When
I wake up in the morning I go to the bathroom, and I wash my face and hands. I remove the mouth guard that protects my
teeth from clenching during the night, and clean it with a special brush and
put it away. I go into the kitchen and
fill a glass with water and have a good long drink. I take a few minutes for my morning prayers,
and then I get back to tending to needs of my body. I heat water to cook oatmeal and for tea. Then I go into the living room and roll out
my yoga mat and stretch and breathe to loosen the stiffness and soreness of the
night. I turn off the oatmeal pot and cover
it and go take a shower. I wash my hair
and shave. I brush my hair and dress. I eat my breakfast, brush my teeth, grab my
wallet, my phone, and my keys, put on my shoes, and then I’m ready.
I’m
ready to go out into the world, to assume my public persona, to go to work, to
be the person others know and expect me to be.
But in order to be him, I first have to care for my body. I say “my body” because that’s the way we
conventionally talk, but that makes it sound like this body is a thing that I
own, like a hat or a car, as if there is a separate “I” who possesses it, when
the truth of my experience is that I am my
body. And it’s also true that even something as undeniably my own as
being this particular body is not left to me to negotiate in private; whether I
want it to be or not, “my” body is public property. Other people define and interpret my body.
They
evaluate me, according to cultural norms—by sex, age, height, and weight; by the
color and texture of my skin, eyes, and hair; by the tenor of my voice and dexterity
of my movements, by the functionality, or lack thereof, of my organs and limbs,
and brain. These are all keys for
classifying me as this or that kind of person and for interpreting my behavior. Am I beautiful or ugly? Menacing or friendly? Esteemed or shameful? Am I normal and able and healthy and well, or
am I somehow other, something less than these?
These are questions we don’t always get to answer for ourselves, and the
answers that we get from others profoundly shape how we relate to ourselves. They can turn our bodies into prisons, where,
quite apart from any biological necessity, we are sentenced to humiliation, isolation,
or even death.
The
Gospel of Mark is mostly a series of Jesus’ encounters with aspects of human
existence that we would rather not have to deal with. In many cases these are stories of the suffering
of a body, one possessed by a demon or afflicted with disease. But these bodies don’t simply have a medical
condition, because their physical or mental suffering is compounded, is
multiplied, by social indifference, by prevailing attitudes of suspicion, disdain
or fear. Public interpretation devalues the
suffering of these bodies and gives them scant comfort or remedy.
Today’s
Gospel story is about the healing of this kind of body. It is really two stories, two healings, with
the second sandwiched into the middle of the first, and by putting them together
the Gospel writer makes them comment on each other. In some ways the story about the little girl
is the more dramatic—after all, Jesus raises her from the dead, but it the
other encounter that is the meat in the sandwich. The protagonist of this story is a woman
whose body has betrayed her with an abnormal, continual menstrual flow. Needless to say, this has made her unable to
conceive and bear children, denying her a woman’s primary source of honor and
value in the eyes of her society.
But
more than that, the religious laws in the Book of Leviticus say that this bleeding
makes her ritually impure—she is excluded from the worship of God in the temple. Her impurity is considered contagious; you
can catch it from contact with her body or her clothing or even a place where
she has sat or lain down, and it takes time and special ceremonies to cleanse that
impurity away. She once had been a woman
of means, because the story tells how she spent her money on painful and ineffective
treatments from doctors until it was all gone.
By the time that she meets Jesus, she has suffered this condition, and
the status of pariah that goes along with it, for twelve long and lonely years.
Which
are all the years that the young daughter of the leader of the synagogue has
been alive, and the contrast between their stories is instructive. When the little girl needs help it is her
father who goes and falls at the feet of Jesus to plead with him to come. And this is the way it is supposed to be
done. A woman in the ancient world was
supposed to avoid interaction with men she didn’t know. She kept to the company of women, and to the
private sphere of her home, and it was the responsibility of her male
relations, her father, brother, uncle, or husband, to advocate for what she needed in the public
realm. But the woman with the bleeding
has no one to plead her case. So she has
to take matters, quite literally, into her own hands.
The
initiative in the story is all hers, it is her faith that if she could just
touch Jesus’ cloak, she could be healed.
And she does touch it, and at once she feels in her body that she has
been made well. Power passes from body
to body, but it is not the contagion of impurity passing from her body to Jesus’,
but a healing charge of spirit that flows from his to hers. Jesus’ feels it, too, a touch different from
all the other hands grasping at him in the crowd. He stops, demanding to know who it was who
touched him in that way. And though she
falls before him trembling with fear, he tells her she is no longer alone, no
longer without a patron, that now she has an advocate and protector, for he calls
her “Daughter”, and says her faith has made her well.
The
word that means “made well” can also be translated “saved”, and this is a story
of what it means to be saved by Jesus.
It’s a salvation that has everything to do with faith, and that
shouldn’t surprise us. I’m sure we’ve
all heard enough about being saved by grace through faith to know that’s what
Christians are supposed to believe about salvation, even if we’re not sure
exactly what it means. But what might be
less obvious or expected is that this is the salvation of bodies. It is God’s presence in a human body, the
body of Jesus, that the woman in the story puts her faith in. In faith she reaches out to touch that salvation,
and it comes with the healing of her body.
But
it goes further than that; it is the salvation of her whole person, of a body
that is not only inner and private
experience but also public belonging. Jesus’
salvation replaces the old, oppressive and divisive cultural codes with a new and
universal language of identity, so that everyone who has faith in him is a new
person in a new society, a daughter or a son in the family of God, a citizen of
the Kingdom of God. This salvation is what
St. Paul writes about in the Letter to the Galatians, of baptism into Christ that
makes us one--“no longer Jew or Greek, no longer slave or free, no longer male or
female.”
This
week a scant majority of the United States Supreme Court, added that we are
also no longer straight and gay. Old
cultural norms that privilege certain kinds of bodies and denigrate others continue
to fall away before the gospel’s universal affirmation of human freedom,
responsibility, and love. This is a
vision of the salvation, not only of persons, but of the world. In the church we have a name for this world, this
community in which every body has a unique but equally valuable place. We call it a body—the Body of Christ.
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