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Do Not Fear
Mark 5:21-43
Journey with Jesus – Crossing the Sea of Death
Do not fear, only believe.
Barbara Brown Taylor, an Episcopal priest, calls this Jesus’ shortest sermon. Only five words. On face value they seem so simple, only two directives: One, don’t be afraid. Two, believe. It’s a sermon almost everyone can memorize, from the youngest children to the oldest adults.
Of all the one-line sermons in the Bible, it’s also one of the most difficult of sermons to live out. Love your neighbor as yourself. That one seems doable. He is risen from the dead. Even that seems easier to believe. But “Do not fear, only believe”? It’s a classic example of easier said than done.
So much of our life is motivated by fear, touched by fear, wrapped up in fear. We fear, with good cause, our financial security in retirement – or we fear we may be able to afford retirement at all. We fear the next call from the doctor’s office. We fear that we won’t know what we want to major in or where we’ll go to college. We fear we’ve wasted our life once we realize we’ve most likely lived more years than we’ve got left. We fear recriminations at work or on the playground if we dare to do the right thing. Sometimes fear and anxiety grip us in ways that we don’t fully understand and can’t fully explain.
But few things crystallize fear like the possibility of death. We’ve seen that fact played out with devastating certainty this week in Iran. As the protests against the reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad grew bolder and more numerous, the response of the government grew increasingly violent and fierce. The threat of beatings, detentions and death eventually worked – the government crushed the protests by using fear.
Even the most faithful of people can be overtaken by fear when faced with a life-threatening illness, the reality of losing a partner or spouse, the possibility of losing a child. Death also visits us in many endings: the end of a marriage or valued relationship, the loss of a job, the end of an opportunity. Hopelessness and oppression also feel like the death of all possibility.
The lesson from Mark for today if full of both fear and the possibility of death. But it also overcomes the fear and the death with the calm assurance of Jesus, the peace in the midst of the storm swirling around him: Do not fear, only believe.
These two stories are intertwined together, and while on the surface may seem separate, they are mutually dependent on one another. The first encounter involves Jairus, a leader of the synagogue, who’s only child, a 12-year-old girl, is dying. He begs Jesus to come and save her. The second main character is an unnamed woman who has an issue of blood, a hemorrhage, for 12 years. She sneaks up behind Jesus, daring to reach out and touch his robe. The simple act of touch instantly heals her.
The parallels are striking. Both the girl and the woman are unnamed. Jairus’ daughter has been alive for 12 years, the same length of time that the woman has been unable to carry or create life in her womb. The woman who is bleeding is ritually unclean; so is the girl, when Jesus touches her dead body. Two different crowds surround Jesus – the one presses in on him as he goes to Jairus’s house, hiding the unnamed woman, and the other crowd is in front of the little girl’s home and mocks him for trying to heal a dead child.
Both Jairus and the unnamed woman are out of options.
Both fall at the feet of Jesus – in the face of fear and death, absolute submission, absolute inhibition are all that’s left. There’s nothing left to fear, because the worst has either happened or is ready to – the only thing left to do is believe.
I wonder if this is part of what Jesus meant when he told Jairus to not fear. You’ve already stopped relying on yourself, on magical potions, on useless incantations to heal. You’ve put your faith in me. Don’t be afraid, believe in what you will see, believe in what you know, and the power of God will be at work.
Jesus told the unnamed woman not to fear his response because her faith had already made her well. She had offered her last and her best hope of healing to him. She had tried the doctors, she had used up all her resources on their potions and snake oils, and now was worn out, put out, down and out. She had no where else to turn.
Faith in Jesus. It may sound simple, perhaps even trite. But as Jairus and this unnamed woman show, when faith is put in Jesus – not just a little faith, but unabashed, unashamed, completely uninhibited faith, even death does not stand in the way of healing and wholeness. These two did not do anything to earn the healing hand of Jesus. They didn’t pay for it, they didn’t barter with him for it, they didn’t try to behave their way into it. As Paul has said, we are saved by faith not by works. All God wants from us, and what God does through the Holy Spirit, is give us the faith to say yes, to fall at the feet of Jesus, to abandon all of our attempts to save and heal ourselves and simply reach out our hands and believe. Even in the face of death, Jesus overcomes fear by reaching out to touch us.
In Friday’s Philadelphia Inquirer, columnist Annette John-Hall wrote about Sharon McGinley, a wealthy woman who lived a posh life outside of Philadelphia. Several years ago, she suffered a boating accident that left her spinal cord severed. After she recovered, she decided to stop raising money to help disadvantaged children and do the work herself. She now operates a transitional housing program for children who turn 18 and age out of the foster care system.
As she recalled the time between the accident and when she regained consciousness, she said she felt no fear, only peace and happiness. When she awoke and began her recovery, she realized she had been touched by something holy – and the deep root of her fear was realized.
"Because I wasn't afraid to die, I realized I had been afraid to live," she says. "What was I waiting for?"
She had been afraid to live, to really live. It took an awareness of how close she was to death to understand how bound she was in her life.
My brothers and sisters, today, of what are you afraid? What places of death in you life cause you fear, the type of fear that raises its head in the middle of night, that constricts your chest and shortens your breath? Is your heart deadened to something that you are afraid to mention out loud?
This is the good news that Jesus brings us through this story and through the story of his life. To receive new life in Christ, all we have to do and be is dead – dead to ourselves, dead to our own striving, dead to trying on our own. We have to be ready to receive new life, receive a new way, ready to experience and embrace the love of Jesus anew. Do not fear – only believe. Trust in God today to give you that same faith. Amen.