Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, June 30, 2024
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
The Chosen, Season 3, Episode 5 – Jairus and Veronica
God did not make death! Nor does he rejoice in the destruction of the living. God formed man to be imperishable.
In The Chosen, Simon’s wife Eden (given her name by those who yearned for the Good Old Days before sin entered the world) encounters a woman with few words and wild eyes who befriends Eden. The woman has been bleeding menstrually for twelve years, without a break. “It just makes me tired, that’s all.”
But Levitical rules label a woman having her period as unclean, and it is illegal for her to enter any town until her period is over. That her period is never over for this woman named Veronica is of no consequence to the men whose job it is to protect the townsfolk.
By the envy of the devil, death entered the world.
Jesus’ disciples recently returned from their two-by-two journeys into the countryside, where they discovered they had power to heal and words with which to proclaim the coming of the Messiah. Now together again, they wonder if Jesus will help them understand what they’ve been given the power to do.
On the way to their next amazing adventure, a temple official named Jairus asks Jesus to come heal his daughter, who is dying. Jesus agrees and follows him. Veronica walks in the large crowd following Jesus, knowing Jesus can heal her bleeding. She pushes her way to the front, directly behind him.
She came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak.
Can you do that? Can you receive healing from Jesus without telling him, or asking him, or saying a single word to him? How does this healing thing work, exactly? Who gets what, when?
Immediately her flow of blood dried up. Jesus was aware at once that power had gone out of him.
I guess you can do that. Jesus doesn’t even need to know beforehand. He does not consciously turn the spigot on and off. But he did feel touched.
Who touched me? The woman approached in fear and trembling and told Jesus the whole truth. “Daughter, your faith has saved you. Go in peace and be healed.”
Wonderful. Amazing. Mysterious. Messiah-like. But those few minutes Jesus had stopped in the street mattered to Jairus. Messengers came and told him his daughter had died. Can you imagine how he looked up into Jesus’ face?
But Jesus said, “Do not be afraid. The child is not dead but asleep.” And the people ridiculed him.
Everyone knows the difference between sleep and death. But Jesus knew something else, that death was Satan’s way of getting his own facetime, and that just did not work when Jesus was around. Death ran the other way. Jairus looked into Jesus’ eyes, and he believed him.
Jesus said to the girl lying in her bed, “Little girl! Arise!” And this twelve-year-old girl arose and walked around, and Jesus told them to give her something to eat.
As I write this I am eating from a fruit plate. Earlier in the Chosen episode, the disciples eat olives and taste olive oil, they break bread together. Jesus eats too. He loves food. He loves God’s people. Jesus lives and Jesus loves.
Give her something to eat.
Paul struggles to explain to the Corinthians the way Jesus changed the world and changed our lives.
You know his gracious act, that though Jesus was rich, he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich.
Jesus was teaching us God’s original way to live:
As a matter of equality your abundance at the present time should supply their needs, and their abundance may supply your needs.
Give, and it will be given unto you.
On Hearst Street in Berkeley, where I had been invited for dinner at the old Hearst House (mansion, really), I climbed out of my back pack and traveling guitar to join the group cutting vegetables in the kitchen, while we sang “You Are My Sunshine.”
At mealtime we sat around circular Japanese-height tables, and crossed our legs. Someone said a prayer. The sixty or seventy of us passed around plates of sandwiches, cut into quarters. But then the regulars began passing their sandwiches to the people sitting on either side of them.
Unless we newbies followed their example, our plates were soon filled to the brim. So of course we passed on our sandwiches too, and suddenly it seemed as if there was enough food in that room to feed five thousand. I had never felt that kind of abundance before, at least not in just that way.
Whoever had much did not have more, and whoever had little did not have less.
And that must be how everyone felt, wherever Jesus went.
(Wisdom 1, Psalm 30, 2 Corinthians 8, 2 Timothy 1, Mark 5)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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