You heard today why some people believe and why some do not. In verse 34 Jesus says to the woman with a 12 year flow of blood: “Daughter, your faith has made you well.” Only one verse later another they came from the house of the synagogue ruler saying : “Your daughter is dead. Don’t trouble the Teacher any more.” One verse and therein lies the hitch. Some people seem to get what they want from God and others don’t. One person gets healed and the other dies. What is the deal?
This is not some debate over abstract ideas. This goes to the heart and core of our faith and life. On the one hand, You have a parent who has hopes and dreams for his child. From the moment that child was born, like every mom or dad, he has imagined a future for that girl to grow up into. A husband, a home, children, grandchildren, family meals, a life together and a life as God’s people. Jairus, this ruler of the synagogue, had hopes and dreams until his daughter became sick, so sick that death was near. And then suddenly nothing mattered except her next day, the next hour. For that this man would fall at the feet of Jesus and beg this Jesus to make her well.
Before Jesus could even get near the man’s house, another person shows up. This was a woman who had a menstrual flow for 12 years. For 12 years she had been unclean and couldn’t go to the Temple, could not marry, could not attend family gatherings. All the normal things that one expects from life were denied her because she was unclean. And there was nothing she could do about it. The doctors had not helped one bit – perhaps they had made things worse by holding out hope that disappointed her. This woman had no future on her own but she had one last chance. If only she could touch the hem of Jesus’ garment, just maybe she might be healed.
God’s power and grace do not live in the realm of theory or in the abstract. They do not offer explanations to placate the mind or philosophical ideals to satisfy our thoughts. God’s power and grace come to us in our wounds and worries, in our sins and sorrows, to offer us real hope. Yes, sometimes that hope is realized in the healing of our bodies and yet the healing of the body is but temporary in the face of what we need most of all. We need the healing of our lives. We need the wellness that can survive death, the forgiveness that clears the conscience, the healing that saves us for eternal life, and hope that leads us through the valley of the shadow into paradise and the eternal day.
Our concerns are not little things to God. God is not bothered by the broken hearts of a dad for a child who is dying and God is not bothered by the broken life of a woman whose life has been a living hell for a dozen years. God has come to redeem every one of us and yet the answers are not all the same because we are not all the same.
What all our prayers have in common is that we trust in God, not the God of last resorts but the God of power who answers our prayers. The father prayed that Jesus would come to his aid and, though he had no idea what Jesus would do, he believed that Jesus was enough. The woman who had bled and suffered for 12 years had no idea what would happen if she touched the hem of Jesus’ garment but she believed that Jesus’ power was her only answer. Faith is focused not on the outcome but on Christ alone.
In Greek the word is the same. You faith has made you WELL. Your faith has SAVED you. We can quibble about the nuances of difference here on earth but the point is the same. Their faith was placed in the One who could answer their need. They believed that Jesus was their help, their only help, their help when every other door had been shut in their face. Their faith did not end the flow of blood or raise up a dead girl. No faith has the power to do this. But their faith was rightly placed in the Son of God who had come in flesh to suffer, die, rise, and save suffering women, dying daughters, and the worried and desperate families who ached for those whom they loved.
Faith is not its own power. But the power of faith is that it knows in whom you must believe. By the Holy Spirit, faith seeks Jesus as the one and only Savior. Faith trusts Jesus to do what is right and needful. Faith accepts that Jesus has come to deliver us to eternal life and not simply to a better but temporary life. Faith looks to the cross where sin is forgiven, where God’s love is made clear and plain, and where the power of death is undone. Jesus has not come to rescue only our spirits or our minds or an idea. He has come to redeem us body and soul and to deliver us into the new flesh death cannot touch and to grant us the perfect rest of spiritual peace.
We are all bleeding. We are all dying – whether that death comes suddenly or slowly over decades. That is what sin has done. Medicine can relieve our suffering some and perhaps stave off the day of our death but they cannot prevent us from dying. That does not make medicine bad. That simply acknowledges the limits of what we can do – even with all our learning and technology. But there is one who can stop the flow of blood and end the reign of death. That one is Jesus; He has power over sin.
So we come like Jairus the synagogue ruler and we ask Jesus to touch us so that we might live. And touch us Jesus does in the water of baptism where our sins are forgiven and our lost lives are rescued and a new person is created that death cannot overcome. And we come like the bleeding woman, saying, if I can touch even Jesus’ garment I will be saved. And here the garment of His flesh is placed upon our tongue and we receive into our broken bodies the very Body of Christ and we are made well. That is how it happened then and how it happens still. Oh, we may pout because the saving grace of Jesus did not come to us when we wanted it or how we wanted it. We look at the outside of peoples’ lives – making smug judge- ments of whether the bleeding woman or the father of the dying girl had it worse than we. We complain that God does not treat us all alike because we fear that somebody might have gotten more from God than we did. We presume that we want and what we pray for is the best and the only thing for us. We hesitate to trust in anything and we want to control everything. But in the end, there is only Jesus.
That is the focus of faith. It is not on the things that trouble you. It is not on others around you who also have their complaints before the Lord. It is not on the answers that you think best. It is on Jesus. We need more than a patch job to get us through another day but the radical redemption of new lives. We need more than a selective reading of God’s Word but the full wisdom of the Lord and the whole counsel of His Word. Faith is nothing more and nothing less than trust prompted by the Spirit. We trust that Jesus is the Savior sent from the Father into our flesh to wear our wounds and bear our sin and die our death. We trust that in Jesus life, death, and resurrection is grace sufficient for all our needs. We trust that God not only knows what we want but what we need. He will deliver us from this body of death and provide to us everlasting life. That is the faith that makes you well, that saves you, that heals you, that gives you peace that passes understanding. In the holy name of Jesus. Amen.
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