Thresholds of Deeper Meaning
“Thresholds Of Deeper Meaning”
Lamentations 3:22-33 Psalm 130 Mark 5:21-43
Fifth Sunday after Pentecost, Year B, June 27, 2021
First Presbyterian Church, Sandpoint, Idaho
Andy Kennaly, Pastor
Today we do some soul searching. The Hebrew Scriptures and the Psalmist take us deep, and in Mark’s gospel, Jesus uses stories as his parables share God’s love. We’ll start with the parables then invite ourselves to look behind the words, so their meaning can resonate within us on a faith level.
Did you notice Mark puts a story within a story? Jesus takes action, but then a side plot emerges and thickens the drama. The healing of Jairus’ daughter intermingles with the woman who touches Jesus’ cloak. Along the way the stories dance together, sometimes with similarities and other times by contrast. In both stories, the number 12 is used. The little girl who died is 12, just on the verge of becoming an adult yet still a child, powerless and without protections, and this woman has been bleeding for 12 years. Twelve is a biblical number of significance: the 12 tribes of Israel, the 12 disciples; 12 indicates the fullness of something, completeness. Because the girl is 12, the woman with hemorrhaging has literally bled for a lifetime. Both are now vulnerable and there’s elements of desperation.
Each story involves risk, for Jairus, to be seen with Jesus was risky. To have this Synagogue leader on the ground begging is not a symbol of strength. And for the woman, just to be in that crowd as someone considered unclean, she was taking great risk. That no one knew she was there indicates she had not cried out, “Unclean, unclean!” as required by religious law. With the young girl, for Jesus to touch a dead body was also taboo. But in both cases, Jesus is not made unclean but his power heals those he encounters. In both scenes, Jesus knows more than others, and Jesus provides complete recovery and restoration to the community. His healing touch opens possibility toward the future as the past is let go. Jesus leads and directs and there’s a sense of movement both in the action that unfolds but also with time itself as time is sort of messed with. Another dimension that vibrates through the parables involves the internal and external. On the outside, social codes, religious law, gender roles, a great many cultural issues of context move from a position of dominance and constriction to a sideline as the internal takes precedence. The little girl is dead, she has totally let go of her conscious self. The woman moves from hearing about Jesus to a deep trust. She thinks the traditional belief that if she at least touches his cloak his power will heal her from all her diseases. Sure enough her bleeding stops the moment she touches the cloak, and Jesus senses that power has gone out from him. But this is a throwback to externals and concepts and mentally held beliefs. Jesus invites her to go deeper by coming forward and in a public way he tells her the internal reality, “Your faith has made you well.”
There are opposites in these stories. For example, Jairus is named but the females are not; we see a great crowd and solitude; there is a contrast from a boat in the sea which is as wide as the horizon, to a closed bedroom. In one scene, Jesus moves toward the girl, but he doesn’t initiate the woman’s healing. The little girl has a father, Jairus, who has a position of power and prestige and he puts everything on the line by humbling himself to be his daughter’s advocate. For the woman with the bleeding, she’s socially isolated and religiously condemned, and she has no such advocate, indeed, those she’s paid to help her have only made things worse. Finally, the healed ones are a woman and a child – like the old not yet gone and the new not yet emerged. This is a metaphor we can spin out as a model of evolution and cultural changes in our own time.
So, we have similarities and contrasts. So many details at so many levels, this story-in-a-story bursts open like an explosion to knock away our preconceived notions. It also invites questions, such as, when do we move from hearing about Jesus to recognizing the Jesus who comes near us, and do we desire to reach out to connect with this Loving Presence? How is it we trust in faith? When do we feel we have endured enough? Do the comforts of externals prevent us from trusting inner experience? Are we open to God’s power, even if it calls us in challenging ways? Other questions will likely emerge in your own life if you sit with these stories for a while. Maybe not answers, but sometimes the questions are enough for now, enough to help us wait for what emerges next.
As I sit with these texts one thing that catches attention is how deep they invite us to go. Even with all the cultural aspects, the contextual details, the social-justice issues, and surprising outcomes, it’s as if we’re standing on thresholds of meaning and invited to go even deeper as God calls us, like Jesus who looks at the crowd and says, “Who touched me?” as a way to draw us forward.
In a recent article in a newsletter called, “Thin Places,” the Rev. Dr. Matthew Skinner reflects on his life “At the threshold…” He’d spent years studying the Apostle Paul who was under arrest for two years in Caesarea Maritima on the “eastern edge of the Mediterranean Sea” before “being shipped off to Rome.” Matthew Skinner studied this place, saw pictures of it, read about it in books, and even did his doctoral dissertation on it. It was over fifteen years later that he actually visited the place in person. He took some time alone, away from the tour group and he stood on the shoreline as the water splashes up on the ancient stones. He says he got “as close as possible to the ruins at the water’s edge. Standing there, I turned toward the warm late afternoon sun in the western sky and started staring at the vast sea, which quite literally splashes up against the site and its ancient stones, the ones full of stories I’ve spent a lot of time trying to extract and retell. And that’s when it happened. At one level, I grasped the grandeur of Caesarea and its harbor as engineering marvels and once-proud statements of Roman cultural and commercial dominance. But what stunned and held me in that moment was the breadth of the Mediterranean horizon. It was – and still is – an expanse of openness full of risk and possibility. I sensed all the possibility it held. Caesarea was built…as a passageway into and out of that wild horizon. … And I felt it at a deeper level: I was standing on a personal threshold, and I had been there for a long while. A transition from feeling satisfied with accomplishment to asking how I might yet serve others. A realization that faith involves perceiving reality differently. A reminder that encounters with the Holy expand and don’t confine what we can comprehend about our purpose… […] thresholds – the explorations and encounters that beckon me toward new journeys. Caesarea jolted me from self-containment. That memory-saturated [holy] landscape […] posed questions: Where did you come from? How on earth did you get here? And where do you want to go next? […] Thresholds can reveal themselves in all sorts of places: high points or low points; in solitude or in crowds. […] grace can come when we turn and face the threshold with openness. The point is to cross them expecting to encounter the holiness of God on the way ahead…not to slide into them as portals to a tranquil nostalgia about what was […but] following God into an unknown but enticing future.” (Thin Places newsletter, June/July/August 2021, pages 1-2)
If you sit in Silence long enough, or are honest with real struggles and desperation, thresholds of deeper meaning invite you to move beyond externals into the depths of your own soul where you meet God. “Most people don’t even realize they have a soul. Their lives are based on externals, whether it be moralist behavior codes, law and order, materialistic measurements of success or prestige, or boundaries erected in hopes of protection from unknowns. Most people are unaware, or suspicious of, inner experience, the depth of soul within them as a created being. By soul, I mean that part of you, deep down in the core of your true identity, below and untouched by self-imposed identity, storylines, or contexts. Our soul is eternal because we are hidden in God with Christ…the part of us who has always been eternally known before the creation of the world, and will always be held in Christ’s care, held as Christ’s expression. […] Lesson number one in life is to learn you have a soul. Lesson number two is to unlearn any lessons that have taught otherwise, or in any way qualified the unconditional is-ness of the Love that is your Essence, your core, the solid rock of God in you, as you, living through you. […] Dying to our false self […] involves and depends on humility, letting go, which is like dying.” (portions of Soul-Aware, by Andrew Kennaly, a reflective write from September 2, 2020).
“She felt in her body that she was healed.” Jesus, “immediately aware that power had gone out from him, turned around in the crowd. […] The woman, knowing what had happened to her, came in fear and trembling (awe and wonder), fell down before him (humility) and told him the whole truth (letting go). […] Your faith has made you well. Go in peace…and be…healed of your disease.
To close, lets invite these biblical stories to resonate in our hearts through a poem. Picking up on the theme related to time, like the older woman and the young girl represent the threshold of moving from what has been but cannot continue toward what is coming but not yet revealed. Let’s close with this poem. It’s written by John O’Donohue.
This interim.
“You are in the time of the interim
When everything seems withheld.
The path you took to get here has washed out,
The way forward is still concealed from you.
The old is not old enough to have died away, The
new is still too young to be born.
You cannot lay claim to anything,
In this time of dusk . . .
As far as you can, hold your confidence.
Do not allow your confusion to squander
This call which is loosening your roots
That you might come free
From all you have outgrown. . . . ”
(John O’Donohue, This interim, from To Bless the Space Between Us, printed in Thin Places newsletter, June/July/August 2021, page 4.)