February 6, 2011 | 4:00 p.m.

When Words Are Not Enough

Part of the Sermon Series
“Preaching through the Gospel of Mark”

Matthew J. Helms
Pastoral Resident, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Mark 5:21–43

It is truly an incredible scene, if you stop to think about it. Here is Jesus, a carpenter from Nazareth who has gotten this reputation for being able to cast out demons and heal the sick. Mark tells us that the crowds grew huge as people were curious what this man would do next. As he walks, a highly respected man of the city, one of the synagogue leaders, runs up and drops to Jesus’ feet—surely a shocking gesture at the time—and this man asks Jesus to help his daughter. As Jesus travels to heal her, however, a chronically ill woman filled with a belief in Jesus’ healing powers reaches out and touches Jesus’ cloak, and then, almost supernaturally, she is healed. After resuming his route to the man’s daughter, Jesus then arrives at the synagogue leader’s house only to find his daughter is dead, a condition that the people logically assume is beyond Jesus’ healing purview. And yet Jesus speaks, using bold words, telling them to not be afraid, but only to have faith. To everyone’s astonishment, Jesus takes the girl’s hand and tells her to get up. Immediately she gets up, and we are left to wonder how this is possible and who this Jesus really is.

This story is moving and inspiring on its own and truly speaks to the awe that people had for Jesus, but since we are spending an extended period of time on Mark’s story and who Jesus is in Mark’s Gospel, it is also important that we stop and recognize Mark’s rhetorical brilliance in piecing together these two scenes. When these scenes were read out loud, we split them up with music, but if you look in your pew Bibles, there is not a lot of differentiation in terms of paragraph breaks and scene switching. It seems as though Mark saw these two scenes as very connected to one another. This pairing of similar stories was a common rhetorical technique in the ancient world, and it was typically used to tie the themes of two stories together. It was typical too that the center story contained the kernel of the message. So perhaps we should spend time examining the major themes of this center story—of this woman bold enough to touch Jesus’ cloak—and spend some time thinking about how they connect with the wider story of Mark?

First and foremost, the themes that jump off the page are these themes of fear and faith. In Mark’s Gospel, it seems as though Jesus is continually telling people not to be afraid, but to instead have faith. Fear is the antithesis of faith for Mark. The woman begins this story with boldness and no fear, just as the synagogue leader ran up to Jesus with boldness and no fear; she reaches out and touches Jesus’ cloak. But then she begins to doubt herself, just as we all do, when Jesus asks who touched her cloak. She assumes that she was in the wrong; perhaps she was too bold in reaching out to touch Christ. The story states that she comes before Jesus with “fear and trembling,” only to have Jesus reassure her of her faith. We see a similar theme pop up in the story of Jairus, the temple leader whose daughter is raised. Jairus has believed that his daughter could be healed by Jesus, but he doubts after hearing she is dead; he fears that Jesus came too late. And yet Jesus speaks with boldness, saying that they should not be afraid but only believe. Casting out fear and having faith in Jesus with boldness is a prominent theme in these stories then, and throughout Mark’s Gospel we see Jesus again and again imploring people to not be afraid.

It seems as though faith is connected to another major theme in Mark—that of salvation. For Mark, salvation is something that occurs through faith, a trust in Jesus and Jesus’ saving grace. Both the woman touching the cloak and Jairus’s daughter are said to be saved by Jesus. And yet Mark puts a twist on our common understanding of salvation and healing; he heals through physical touch. Throughout the other Gospels, Jesus speaks words of healing and people are healed. In particular, the Gospel according to John depicts Jesus as the pre-existent Word and it is primarily through the power of words that Jesus heals. And yet here in Mark we see the more human side of Jesus—someone who heals through personal touch. Rather than through words, it was through contact with Jesus’ cloak that the woman was healed. Rather than just telling Jairus’s daughter to get up, Jesus takes the little girl’s hand and raises her. In both these stories, the power of someone’s hand making contact with another is what begins the moment of healing and the moment of salvation.

I was amazed when going through Mark’s Gospel this week to see how often physical touch occurs in these healing stories. In truth, it was a bit bizarre to me, because we live in a society that is uncomfortable with physical touch—perhaps many of us are even uncomfortable with the word or thought. It is extremely important to be conscious and wary about how we touch one another, particularly given the horrible cases of physical abuse and exploitation that we are all aware of. But I often wonder if perhaps we have gone too far in cutting personal contact out of our lives. Before you peg me as someone who is touchy-feely, I can completely reassure you that I am anything but touchy-feely; in fact, I try to avoid physical contact whenever possible. I take the L every day to work, and after I sit down, I defend my personal space like it was gold.

Perhaps you feel the same way, and perhaps that really is a cultural thing for us as Americans. I know that two friends of mine both spent significant time in Africa, and they said that the hardest thing for them to get used to while being there was the lack of personal space. Instead of shaking hands with someone and then resuming talking, if you are talking to someone that you don’t know, you are expected to hold hands with them the entire time that you are talking. To me, that sounds absolutely horrifying, but this custom is believed to be in place because it builds up trust between new acquaintances.

I suppose in some ways it is not all that different from our own idea of shaking hands. When you meet someone, it is expected that you shake hands with them. Even more interestingly, there seems to be an expectation that a handshake will occur without gloves or anything else covering up the skin. Throughout this winter, I have observed perhaps a hundred people take their gloves off before shaking hands as they are exiting the church. Why is this? It seems to be a way of connecting with people—physical touch is a sort of tool that creates bonds between people. Gloves, or anything else, just seem like a barrier to these bonds. It is an interesting sociological phenomenon, but it is particularly interesting when we start thinking about the implications that this has on how we think of our faith.

For the most part, when we think of physical touch as an aspect of faith, it is a negative thing. Perhaps the most common example is the story of doubting Thomas as recorded in the Gospel of John. Thomas needed to touch the wounds of the risen Christ in order to believe that Jesus was indeed alive, something that I think 9 out of 10, or maybe even 99 out of 100, of us would have asked to do. However, John disagrees that this physical touch is important; he instead states, “Blessed are those who have not seen, but believed.” The Gospel writer’s hesitance to embrace the importance of touch to faith in Jesus is understandable; after all, Jesus was not physically present for John’s audience, nor would we say that Jesus is physically present with us today. Rather, faith has become something spiritualized and individualized, a private matter that has nothing to do with our bodies and has everything to do with our thoughts and minds.

And yet our passage from Mark today seems to suggest otherwise. Physical touch was an important part of Jesus’ healing, as we heard in these healing stories; words were not enough. Could it be that mere words are not enough for faith? Could it be that our touch can provide trust and connections and empathy in a way that mere words cannot? Could it be that our cultural aversion to touch and our overreliance on words are keeping us from developing community?

I can’t help but remember times from serving as a chaplain when I was too afraid to place my hand on someone’s shoulder to give them comfort after they had learned difficult news. Instead I tried to make a connection with them by talking to them, but I imagine that my words of comfort sounded hollow. Perhaps you have been in a similar situation at a hospital or at a wake when you try to say words of encouragement to someone in need—or even any words at all—and they just sound and feel hollow.

In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus seems to recognize this. He instead lays hands on those who are sick. He does not shy away from taking someone’s hand when they are ill, even though ancient cultural expectations around impurity would have told him not to and our own modern cultural expectations would have told him not to as well. In the midst of fear—of a woman who had suffered for twelve years and who was afraid she would never get better, of a man who had watched his daughter suffer and who was afraid that he would never see her again—in the midst of that fear, Jesus reaches out and takes them by the hand. Rather than allow their fear to take hold, Jesus tells them to have faith. If faith is the opposite of fear in Mark, than faith comes as Jesus offers a comforting hand, ready to lift these people up when they are weak. He empathizes and bonds with them in their condition in a way that he could not have with words.

How is it that simple touches can create that bond or a lively sense of community? Later this evening, Packers and Steelers fans across the nation will gather together, joining in high fives, backslapping, and hugs when their team does well, while poor plays will lead to commiserating and empathy. We watch the Super Bowl not only so that we can yell together but so that we can be together; simply professing our love for our team with words is not enough.

Compare that with our worshiping community here at Fourth Church. Many of us may think the passing of the peace, which happens at the beginning of the service, to be liturgically unimportant, but it is a vital part of worship. Shaking hands with one another reminds us that we do not attend church as individuals, but we come together as the body of Christ to share with one another—share with prayer, share with music, yes, but also to share Christ’s peace and blessings with one another. Earlier I said that Christ was not physically present, but the spiritual presence of Christ pervades this place as we reach out and shake one another’s hand. It is important that the passing of the peace occurs in the beginning of worship, because it reminds us that we are each Christ’s eyes, ears, and hands in the world. It reminds us that we are each part of something that is bigger than ourselves—a thought that I think drives away fear and can help give us faith in both in our church community and in the community to come.

We may all be like doubting Thomas, hoping to reach out and touch Jesus, but perhaps we need to recognize the Christ in our neighbors around us first. We need to learn to hold the hands of others as they need us, and we need to learn how to hold out our hand as we need others to hold us up. It is through this faith, and a rejection of fear, that we begin to feel Jesus’ hand raising us up—raising us up to a new calling and raising us up to a new life.

Let us thank God for that gift as we sing a song that lifts up this need for us to feel Christ’s touch— the favorite song of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and one that he would play at civil rights rallies to encourage a sense of community as we reach out for God’s uplifting hand.