A Sermon for the Sixth Sunday after Pentecost
Posted on by The Rev. Dr. Frank Kirkpatrick
June 30, 2024
Trinity Church, Hartford
The Rev. Dr. Frank Kirkpatrick
The Sixth Sunday After Pentecost: 2 Samuel 1:1, 17-27; 2 Corinthians 8:7-15; Mark 5:21-43
In this morning’s gospel we find two stories focusing on the healing powers of Jesus. In the first story a woman with a medical illness (called a hemorrhage) is healed by touching Jesus’ cloak. In the second story, a girl gets up and begins to walk after Jesus comes into her room and speaks to her. At first glance these seem like two stories of healing by Jesus. But on further examination, it is interesting to note that Jesus does not himself choose to heal the hemorrhaging woman. In fact, he only knows that someone has touched his clothes but does not know who until she reveals herself. Jesus only knows that power (of some sort) had gone out of him. He is not the initiator of this healing moment, she is.
And in the second story, it is unclear whether Jesus does an intentional act of healing or not. He starts off by telling her parents that she is not dead at all but only sleeping. His only act in this instance is to tell her to get up and she does. The story does not say that he brought her back to life or healed her, though that is the standard interpretation.
Now, what are we to make of this apparent passivity on the part of Jesus in these two stories? He does not proactively initiate healing or restoration. In the first case the woman is the initiator and in the second case no act of restoration to life is needed because the girl was not dead but only sleeping. Perhaps we are being reminded that we ourselves are not completely passive in our relationship with God and Jesus in our own spiritual and religious lives. This was certainly the case in the instance of the hemorrhaging woman. It is she who takes the initiative and reaches out for Jesus (he does not reach out for her nor does he respond to her entreaties (she makes none at all, just reaches for his cloak). It is her faith in the healing power of Jesus that effects her cure. And in the story of the young girl, Jesus only speaks to her and she arises and walks. It does not say that his words brought her back to life because Jesus knew that she was only sleeping.
What these stories tell us is that we ourselves have the ability to contribute to our own healing, to exercise some degree of free agency and will. We need to take some kind of proactive steps that enable us to tap into the power of God through faith in the power of Jesus as the medium through whom healing is transmitted. There is a danger in thinking that all acts of healing come from God and Jesus alone without our participation and active involvement. That kind of deterministic thinking reduces us to merely passive puppets, dangling from divine strings and responding only when God pulls them. For a long time in the history of Christian thought, beginning with St. Augustine and getting renewed emphasis from Martin Luther and John Calvin, there was a theological emphasis on the utter depravity of human nature. This notion of depravity led to such monstrous ideas as the claim that God and God alone has determined our cosmic destiny for either salvation or damnation based solely on God’s mysterious choice before the world began. This led to the idea of double predestination in which our fate was the result of a deterministic decision by God without any input from the choices and agencies of human beings. The end result was that we humans were totally passive and inert in our relationship with God. While it is certainly true that as humans we always fall short of being the kinds of people God wants us to be, the notion of total depravity is not worthy of God’s compassion for us, God’s desire that we live up to our divine potential, exercising our moral agency to make ourselves and the world better than they presently are. This means we need to reflect the kind of faith or trust that the hemorrhaging woman had in the power of Jesus. We are being called to take the initiative and reach out proactively to Jesus and, through him, to all those people in our community and our world who are doing acts of healing. There are lots of people and forces in the world promising us that if we will only clutch their cloaks in unswerving, uncritical loyalty, they will bring us happiness and the fulfillment of all our dreams. But if the stories in this morning’s gospel are to be given their due, then we must start our journey to the kingdom to which God is calling us, by an act of free will, reaching out to Jesus and acknowledging that we need his healing power; we need to tap into the power that he embodies and offers to us in our afflictions. Then, using the power Jesus transmits to us, we need to exercise our agency to find and support those persons who are actively engaged in healing or repairing the world. We need to shun the cloaks of those who offer us only the fruits of destruction, depravity, domination, division, hostility, fear, self-centeredness, and the inflaming of our resentments against those whom we are led to believe are taking something from us. Instead, we need to find those persons who are exercising compassion, love, healing, reconciliation, justice, and peace. It is their cloaks we need to reach for and emulate. And such vehicles of healing are found in all sorts of places: caregivers to the sick; social justice advocates, friends, neighbors who respond when we are in trouble, social workers, and all those people and institutions that are devoted to creating and maintaining institutions that bring greater equity and fairness to a broken world. We need to be woken up, as was the girl in the story this morning (she may even be the first Biblical example of a ‘woke’ person), by the voice of Jesus and not by the cacophonous voices of those who would lead us into the wilderness of death and desolation. We need to courageously and even perhaps aggressively reach out for the cloaks of those in the daily enterprises of healing and compassion and shun and repudiate those who would exploit our fears and drive into division. We can become like the hemorrhaging women and proactively reach out for the cloaks of those who devote their lives to meeting the needs of others.