Fire Island Pines is a small LGBT shoreline resort town in New York not unlike the one I currently live in along Lake Michigan. Not surprisingly, the town enjoyed a flurry of festive rainbow flags flying from homes and businesses for LGBTQ Pride Month. One of those flags honored Ritchie Torres, the first openly gay Afro-Latino member of Congress. But Mr. Torres is also a strong and vocal supporter of Israel, so some gay activists tore down his flag and replaced it with one honoring LGBT Palestinians. Not long after that, a gay filmmaker, known for his anti-Muslim remarks, tore down the Palestinian flag.
That tiny town with its competing flags illustrates in painful microcosm the complex wounds of our larger society, and by analogy, the fissures scarring nearly every country on Earth right now. These fractured communities need healing—we all do—but it’s increasingly difficult to imagine what kind of healing we need and where to find suitable salves.
While some people are wounded because of their sexuality, they might also live with the cultural markers of race, which often compels them to wrestle with an impossible decision about whether the color of their skin matters more than whom they choose to love. Others lament that speaking with an accent betrays their outsider status just as pointedly as their indeterminate gender—or maybe one because of the other.
These complexities are manifesting at a time in this country that many commentators are describing as just as grim and grave as the decade leading up to the Civil War era in the 1860s. The social media storm following last week’s CNN presidential debate made those divisions, and their accompanying dismay, all too evident.
Personally, I am so fed up with the vitriol and grandstanding and petty mean-spiritedness around every corner that I’m not sure I even want to heal from some of these wounds, not if it means giving up the resentments that feel like merit badges—I earned this bitterness and I aim to keep it!
And just like that, along comes the Sunday lectionary with a passage from Mark’s account of the Gospel, a passage that carries a timely reminder: it sometimes takes courage to heal.
The portion of Mark’s fifth chapter (5:21-43) assigned for yesterday includes two healing stories, and Mark interrupts one of these stories with the other one, a clue that these two stories should be interpreted together.
Mark is even more direct about weaving these stories into a single garment: in the first story, the daughter of Jairus is twelve years old; and in the second story, the nameless woman has been ill for twelve years. Mark seems to relish telling these two stories as one for a singular point: faith is mostly about overcoming fear for the sake of thriving; faith is the courage to seek healing.
In the first story, Mark presents Jairus as a leader of the local synagogue, a significant religious and civic position whose title Mark mentions not once, not twice, but four times in this short story. Jarius’ social prominence clearly matters for Mark’s purpose, most likely because the conflict between Jesus and the religious establishment keeps worsening with each successive encounter in this gospel. And here, a key leader of that establishment approaches Jesus in public, in the middle of a crowd, to ask for help. That takes courage.
We might also notice how unusual it is for Mark to give this character a name—Jairus. Nearly all the other encounters in this Gospel are anonymous, which some have supposed helps to ensure that the stories remain relevant far beyond any particular first-century person. Mark intends these stories to enjoy a much broader appeal, across time and place.
But Jairus is named and his title repeated, perhaps to encourage people with power and position and privilege—people, that is, with a name—to recognize their own need for courage, and especially where and from whom we can learn such bravery: a nameless woman, sick for years, exploited by physicians, poor and desperate for relief.
This woman takes the initiative for her own healing by reaching out—a risky move indeed. She had no authorized access to Jesus; she wasn’t in his inner circle; her long illness had excluded her from temple worship for all those years—she was ritually unclean.
Mark places her not only at the center of this story but, as one commentator noted (thank you, Andrew McGowan!), this nameless woman is the first character in Mark’s account to be given an interior life; Mark lets us eavesdrop on her own inner dialogue, a dialogue that exhibits a remarkable faith. For Mark, this woman, this courageous, nameless woman, lives as a model of faith: “if only,” she says to herself, “I could touch his clothes.”
Sometimes it takes courage to seek healing. Sometimes it’s easier to stay sick, or remain troubled, or harbor resentments, or simply resign oneself to the misfortunes of fate. Sometimes it’s just easier to stay stuck, even when it’s uncomfortable—at least it’s familiar.
But Jairus and this nameless woman in Mark can inspire us to seek healing, even when it seems foolish, unreasonable, and pointless—especially then, actually, when courage is most needed.
There are others in Christian history who inspire this, too. And it seemed important enough to make this point that I replaced the epistle passage assigned by the lectionary yesterday with an excerpt from the “Showings” of Julian of Norwich.
Julian, a fifteenth-century English mystic, seemed quite untethered to what we today would call “the binary gender system.” She writes about Christ as our mother while also referring to the wound in the side of Christ as the “womb” from which we are born. These odd but compelling slippages in ostensibly appropriate gendering is actually quite common among the mystics, in nearly every religious tradition. And this matters today—it’s actually a matter of life and death.
For some years now most of the targeted violence against LGBT-people has landed squarely on the “T,” on those who push against the edges and boundaries of gender. If any in this Pride Month stand in need of healing and soothing balms for their wounds, it’s anyone mis-gendered, un-gendered, violently-gendered, dis-gendered, or merely beaten to a bloody pulp by someone deep in the throes of gender panic.
It matters that Christians say this. It matters that religious leaders stand up boldly and say this. It matters that we all hear this in churches and create safe religious spaces for the many genders gracing God’s creation. And it matters that we do all this not in spite of the Bible or our theological traditions as Christians but because of them.
Given the horrible track record of religious institutions and communities on nearly every issue related to sex and sexuality, and especially gender, it matters that we can retrieve resources from our very own theological traditions for this vital work of healing—and that’s why we heard from Julian in my parish yesterday rather than Paul.
It’s a scary world and seemingly getting scarier, for all sorts of people. I would say transgender and gender-fluid and gender-queer people are very much today’s “canaries in the coal mine”—if they can’t survive and thrive, then we are all in very serious trouble.
While we have reasons to lament a world like this, many Christians also heard from the biblical book of Lamentations yesterday, which offered a potent reminder: lament is not despair.
In that book devoted to the lamentations of the prophet Jeremiah there is a bold declaration of God’s mercies and of an endless divine faithfulness (3:21-25). All appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, in other words, God remains faithful.
Julian herself insisted on this, even in the midst of bubonic plague that had decimated Medieval Europe for many decades. With signs of disease and death all around her, she could nonetheless declare that “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”
Embracing that declaration is itself a moment of healing for many of our weary hearts. To find the courage for healing is itself a vital part of our healing.
I can scarcely think of a better reason for working hard to sustain religious communities of faith where we can inspire each other with these stories of courage—we need each other, we all do, to inspire our courage.
Together we can learn, over time, to trust the astonishing words Mark’s Jesus spoke to Jairus when Jairus was told that his daughter had died: “don’t be afraid.”
Don’t be afraid.
