Twelve years ago, in June of 1997, Bill Clinton was into his second term as president as he was ending his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Timothy McVeigh was convicted and sentenced to death for the Oklahoma City bombing. The United Kingdom turned Hong Kong over to the Chinese after 99 years of control. In sports, Donovan McNabb had just finished his sophomore year of college. He was a year older than Kobe Bryant, who had just concluded his rookie year in the NBA. Being the same year as Kobe, I had just completed my freshman year of college. Twelve years ago, our members who just finished the sixth grade – Jamie Ashbrook, Anna Semler, John Harnsberger and their crew – were newborn infants and anyone younger than them hadn’t been born yet. Many of our beloved family members, friends and church members were still with us. Twelve years ago, Dick was in his fourth year in our pulpit, while Mary Alice and Karin were still learning and relearning people’s names.
Twelve years is a long time. It’s a lifetime for some. That’s how it must have felt to the daughter of Jairus, one of the leaders of the synagogue. Twelve years was the span of her time on earth. She was a girl of some privilege in her world, because her father was a big deal in the community, but it wasn’t enough to make her well, because we hear of her when her father comes with desperation and in haste to beg Jesus to heal her. This girl, whose name we never know, is about to die, and indeed she will die before Jesus sees her in person. For her, twelve years isn’t nearly long enough.
For the other daughter in this passage, the woman whom Jesus calls “daughter,” twelve years is far, far too long. She has been suffering from hemorrhages for as long as her counterpart has lived. She has spent her last twelve years going to every doctor, healer and psychologist in town, while spending every last dollar she has. All the while, she has gotten no better. There is no end to her bleeding, meaning there has been no end to her isolation from her town, her faith community, her friends and her family, because she is ritually and physically unclean. She has spent twelve long years alone and in pain, and it has been twelve years too long. It must have felt like a lifetime.
I am fascinated that twelve years that keeps popping up in this story. And I am convinced it isn’t a coincidence – as if anything in the Bible ever is. I think there’s something here. For this period of time ties together the lives of these two daughters, the daughter of privilege and the daughter of isolation, despite the fact that they have probably never met each other. Although they could not have known it, their days have been pointing towards each other and towards Jesus for a dozen years now, aimed at the moment when their desperation overflows and runs through the streets like a flash flood. There is certainly enough desperation, enough suffering, enough fear to go around between these two. Each story is more difficult and painful than the other. A child on her deathbed. A woman forever bleeding and forever alone. A life that never really began. A life that ends too soon. It’s tragic any way you look at it – as tragic as any ancient Greek drama or Shakespearean play or cable news story. In some ways, it seems the world never really changes.
Either one of these daughters’ stories could be our story, or that of a friend, loved one or acquaintance. We don’t have to look far to see tragedy and desperation in our own lives and today’s world. There are still plenty of both to go around. Perhaps that’s why these women still resonate with us. We all know people who have died before they should have. And we all know folks who never really got a good shot at life. And our hearts hurt for them. We ache on their behalf. We all have our own stories – names and faces that are floating around in our heads right now. Some of them are from far away, and yet they come to us across space and time. And others we share together – people who have been or are a part of this congregation. Perhaps that’s why Mark leaves these two daughters unnamed – because each of us could fill in their names many times over again. We live in a desperate world. We live in tragic times.
And like the daughters, like Jairus, perhaps we wonder if there’s still enough healing, enough grace, enough of God’s love to go around and match up with all the brokenness. Both the isolated woman and the begging synagogue leader seem to have no doubt that Jesus can do what they need him to do. Or at least they don’t have the luxury of such a doubt. But either way, they don’t challenge Jesus’ ability to help. Jairus begs for healing. The isolated woman takes it. Their great fear isn’t Jesus’ ability. It’s his availability. Jesus never spent too much time in one place, and this story finds him on his way from the country of the Gerasenes back to his hometown of Nazareth. Surely everyone in town who needed Jesus and needed healing wouldn’t get their chance. No doubt Jairus used his position of power to fight his way through the crowd. The daughter of isolation didn’t have that advantage. There just might not be enough grace for both, they fear.
I suspect that is one of our great fears as well – that there just isn’t enough, because we know all about not having enough. Maybe or maybe not with money and resources, but certainly with time. After all, isn’t the perfect person the one who has time to do everything? Don’t we wish that each of us had enough time to get everything done, to spend quality time with all those we like and love, to be able to do the things we enjoy and still find the hours to get enough sleep? We are so busy these days, and so the best and most successful among us are the ones who do it all. And maybe you have some of the same fears I do. Maybe you’re afraid, like I am, that you just can’t manage it all. Maybe you’re afraid that you’ll run out of hours in the day, or energy for hours you do have, or even days in your life. And maybe you sometimes forget, like I do, that God isn’t just a bigger, better person. Maybe you wonder, like I do, how God can attend to the lives of over six billion people, and all of nature, and the whole universe – all at the same time and all the time since time began – without letting a few balls drop here and there. Can God really be available to each of us? Can God really pay that much attention to me at any given moment? Is God big enough for that? Is God wise enough, efficient enough, loving enough, available enough? We all know of people who haven’t been healed, whose lives were cut too short or never given a full measure of opportunity. I can point to places where it sure looks like God dropped the ball. So, do I and my problems really matter to God? Is there enough of God’s grace to go around?
If this were a Bible story about just one daughter, the answer would be “Yes.” It would be a solid, faithful and hopefully convincing “Yes,” the kind you might believe for a moment, or a day, or a week, or until it seems like God has dropped another ball. That “Yes” might be eroded by the scarcity that pervades our lives – the sense that not having enough time, or health, or well-being is far more real than any wholeness our God provides.
But this is a Bible story about two daughters. This is a story about two very different daughters, united by twelve years and desperate need but not much else. For one is rich while the other is flat broke. One has an advocate while the other fights for herself. One is a child while the other is an adult. One is privileged while the other is marginalized. One Jesus knows about before he heals her while the other he heals before seeing her face. One has a big display made on her behalf while the other tries to find healing without anyone knowing. One is healed in private while the other in public. One was physically dead while the other was just socially dead. Two very different daughters.
So yes, there is enough of God’s grace and healing and love to go around. There is enough for all of us – for the rich and the poor, for those with advocates and those who must fight for themselves, for the young and the old, for the privileged and the marginalized, for the public figures and the faceless souls, for the loud and the quiet, for the ones with visible suffering and the ones with invisible brokenness, for the physically dead and the socially dead – for all of us and each of us no matter who we are or why we’re desperate or how much we believe or how busy we are or anything else in all of creation – there is enough of God’s grace and healing and love to go around. Yes. Our God is available for us. Our God cares about us. Our God died for us. So there is enough and there will always be enough. Our God will not run out of grace or healing or love, no matter how much we need. There is enough to go around.
And if this were another sermon about another text, this is the place where I would encourage us all to do something or be something or live a certain way. But this passage isn’t about that. The Jesus we meet here, on June 28 in between the country of the Gerasenes and his hometown of Nazareth, doesn’t tell us to go and sin no more or anything like that. In this place, Jesus is just about grace. Only grace. Nothing more and nothing less. Grace that is more than enough. Healing that will come to us in obvious and subtle ways. Love that will not end with busyness or scarcity or death. No. Just grace. More than enough grace to go around. Amen.