perceive certain things that are true and to trust your whole life to them and to him who establishes their truthfulness.
The Bible never, ever suggests that we should believe that which we do not think is true. That’s not faith. It’s indigestion or presumption or stupidity or gullibility, but it’s not faith. That is why the New Testament writers were always trying to push the truthfulness of who Jesus is or the facticity of the resurrection or the truthfulness of the witnesses. This is part and parcel of the fact that this is a historical revelation. God discloses himself in real space-time history.
It’s why the role of witnesses is so important in the pages of the New Testament. There were people who saw and touched and heard and wrote down and preserved and passed on, with multiple attestations and multiple voices and multiple witnesses. If at the end of the day you come to read and reread this and decide that it isn’t true, then don’t believe it. From a Christian perspective, you may be lost, but at least you’re honest in your lostness.
It is very important to understand that New Testament faith has its ultimate validity in the truthfulness of what is believed. Nevertheless, having said this, it is also important to say that the New Testament writers then give further additional flavors to faith in their different writings. For example, in the epistle to the Hebrews, one of the great emphases in that book on faith is that genuine faith perseveres. Genuine faith is a persevering sort of faith.
Here, it is the faith of the woman that is cast most positively in the narrative, not the faith of Jairus, and that contrast then gives us some fresh insight into what Christian faith is about. It’s not only faith in Jesus who really is true, who really is reliable, who really is trustworthy, but there’s something more. When we compared this woman with Jairus, we saw that she had no name, no standing, no security. She was ashamed. She did not deign to approach Jesus boldly. She comes to him frightened.
I’m sure there are some people in this meeting tonight who look at the pastor of this church, for example, and think of him as a man of faith, or maybe you know some mature Christians, who have been around the block a long time, and they’re steady and stable. You think of them as men or women of mature faith, and you look at your own life. Maybe you’re not very gifted intellectually. “How can I really trust Christ?”
Maybe you’ve suffered enormously, and with the suffering has come some times of doubt and insecurity and fear. You’re just plain frightened of the future. “How do I trust Christ?” Or maybe you now have the sentence of death upon you with a terminal case of cancer or you’ve just been bereaved, or maybe you know of such deep-dyed sins in your life that no one else knows about but God Almighty himself, and you think, “How can I trust Christ?”
I want to tell you that if a broken, disgraced, fearful, frightened woman in the first century has her faith commended by Jesus, then you are welcome to come and trust Christ. The faith that is commended here in this double account is faith that is not only desperate but broken. It’s not the faith of the strong; it’s the faith of the weak. It’s not the faith of the respected but the faith of the disgraced. It’s not the faith of the bold but the faith of the frightened.
This, too, is bound up with the object of faith, Jesus himself. He came as a doctor comes for the sick. He came as the strong comes for the weak. He came for the broken and the bruised and the guilty. You know what? He wants not only that you should, as it were, draw from his power, suck some power, some forgiveness from him and move on. No, no, no. As you bow before him and trust him, cry heavenward, “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief,” you may hear a small voice saying, “Who touched me?”
He asks the question not because he does not know the answer but because he wants an I-Thou relationship. God’s own Messiah, God’s own agent in creation, God’s own King of the universe wants to know and forgive and empower the broken, the bruised, the needy, the frightened, and the desperate. Let us pray.
O Lord God, on the one hand, we really do want to understand your Word better, but on the other hand, we want not so much to be masters of it as to be mastered by it. We want to see the Lord Jesus with eyes of faith. Not the faith of secure and bold people but the faith of those who recognize our limitations, our failures, our sins, our disgrace, and still come with quiet confidence, because to whom else shall we go? He has the words of eternal life.
So Lord God, by your Spirit work among us this evening, we pray, and where there is deep guilt, O Lord God, disclose yourself not only in holiness but in forgiveness. Where there is despair, bring hope. Where there is loneliness, show yourself to be the lover of our souls. Where there is crushing fear, O Lord, remind us afresh that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to his purpose.
“No good thing will the Lord withhold from those who walk uprightly.” “He who did not spare his own Son but freely gave him up for us all, how shall he not also with him graciously give us all things?” Thus, Lord God, by the promises of the gospel, by the glorious patience and forbearance of Christ, increase our small faith, we pray. In Jesus’ name, amen.
