Mark 5: Trading Fear for Faith

It would be easy to allow these stories of Jesus to flounder in a fog of fairy-tales, to have them begin with “Once upon a time...” and never leave that realm.

The effect would be to remove them far from us.

That is not what Mark intends.

Remember how he began the Gospel with those words which are such a challenge to Jew and Gentile alike: The beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ, the Son of God..[1:1]

He wants to grab hold of us with this narrative, and never let us go until we have heard the truth, the whole truth of who Jesus is and what he intends with us.

And so in story after story, as he grips our lapels and demands our attention, Mark wants us to trade in our fear and take up faith instead.

As part of the reality of the stories, Christians have always insisted that they happened in a certain time and in definite places.

The impulse has always been among us to travel to Israel and walk in those places.

None of that is ever simple, however.

The Jewish revolts of 66AD and 130 AD led to a total disruption of the Jewish communities, and people were moved and places destroyed all over the country.

So when in the third and fourth centuries when pilgrims began to travel there, there may or may not have been accurate memories of the exact locations of specific events.

So in order to satisfy the pilgrims, the locals apparently made their best guesses about locations, and went with that.

There is an even greater problem with the setting for the first story in this chapter 5; the oldest manuscripts of the Gospel do not agree on the name of the place.

Was it Gerasa, Gergasa, or Gadara?

And when one consults a Bible atlas, there are locations proposed for each of them, often with question-marks beside the names.

One is on the Sea of Galilee, another they think was near the steep canyon of the Yarmuk River that empties into Galilee, and the third further south in the hills.

But we do know what our forebears in the early centuries thought was the right place, because about 35 years ago and quite by accident, a site was discovered.

The Israeli army was planning to bulldoze a military road up into the Golan Heights, but as they surveyed the likeliest ravine sloping up into the hills, they uncovered a substantial ruin that had been lost and forgotten for well over a thousand years.

The current name of the place is Kirsi, and with the floor mosaics and other evidence discovered, it was clear that long-ago Christians had regarded this as the place where Jesus healed the demoniac.

I can tell you from personal experience that there is nothing quite like the feeling of being a pilgrim and walking on the stones that have been hallowed by the prayers of generations of Christian forebears who strove to honor Jesus, climbing that hill to the spot where monks had a hermitage for more than 400 years before being murdered by the conquering Muslims, and turning then to gaze at the sea.

But whether Kirsi is the exact location or not, the points raised by the story are the same.

First, we note that all three of the possible sites are in non-Jewish territory.

The Golan region was taken over by the Israelis in the 1967 war, but it has always been a disputed and contentious area.

The story shows how Jesus reaches beyond the usual circles of the Hebrew people to let non-Jews know that his message is for them also.

No impediment will stand in the way of Jesus as he announces the in-breaking kingdom of God.

The internal evidence is easy: Jews have nothing to do with pork, and thus would not be keeping pigs.

That Jesus would use them as agents of salvation would either bring a chuckle or a gasp of horror to the first hearers of Mark's gospel.

Second, the powers of evil recognize who Jesus is before the people do!

The evil ones strive to get away from him as quickly as possible.

Third, the demoniac is about as unclean as one could be:

--he is in a unclean Gentile region

--he can follow none of the Hebrew laws because of being driven by the demons.

--he is in and out of the cemetery, and contact with the dead is a contaminating place and activity, according to law.

Fourth, he is offensive to everyone by being naked and cut up by the stones.

So Jesus wades into a situation where no one else would dream of venturing.

He demonstrates his power over every force of evil.

Since he has traded the man's fear for faith and healing, he now sends the man home, healed, as the first apostle to the Gentiles [that's us!].

Finally, there is a somberness to the story, in that it foreshadows the passion, where Jesus will take upon himself all the powers of evil.

He will not depend upon pigs, but will himself be outside the city, among the tombs and garbage, naked and rejected on the cross, and cut by the stones of hate.

The resurrection is the vindication of his acceptance of that role.

The idea of inviting people to trade fear for faith continues in the next stories.

It is a wonderful demonstration of the story-tellers art to have the healing of the woman in the midst of the story of the healing of Jarius' daughter.

The stories reinforce each other in at least five different ways.

--Jesus cares about women as he does men.

--The standard taboos about uncleanness do not get in Jesus' way; he will deal with the corpse of Jarius' daughter as easily as he does with the hemorrhages of the old woman.

--The faith of the old woman (“If I only touch his clothes....”) is joined to the faith of Jarius (“Please touch my daughter, that she may live....”), and both are answered with healing.

--There is desperation in both stories: Jarius as an official would not want to have too much contact with this strange man Jesus, the disturber of the public peace, but his love for his daughter drives him past that fear; and the old woman had tried everything, had been fleeced by doctors who could do nothing about the illness, had likely been ostracized by family and friend because of her impurity, and with nowhere else to turn puts her trust in what she has heard of this new teacher Jesus.

--The astonishment of the onlookers is a foreshadowing of the astonishment of the women on Easter morning, where death is replaced with new life.

We might be tempted to regard Jesus' words to the girl as “abracadabra”, magician's magic words.

Not so! Talitha koum are not magic words at all; they are in the ordinary language of ordinary people in the Israel of that time.

It is the Aramaic ordinary expression for “get up.”

It would seem that the actual words of Jesus have been remembered and recorded precisely because of their ordinariness, not in spite of it.

Jesus is not a magician, but rather the one who can use ordinary means to accomplish extraordinary results.

He makes himself available even today in all the languages of his people.

He invites us to live in faith, through the ordinary words and actions that we hear and see, without waiting for something magical.

And also, in those times when we might be overwhelmed with despair, we learn from these stories that it is OK to reach out only to touch Jesus and discover that Jesus has already accommodated himself to our need.

The water of Baptism and the Bread and Wine of Holy Communion are the tangible sign that this is so, that Jesus allows power to flow from himself to any who would dare to touch him.

What wonderful news it is through the stories in Mark 5.

Like the man beset by demons, the woman burdened with hemorrhage, and the girl's father gripped by death, we too can trade in our fears for faith, and live now in anticipation of the joy of life remade in the kingdom of God.

And we pray:

Oh, be our great deliverer still,

The Lord of life and death;

Give wisdom's healing power

That all may praise you evermore.[LBW431.3]

Amen.

Please note: The preceding sermon is provided as a resource for the thought, prayer, and meditation of the members and friends of St. Mark's. It is the residue of a verbal event, and thus it does not have academic footnotes and other details that would be expected in a written document. The writer gladly acknowledges the prior thought and work of many Christians before him.