This week’s sacred story comes from Mark 5:21-43 where a woman who has been sick and separated for 12 years touches Jesus, is made well, and only then do they talk about faith. Meanwhile, the daughter of a community leader has died but Jesus goes to see her anyway and she gets up and is given a snack.

Hurt and heartache is such an egalitarian thing, even as it is often unjust. It seems like it pools among the already poor and struggling. (Just look at the “Cancer Cluster” investigation right here in Houston in the predominately black neighborhood of Kashmere Gardens). But hurt and illness can humble even the most proud and prestigious – even well-respected community leaders like Jairus, even celebrities, even the ones with the corner offices and retirement plans, even the chair of that nonprofit that has done so much good for the neighborhood. It turns out that no amount of respect, accomplishment, meditation, or volunteer hours can inoculate us or the ones we love from being utterly human.

Some ailments are visible – the ones that flush our cheeks and pale our skin, leave us with surgery scars, a sling around our arm or a walking cane, some that mean we won’t ever leave the hospital again. And some illnesses hide in plain sight – chronic pain, anxiety, depression, HIV/AIDS, addiction, diabetes, cancer, rage, silent viruses in the body and mind, and hemorrhaging women whose names we do not know.

Whether or not our dis-ease is diagnosed or has a name…whether or not our symptoms are obvious…when we are not well in body and soul, it affects our whole being. We often sense there’s a limit to how much the people around us can do or deal. And if this goes on for any prolonged time, this kind of pain and hurt can make us feel deeply alone, even among a crowd. We feel like we’ve tried everything - doctors, prayers, people, changing our diet, our intentions, the oils, and the regimens. And maybe when those fell short too we leaned into addiction, addiction to substances or sex or stuff - to consumption, to social media, to busyness, to novelty, anything that could temporarily soothe or at least mask the ache of uncertainty, rejection, disappointment, or fear.

We isolate ourselves because we don’t want to be a burden, or we feel untouchable (and not it a good way). It feels like we’re crawling in our own skin. We hide away because when we have let our true selves be seen, we were hurt and we fear it’ll happen again. We isolate ourselves because we don’t want to admit how bad it really is because it scares us. We stay closed off because it’s literally all we can do, getting out of bed just isn’t an option some days.

Others isolate us because they’re embarrassed they don’t know what to say or it reminds them of their own pain or they’re afraid the might be as fragile and human as you are.

And so, to try and bridge the gap between, to create our own sense of wholeness of connection, we can cut off pieces of ourselves. We separate bits of ourselves into categories – parent over here, daughter over there, student here, felon there, hobbies here, church-goer there. And we don’t let them mix. We compartmentalize ourselves in the hopes of managing it all just a bit better. That will be the ticket out of this mess. If we can just configure it all just right, we’ll be ok. We lock up our feelings, we segment ourselves, we conceal the freckles that God gave us, we hide the whole truth of who we are because once it was the subject of schoolyard bullying that we didn’t even realize still hurts.

When we get to the point when those walls of separation and segmentation begin to crack and with nothing left to prop us up and nothing left to lose, no more pretense to maintain - when we no longer even bother to pretend that we’ve got it all together, that things are fine when they’re definitely not…we fall to the ground in submission or we plunge through danger and strain our arms to their limit just to touch something that might set us free from our bursting desperation.

But even this is risky. It’s possible that even this won’t change anything – and even when we say we expect that to be the case…it still hurts when it happens. After the little girl is declared dead, Jesus still asks to be taken to her and the people laugh. In the face of deep disconnection, the idea of wholeness and restoration seems laughable. In this ancient Jewish society both blood and the dead are considered ritually unclean and anyone who touches them will be contaminated too, cut off from the people and at least for a time…separated even from the fullness of God. Who would risk such a thing?

Jesus knows the risk, knows the consequences, and chooses love anyway. Among a sea of people, pushing in on every side of him, Jesus notices when this woman touches even his outer clothes. Jesus notices. Jesus knows when something’s off with us, and it sets something off in God’s very self. Even with all the barriers, God feels the power of new life that has been lying asleep and trying to emerge.

Jesus stops everything to tend to it.

The woman’s body had been made well, but this was only part of the healing. Jesus called out and she stepped forward…she came in fear and trembling, fell down before him, and told him the WHOLE truth. Jesus says, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.” Daughter!?! It’s been so long since anyone used a word of such intimate relationship with her. And faith!?! Is that what that was fluttering within her? She never said anything of faith – never declared Jesus as Savior, never expressed any allegiances or convictions. But Jesus speaks of God’s conviction for her and her wholeness. It’s the same with the little girl. While her family and community have been reaching out for help on her behalf, she is unable to move or speak. She cannot even reach out for touch and she cannot plead for anything. And yet, Jesus casts out the noise of weeping and mourning, of sorrow and separation. God softly kneels beside her bed, touches her small cold hand and says with gentle firmness, “little girl, get up.”

None of the positioning, pleading, campaigning, negotiating, or rationalizing produces healing. No sense of, “if we could just….x,y, and z…we’ll be better,” not in the way our soul truly craves. Rather, is it WHO Jesus is that restores. The woman says “if I but touch those clothes, I will be made well.” She lives in a world of if/then transactional healing and wholeness. That’s not a mark against her, it’s just how things work in the world. That’s the system of empire that surrounds us, a system of scarcity. And Jesus says, it’s not even that, it’s not that you’ve finally won the unwinnable system. It’s who I am. It’s not what you do that earns wholeness; it’s who I am that reveals it, even in a broken world. I bring a new system, a new economy where there is more than enough life and love for all.

While our habits and practices can help us recognize and lean into our divine wholeness, they don’t produce it. The woman never uses the word “faith” for herself. She may never have called what she had faith or recognized it as such, she may even have been repulsed by very idea after it seemed to have let her down so profoundly. But Jesus does. Jesus lifts out part of ourselves we thought were dead or perhaps never even there.

Still, HEALING IS OFTEN A PROCESS. In this scripture we see that what is born out of one healing is another - truth, faith, wholeness. It calls forth that original blessedness deep in our bones that somehow became obscured to us or others. It sparks dormant hopes that lie below the hope we even knew. It is the even greater hope that emerges when the hope we hoped for doesn’t happen.

When discussing this kind of hope, a friend and mentor read to me this final stanza of Percy Shelley’s “Prometheus Unbound:”

“To suffer woes which hope thinks infinite;To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;To defy power, which seems omnipotent;To love, and bear; to hope till Hope createsFrom its own wreck the thing it contemplates;Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;This, like thy glory, Titan, is to beGood, great and joyous, beautiful and free;This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory.”

What’s unique in God’s life, kingdom, and victory is that this healing is not just for the privileged, it’s for all, and it’s the kind that lasts. In the ancient world, the ones who were healed were the ones who could afford it, the ones who could finance their travel to renowned physicians or the temples of holy healers, to centers that resemble modern health spas – equally as spacious and grand with natural spring waters and giant amphitheaters for charismatic speakers. They too taught that the right set of beliefs or the right way of thinking was necessary for healing. The ones who got healthcare were the ones who were already relatively healthy enough to make the journey to such places. In this system, healing was not given, it was earned. Healing doesn’t come TO YOU, YOU had to make the way for healing. Perhaps our system is not so different all these years later. The woman that Jesus heals has no money left for doctors or treatments, and the daughter isn’t well enough to make the journey to any healer. They point to the top and bottom of the social hierarchy. Those who are just 12 years old surrounded by family and those who have spent that same amount of time isolated from others. They are both dangerously unclean and neither expresses any explicit faith before they are healed. This is who God heals – the high and the low, the overtly religious and those who haven’t been to church in years (if ever), the well off, the comfortable middle class, and the poor.

And the healing culminates… in sharing food.

Jesus tells those gathered to get the newly resurrected girl something to eat. It’s a practical idea. She’s been through some stuff. She’s probably famished and food does wonders for a hungry body and soul. But Jesus also wants those around to see that she’s not a ghost, that this healing isn’t a smoke and mirrors trick. How many times have we been sabotaged with fear, even when we do get a glimpse of healing, that it’s not real or it won’t last? Jesus shows that this healing is not a shallow or hollow temporary fix, it is complete wholeness restored and it will remain. That doesn’t mean the little girl will never get a cold or the woman will never get arthritis for the rest of their lives, but they are eternally liberated in the truth that isolation (even within their own minds) will never again define them. The weight of our woes, as heavy as they get, is still no match for God’s love for us. They’ve experienced a hope so big, a relationship so restorative, a connection so powerful, and a love so profound that they cannot be intimidated, enslaved, or confined to anything less than God’s promise for ultimate wholeness. Each time we eat and drink this sacred meal, we taste that promise again and again as it nourishes us day by day. It declares that we are part of this body which has already gone to the grave and back. We are part of a divine body that in its brokenness is also life-giving food for a weary, disconnected world. It’s fragmentation is made whole in our sharing of it. Amen.

Made Whole: Healing in a Culture of Isolation