"This week's passage contains two stories that are, for very good reason, woven into one. Just as the sea crossings hold more meaning than might first appear, this narrative of healing and restoration of life is full of contrasts and connections that weave the two incidents together tightly. You might say that these two incidents together help us to understand each of them. They both involve women in crisis – in fact, we don't know them by their names but by their needs – both "daughters" of Abraham, not outsiders to begin with but now both subject to the taboos around the mysterious power of life (blood) and the even more mysterious (and seemingly unconquerable) power of death. Neither a bleeding woman nor a dead girl should be touched, at the risk of conveying their uncleanness to others." And yet Jesus, God's love and compassion incarnate, touches us, or allows us to touch him. We reach out in faith, forgetting, or in spite of our fear, and receive life from him.
"Another theme that runs throughout these stories is really a way of describing that reception: faith, or no faith. Faith, or fearfulness. Faith, or confusion or hard-headedness or maybe even hard-heartedness.
Our text this week sits on that point between faith and fear as it tells us two stories in one, both of them taking place on "this" side of the sea, after Jesus has returned from Gentile territory where he was (perhaps politely but definitely with fear) asked to leave. Fear, not rejoicing, was the response of the people who witnessed the spectacular and very public healing of a man who had unclean spirits; surprisingly, they didn't flock to Jesus in hope of more miracles. In contrast, the former demoniac wanted to leave everything behind and follow him. In this case, we get to hear about what happens later to someone whom Jesus has healed, and how his life has been transformed: he goes about the countryside telling everyone what Jesus had done for him, "amazing everyone."
Barbara Brown Taylor and Frederick Buechner have both written beautiful sermons on this text, and they bring the scene alive before our eyes. Buechner is tender as he puts us in the place of the little girl, as Jesus speaks to us, taking our hand and telling us to rise up and live: "You who believe, and you who sometimes believe and sometimes don't believe much of anything, and you who would give almost anything to believe if only you could….'Get up,' he says, all of you – all of you!" Jesus gives life not only to the dead, but to those of us who are "only partly alive…who much of the time live with our lives closed to the...wild beauty and miracle of every day we live and even of ourselves." That, Buechner says, is the power at the heart of this story and all of our stories: "the power of new life, new hope, new being" ("Jairus's Daughter" inSecrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons). Whether we take notice or not, miracles happen around us every day, and "every single breath we take," Taylor writes, "is a free surprise from God. Faith does not work miracles. God does." And every miracle, she says, gives a taste of the reign of God that is to come ("The Problem with Miracles" in Bread of Angels)."
~ The above was taken from The Rev. Kathryn Matthews Huey in Reflection on Healing Powers.
This brings to mind the old hymn by Lewis E. Jones, 1999 - "There's Power in the Blood"
Refrain:
There is pow'r, pow'r,
wonder working pow'r
In the blood
of the Lamb;
There is pow'r, pow'r,
wonder working pow'r
In the precious
blood of the Lamb.
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