Fourth Sunday after Pentecost
June 8, 2008
Sermon by Pastor
The
Holy Gospel according to St. Matthew.
(Matthew 9:9-13, 18-26)
As Jesus was walking
along, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth; and he said to
him, “Follow me.” And he got up and
followed him.
And
as he sat at dinner in the house, many tax collectors and sinners came and were
sitting with him and his disciples. When
the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat
with tax collectors and sinners?” But
when he heard this, he said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician,
but those who are sick. Go and learn
what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have come to call not the righteous but
the sinners.”
While he was saying
these things to them, suddenly a leader of the synagogue came in and knelt
before him, saying, “My daughter has just died; but come and lay your hand on
her, and she will live.” And Jesus got
up and followed him, with his disciples.
Then suddenly a woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve
years came up behind him and touched the fringe of his cloak, for she said to
herself, “If I only touch his cloak, I will be made well.” Jesus turned, and seeing her he said, “Take
heart, daughter; your faith has made you well.”
And instantly the woman was made well.
When Jesus came to the leader’s house and saw the flute players and the
crowd making a commotion, he said, “Go away; for the girl is not dead but
sleeping.” And they laughed at him. But when the crowd had been put outside, he
went in and took her by the hand, and the girl got up. And the report of this spread throughout that
district.
The Gospel of the Lord.
Please join me in prayer.
Our loving and gracious God,
in this Pentecost season we honor the power
of your spirit in healing, redeeming, and making us anew.
Grant that we too may be your agents of healing for others,
in a world so in need of your love.
Amen.
There is an old Talmudic saying that goes like this: “The deeper the sorrow the less tongue it has.” “The
deeper of the sorrow the less tongue it has.”
From the time a friend of mine in graduate school was a
tiny child, she lived with a deep sorrow about which she never spoke. She lived silently in fear of people, afraid
of their reaction, often horror, to a deep-purple and red birthmark that
covered nearly the whole of one-half of her face. Mary could never remember a day when she was
not afraid to leave her house just to go outside to a park, or a store, or to
church, even to school, where she would have to endure the public humiliation
of people’s reaction to her face. As she
got older, she would slip silently and quickly out the door and down to the
post office or the store only if she had to, and just as quickly she would
silently hurry back home to the safety of privacy behind her doors.
From the time she could remember, Mary feared the look
on people’s faces as she passed by on the sidewalk. People did not nod or smile; they stared, or
pointed, or quickly looked the other way.
Sometimes children innocently would say things that hurt. She experienced the human race as cruel and
rejecting. She learned how to avoid
strangers by walking by on the other side of the street. And so Mary, more than most of us, would grow
up to know the meaning of this ancient Talmudic saying, “The deeper the sorrow the less tongue it has.” It was a sorrow suffered in silence and
alone.
It wasn’t until she was in her forties that doctors and
medical research discovered a new form of laser therapy that could be applied
to help fade the purple and red birthmark.
It took many months, and it was very painful, but gradually one
treatment after another proved to be effective.
It was tedious, it was expensive, but it worked. And today Mary can go out into public, like
everyone else. Without fear, without the
looks of horror and wonder, without anyone staring, she now talks openly about the
pain of growing up feeling marked. But
now she is grateful to the medical profession, to modern research, and to those
who made her healing and recovery from years of suffering possible.
When a Syrophoenician woman who has been hemorrhaging
for years appears, lurking silently in the crowd, in Matthew’s Chapter 9, we
know she is suffering a deep sorrow in silence; a sorrow that has kept her
isolated from normal human association for years. No doubt she too has cowered and kept herself
covered so as not to be discovered by passersby on the street and in the
marketplace. But here, in the push and
shove of a crowd, she has found her way and has followed Jesus and the
disciples silently, anonymously, in the hope that if she can just touch the hem
of Jesus’ garment she will be healed.
To be out in public at all was an enormous risk. Yet, it is a risk that she is willing to take
to be relieved of her silent suffering.
And so she comes up silently behind Jesus, and she just touches the
fringe of the garment. Jesus turns to
see who had touched the hem of his garment behind him. When Jesus stops and turns to take note of
someone, the disciples and others would normally just ignore in this
story. It is at great risk to them for
she was an outcast, and to be touched or to touch an outcast was to become, in
ancient culture, an outcast yourself.
Often in the Gospel stories, we are told that Jesus is
moved with pity—a word in the Greek that connotes compassion. But not just compassion, compassion combined with anger; literally, a churning in the
stomach that is not only compassion for the person’s suffering and isolation,
but anger at the cruelty of a society and a law that could treat a fellow or
sister human being in such a way; the feeling described as more than a
superficial kind of pity or sympathy.
Jesus is deeply moved. And so here—when Jesus turns to take note of the one
who has touched the hem of his garment and speaks to her directly, literally
across the boundaries of social custom and legal regulation, and commends the
woman for her courage—Jesus not only restores her to wholeness and health, but literally to
normal human society as well. The one
excluded is now included. What was
isolated is now restored to wholeness.
The one who was ignored is acknowledged.
The one scorned can now know human company. Her life is transformed. The one rejected has now known acceptance and
restoration.
Many in the crowd in Jesus’ day would have been
surprised and would have objected at a rabbi’s acknowledgment of this
outcast. The fringe of a rabbi’s garment
would have looked like the fringe along the bottom of a prayer shawl that we
see Orthodox Jews wearing yet today. To
touch an outcast or to let an outcast touch that fringe was a serious violation
of the law. And so for Jesus to turn and
heal this woman would have been a tremendous act of mercy that stood outside
the boundaries of all conventional custom.
It is surprising, it is curious, until we remember that
this Jesus, this Savior, is not one bent on accumulating popular followers for
himself, but for the work of God’s kingdom of love, compassion, healing, and
mercy in the world.
In the end, this is not a Messiah on his way to
greatness, but a teacher and preacher of love on his way to the cross. In the end, this is not a love that will be a
crowd- pleaser for long, but a love that will take him and those who stay with
him to
In the end, the love that Jesus brings is not a show for
the masses but a quiet and attentive love that is intensely personal and
uniquely individual. The crowds will
come and go, but only a few will remain faithful. Many will hear, but only a few will
follow. To Jesus, the one truly restored
and transformed is infinitely more precious and valuable than the hundred who
go through the motions of discipleship but will disappear. The one outcast, the one sinner, the one lost
sheep, these are the ones most precious in God’s eyes.
In her
beautiful book, “In Search of Our Mother’s Garden,” author Alice Walker
tells of how one day her little daughter Rebecca once touched and transformed
her wounded eye.
Ever since a childhood accident with a toy gun that left
But then one day, Walker tells us in her book, that she
has just put Rebecca down for a nap, just after the little girl has watched her
favorite movie that shows a blue and white globe of the world whirling through
space. “Rebecca studied my face
intently,”
With one simple observation, Rebecca had cut through all
the years of humiliation. What was once an ugly scar now became a world. Nothing had changed, but everything had been
transformed, simply because a child touched and saw a scar through the eyes of
love. And it was from that moment on
that Walker marks the beginning of her healing and her journey out of self‑hatred
and into the place that makes her the writer and the poet that she is for all
of us today.
If this season of Pentecost is about the Spirit of God
at work in our lives and in our hearts, it is also about the Spirit of God
working in us for the sake of others, for the healing of the world, enabling us
to see the world and others, scars and all, in new and redeeming ways; seeing
with eyes of faith, seeing others in the light of the Savior, seeing the world
with new visions for loving and with new opportunities for mercy.
Amen.