Luke 13 10 One Sabbath, Jesus was teaching in a synagogue, 11 and a woman was there who had been crippled by an evil spirit for 18 years. She was completely bent over and could not straighten up. 12 When Jesus saw the woman, he called her over and said, “You are now well.” 13 He placed his hands on her, and at once she stood up straight and praised God.
14 The man in charge of the synagogue was angry because Jesus had healed someone on the Sabbath. So he said to the people, “Each week has six days when we can work. Come and be healed on one of those days, but not on the Sabbath.”
15 The Lord replied, “Are you trying to fool someone? Won’t any one of you untie your ox or donkey and lead it out to drink on a Sabbath? 16 This woman belongs to the family of Abraham, but Satan has kept her bound for 18 years. Isn’t it right to set her free on the Sabbath?” 17 Jesus’ words made his enemies ashamed. But everyone else in the crowd was happy about the wonderful things he was doing.
Less than one hundred years ago, people were still treating Sunday as a day when nothing except attending church and reading the Bible was supposed to happen. Children were expected to be quiet and not play outside. There was no shopping of any kind. People did not run errands. This was how Christians followed the commandment “Honour the Sabbath and keep it Holy”.
We have changed a lot in the past one hundred years, and now people who go to church are also doing a lot of other things on a Sunday.
Jesus would have understood that. Jesus was a practical person.
In this story the leaders from the Synagogue were angry with Jesus because he worked on the Sabbath, he healed a woman who had a problem with her back. Those leaders were forgetting that the Sabbath was meant for the people to have one day of relaxation, it was not meant to be a punishment.
Jesus got angry at those leaders and reminded them of God’s teachings. He reminded them that kindness on the Sabbath for people, animals and nature was a good thing.
Mark 5 21 Once again Jesus got into the boat and crossed Lake Galilee. Then as he stood on the shore, a large crowd gathered around him. 22 The person in charge of the synagogue was also there. His name was Jairus, and when he saw Jesus, he went over to him. He knelt at Jesus’ feet 23 and started begging him for help. He said, “My little daughter is about to die! Please come and touch her, so she will get well and live.” 24 Jesus went with Jairus. Many people followed along and kept crowding around.
25 In the crowd was a woman who had been bleeding for twelve years. 26 She had gone to many doctors, and they had not done anything except cause her a lot of pain. She had paid them all the money she had. But instead of getting better, she only got worse.
27 The woman had heard about Jesus, so she came up behind him in the crowd and barely touched his clothes. 28 She had said to herself, “If I can just touch his clothes, I will be healed.” 29 As soon as she touched them, her bleeding stopped, and she knew she was healed.
30 At that moment Jesus felt power go out from him. He turned to the crowd and asked, “Who touched my clothes?”
31 His disciples said to him, “Look at all these people crowding around you! How can you ask who touched you?” 32 But Jesus turned to see who had touched him.
33 The woman knew what had happened to her. So she came trembling with fear and knelt down in front of Jesus. Then she told him the whole story.
34 Jesus said to the woman, “You are now well because of your faith. May God give you peace! You are healed, and you will no longer be in pain.”
35 While Jesus was still speaking, some people came from Jairus’ home and said, “Your daughter has died! Why bother the teacher anymore?”
36 Jesus heard what they said, and he said to Jairus, “Don’t worry. Just have faith!”
37 Jesus did not let anyone go with him except Peter and the two brothers, James and John. 38 They went home with Jairus and saw the people crying and making a lot of noise. 39 Then Jesus went inside and said to them, “Why are you crying and carrying on like this? The child isn’t dead. She is just asleep.” 40 But the people laughed at him.
After Jesus had sent them all out of the house, he took the girl’s father and mother and his three disciples and went to where she was. 41-42 He took the twelve-year-old girl by the hand and said, “Talitha, koum!” which means, “Little girl, get up!” The girl got right up and started walking around.
Everyone was greatly surprised. 43 But Jesus ordered them not to tell anyone what had happened. Then he said, “Give her something to eat.”
Jairus’ daughter is one of the few stories in the entire Bible that is about a little girl. Her father was an important person in the synagogue, and he knew enough about Jesus to ask for help.
Along the way to Jairus’ house, another woman stopped Jesus and asked for help.
Both the daughter of Jairus and the older woman were healed simply by having faith.
Faith changes things. It can sometimes feel so hard to believe in something outside ourselves, and often like Jairus and the older woman, we are only pushed into faith when there is nothing else to try. However, Jesus encourages us to have faith at all times.
Having faith gets easer the more we practice. And our practice is as simple as asking God to be part of our everyday lives, the good parts and the bad parts. Eventually we will see God active in our lives and we will get into a habit of thanking God for always being with us.
Faith grows over time, and it’s never too early or too late to start.
The Gospel of Mark moves fast. We aren’t even out of chapter 1 and already Jesus has been performing healings and teaching so much he has already become well known.
This story starts with Peter’s mother-in-law who was very sick. Jesus asked her to ‘rise up’, the same word used at the end when Jesus dies and is then resurrected, or rises up. The people who heard this story in the first century would have made that connection quickly.
And then we read that she ‘served’ Jesus and the other people in the house. One of the poor choices of the early Bible translators was how they turned the Greek word for ministry into ‘serving’ for all the women, and then made it seem like they were serving food. For men, they always treated ‘serving’ as ministry.
Women were doing ministry too. They were not serving food. Peter’s mother-in-law was also a disciple of Jesus and helped Jesus with his ministry. Women and men worked with Jesus to spread the good news that Jesus had come to share.
Matthew 15 10 Jesus called the crowd together and said, “Pay attention and try to understand what I mean. 11 The food you put into your mouth doesn’t make you unclean and unfit to worship God. The bad words that come out of your mouth are what make you unclean.”
12 Then his disciples came over to him and asked, “Do you know you insulted the Pharisees by what you said?”
13 Jesus answered, “Every plant that my Father in heaven did not plant will be pulled up by the roots. 14 Stay away from those Pharisees! They are like blind people leading other blind people, and all of them will fall into a ditch.”
15 Peter replied, “What did you mean when you talked about the things that make people unclean?”
16 Jesus then said:
Don’t any of you know by now what I am talking about? 17 Don’t you know that the food you put into your mouth goes into your stomach and then out of your body? 18 But the words that come out of your mouth come from your heart. And they are what make you unfit to worship God. 19 Out of your heart come evil thoughts, murder, unfaithfulness in marriage, vulgar deeds, stealing, telling lies, and insulting others. 20 These are what make you unclean. Eating without washing your hands will not make you unfit to worship God.
21 Jesus left and went to the territory near the towns of Tyre and Sidon. 22 Suddenly a Canaanite woman from there came out shouting, “Lord and Son of David, have pity on me! My daughter is full of demons.” 23 Jesus did not say a word. But the woman kept following along and shouting, so his disciples came up and asked him to send her away.
24 Jesus said, “I was sent only to the people of Israel! They are like a flock of lost sheep.”
25 The woman came closer. Then she knelt down and begged, “Please help me, Lord!”
26 Jesus replied, “It isn’t right to take food away from children and feed it to dogs.”
27 “Lord, this is true,” the woman said, “but even puppies get the crumbs that fall from their owner’s table.”
28 Jesus answered, “Dear woman, you really do have a lot of faith, and you will be given what you want.” At that moment her daughter was healed.
Today’s Bible readings give us two stories of frustrations and challenges. First a Pharisee challenges Jesus and his followers for not washing their hands properly before they ate and how that made their meal ‘unclean’. The second story is Jesus being challenged by a mother from Canaan who wanted her daughter healed, and this time Jesus was the one who was unreasonable.
Often we teach that Jesus was perfect, that he couldn’t make a mistake, and that he knew everything about a conversation before it started. Thinking about Jesus like that means we have a hard time relating, because people are always making mistakes. So it’s time to forget about ‘perfect’ Jesus, and start to see him as a regular person who sometimes said and did the wrong things.
But… Jesus was a person who could quickly learn. He learned from the Canaanite mother that God’s love and hope was for everyone, not just the Hebrew people.
With his own followers he reminded them that there was no good food or bad food, that it was the things that come out of our body that cause problems, not the things we put into our body. If we lie, steal, and hurt people we are ‘unclean’. Jesus taught us that was not the way to live.
In this episode, Debb and Deb discuss the leadership role of women in the early Christian Church. No matter how much some try to erase them from history, the archaeological remains don’t lie.
NOTE: As promised, here is the link to the infamous Episcopa Theodora mosaic. Sorry, dude. You can change the name all you want, but she still was a woman and she still was a bishop.
Jesus would have supported vaccines and a woman’s right to choose.
Too many people are using the Bible as a reason to deny the use of vaccines and a woman’s right to make choices about her body. This is the wrong use of the Bible.
How would Jesus deal with vaccines? He healed everyone who asked, using prayer, dust, even his own spit. If he had had vaccines, he would have used that too.
How would Jesus deal with abortion? Abortion was known at the time of Jesus and he said nothing about it, so it’s safe to accept that Jesus didn’t think he had the right to interfere with a woman’s choices.
If we really want to follow Jesus, we can’t just decide we don’t like something or someone and then throw the Bible around as the reason.
The Barefoot Evangelist 