|
|
The Gospel according to Mark – 3rd Sunday after Pentecost
June 29, 2003
Jairus fell on his face. He fell prostrate before Jesus, anxiously, unashamedly, begging. Jesus, "My little daughter is dying, please come." As a parent, as a human being, before such a terrifying and fearful specter, what can we say to Jairus?
Some ten years ago on a Honduras medical mission from Mississippi, we opened up our clinic on a Sunday afternoon and on Monday morning there was a long line from surrounding villages waiting to see the physicians and the dentists and the veterinarians. And we heard wailing outside – a great commotion – and a mother who apparently had walked through the night, brought her young child, a little girl, to the line to register to enter the clinic, and there was a long line. The baby apparently was in a coma or near a coma, wracked with pneumonia and coughing. "Can you save my baby?" she asked. We rushed her into the doctors and five days later, after two shots of Rocephin, that baby was eating. It was the faith of our Honduras team who was there on Jesus’ behalf, combined with the hysterical screaming and demanding of that mother, and the quasi-divine healing powers of a modern antibiotic – that that baby was saved from death.
And in Jairus time, there is no such miracle drug. "Your daughter is dead."
What do we say to Jairus? Perhaps at best we fall silent, tears and sighs way too deep to be complicated by words. And Jesus says, "Do not fear, only believe." And this is, in some ways, beyond belief.
My father, John Wade, Jr., was a bomber pilot, a B-24 pilot in World War II. In that European theater in which he flew from England into Germany, he flew 30 missions and he knew the other plane commanders, the other pilots, and their crews, because they flew together. On the 30th mission that my father flew, they bombed a heavily defended target and the entire group that flew in formation together on this mission, took tremendous, tremendous fire. Daddy never really liked to talk about this, but I do know that he barely navigated his plane back across the English Channel. I know that he landed, somehow, debriefed, and then went back out on that flight line and waited. And waited. He waited for his friends. It was time for them to go home together, back to the United States. And he waited and he waited.
Now I don’t know too much about my father’s faith journey from that point on, but I knew he struggled to go to church and we quit going as a family when I was a very young boy. And I suspect that he quit going to church because he could not accept the pious platitudes of fellow Christians.
Jesus said "Don’t fear, believe." Jesus and his friends enter Jairus’ home and the commotion of mourning has begun, of course it has. Jesus lived in a time that at least 40 or 50% of rural-dwelling children died before their 12th birthday. This terrible loss was all too routine. These small communities had cried and cried and cried together. They had learned there was no other way to cope but with each other’s tears.
I tell you that fact, as well as we understand those kind of facts about ancient history, because, though Jesus indeed saved many, thank God, from death, he didn’t save them all. This is why I struggle with the way some people interpret a story like this.
Here is popular understanding of faith. Learn the formula. So here is how it goes.
Jairus trusted Jesus, Jesus raises Jairus’s daughter – there is a formula in that. Let’s learn the formula. This is a power of faith story. Let’s learn the formula. And that kind of thinking goes to my father, before he died in 1975, and says to him: "John Wade, Jr., forget what you saw and experienced over Germany; you are home safe. In that time as you waited on the flight line in England, they would have come home too, if you had just had the right faith. If you had just said the Jairus prayer, they would have come home."
Did they return? "No," my dad would have said, "they did not return."
"Then you must have lacked the faith that Jairus possessed, because his prayer was answered and yours was not."
I think that is cruel. Again, it is too many words, too easy an answer. There are no words that make sense of all this, brothers and sisters. But I do know this. God, our heavenly father, has shared this with us and has experienced it with us. God experienced the horror of the death of a child. God witnessed the cruelty, the mockery, and the crucifixion. God experienced those awful losses in the life of his Son.
And what flowed from this experience of loss, suffered by Almighty God, in the death of his Son, is not some formula of faith, but the love of God. The love of God. The compassionate love of God and the Risen Christ. Not faith that somehow deflects tragedy from our lives. But love that somehow triumphs over it. And that love is eternal.
After the 8 a.m. service, a man came up to me and said, "I stood on that ramp where your Dad was in England. And I had friends that didn’t make it home either. Your Dad and those friends are going to be the first to greet me in that next life, that life of love that God offers us through Christ."
I have often tried to understand, in what way, why in the world would God call me into this ministry? I don’t understand it, but perhaps, in some way, it is for me to give voice to men and women who have struggled to believe, who have doubted or been turned off. That they may know that when we offer ourselves, whatever we suffer, to almighty God, in the end, we find love. Love. And that is enough. Amen.
