Misfits and miracles
Day 110, Friday, Nov. 29
Mark Chapter 5 Click here to read
Have you ever hesitated to invite someone to church because you thought they wouldn’t fit in? Or maybe even that your church friends would wonder why you associated with someone like that?
If your answer is “yes,” you’re not alone—but you do have some repenting to do, along with anyone else in a church who would give the impression that anyone has to meet some arbitrary standard to be good enough to be part of the community.
When I was young and we had overnight guests on Saturday, whether or not we attended church on Sunday depended on if they had brought “church clothes.” Somehow, appearance was more important than worship.
I have been blessed that most of the churches I have served as pastor, at least most of the time, were willing to welcome anyone who chose to attend. One of those churches was, quite unintentionally, a haven for persons who suffered from substance abuse. Conversations about their struggles—both successful and unsuccessful—were common Sunday-morning topics.
It’s sad that churches like that are the exception rather than the rule, and that’s a complete contradiction to almost everything Jesus said and did.
Consider the three miracles in today’s reading: The healing of the man with evil spirits, the healing of the woman with the flow of blood, and the healing of the synagogue ruler’s daughter.
Of these, only the synagogue ruler’s daughter would have been welcome in polite society (though, as a woman, still in a limited role.) However, considering Jesus’s difficult relationship with Jewish authorities, we shouldn’t assume that he would consider the synagogue ruler especially worthy compared to anyone else.
The demon-possessed man was as much of an outcast as can be imagined. Think of the loudest, most violent, smelliest street person you have ever encountered and you only begin to approach what he must have been like.
In his strength that allowed him to repeatedly break his bonds, he sounds like some of the people we see today who are on different kinds of drugs that make them impervious to pain. He was disruptive, he was dangerous, and he was frankly disgusting.
Added to that, Jesus and the disciples were already in a gentile area that was so far from their familiar Jewish surroundings that there was even a large herd of pigs handy…nothing about this story is nice.
Yet Jesus asks him, “What is your name?”
While it is the demons who answer, the “What is your name?” question is to most people one of the friendliest approaches possible. It shows an immediate human connection, something that most of us crave.
And the woman healed of the flow of blood was, under Jewish law, also not fit for civilized society. In addition to being ceremonially unclean, she was poor. Her audacity in touching Jesus’s clothing without him seeing suggests that she was, to put it mildly, pushy.
An “unclean” pushy poor lady and a filthy crazy man are hardly the kind of people we dream of when we say we want the church to grow.
But they are the kind of people Jesus thought of.