One of my favorite quotes about Scripture is in the Pirke Avot, a collection of Rabbinic ethical sayings from the 1st and 2nd centuries, which reads, “Turn the Torah, turn it again and again, for everything you want to know is found within it” (Pirke Avot 2:25). This passage came to mind as I prepared for the sermon I gave this morning on Mark 5:21-43. One of the wonderful things about the stories in Scripture, as this Rabbinic saying says, is that there is a lot to be gleaned from their telling. Indeed, the more problematic a text may seem (to my particular ears), the more I may need not to run from it (which is my, and many other good post-modern folks’ tendency), but to turn it again and look at it from another angle; to wrestle it to the ground and refuse to leave it without a blessing (Genesis 32:26).
That’s all well and good when one is dealing with a problematic text; it’s harder when you’re preparing a sermon on a story which, to your mind, many things can be noticed and brought before a believing congregation. What is my focus to be when this is the case? Do I sell out and commit that sin of all sins, the delivery of a three-point sermon? By way of illustrating the truth of the “turn it again and again” hermeneutic, consider this story from Mark 5. Any one of these could be a worthwhile message in its own right, depending on one’s audience.
1. One could preach here on the nature of the “faith” that makes this woman well. After all, although Jesus is clear that it is her faith that has saved her, the expression of this faith looks a lot different from what many churches in the United States seem to think faith is required to look like. For instance, she doesn’t get all of her answers in a row, or say much of anything out loud about God or Jesus; her faith is a matter of embodied trust. In the same way, the faith that saves Jairus’ daughter is not the daughter’s faith at all; she is saved by someone else’s faith. In any case, in this passage, faith is a matter of embodied trust, the benefits of which extend well beyond one’s own personal experience.
2. One could preach on the fact that the love of God in Jesus seems to explode out of him in ways that even he does not control. To be sure, Jesus is the source of this loving, healing energy; but it’s striking as well that this healing happens, initially, without Jesus even knowing about it! Of course, it’s also quite telling, I think, that Jesus then seeks out and finds the results of his healing love, and reclaims it as his own. He makes sure that the woman (and the reader!) know that though the love of God flows out of him naturally, he also goes back and makes sure that all know to whom (and from whom) the healing has come.
3. If I were preaching to a room full of pastors or over-worked professionals, I may focus on the fact that both Jesus and this woman are quite in-tune with their bodies. Jesus knows himself well enough to know, immediately, that something has “gone out of him.” She knows, immediately, that she is well. A corollary to this point is that power “goes out” from Jesus, and thus even Jesus needs to be “refilled,” as it were, with the power that once resided within him. This is perhaps why Jesus is so careful about spending extended periods of rejuvenating time with God in prayer (what we might call in our context “self-care,” although I think the term is much too limp to describe what and how we are to be reenergized by the Spirit of God).
4. One could preach an entire sermon on the interesting fact that this woman’s healing is not at all complete once her physical malady is relieved, but that the real healing happens when she gets to tell her whole story, warts and all. Not only does she tell her story; she tells it to Jesus, in the context of the community gathered around her. Indeed, perhaps the first major, revolutionary step in knocking down the walls that divide us comes by listening to each other’s stories, and Jesus is so quick to do.
5. Finally (but not finally!), one could, as I did on this day, preach about the role of the community in this passage, and how with the bleeding woman we have an image of a community that is just in the way of another person’s healing, whereas with Jairus we have an image of a community that goes out of its way to bring wholeness to a painful, hopeless situation. On the one hand, as so many churches do, an immobile group of people preoccupied with catching a glimpse of Jesus boxes out a person in need of a loving touch; on the other, a group motivated by a father’s love for his child marches into hell, and bring heaven along with them.

What do you see, duck or rabbit?
Of course, these aren’t the only things to be gleaned from this passage: far from it! The challenge, and the fun, of preaching is getting people to read a story one way after having read it only in another way for many years. This is hard, good work, akin to what Ludwig Wittgenstein called instantiating a “Gestalt-shift” in one’s hearers, which he famously illustrated by utilizing the duck-rabbit picture. (How do I get you to see a duck where you once saw only a rabbit, or vice versa? You don’t just talk about it; you show! You don’t just ‘think’ about the differences; you look!). While this method does not mean that all interpretations of Scripture are equally good or equally valid (there are still interpretations that betray our moral grammar as Christians, and thus are really “nonsense”), I was nonetheless happily reminded again this week of the God-given multifaceted nature of Scripture. So, don’t read Scripture like you read a history book, as if you read it once and then “know” its story. No! Marinade in it; “turn it and turn it again.” There’s a reason people keep reading these stories, even after all these years.
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