If last Sunday’s Gospel is aptly described by the Canon Vicar as a “miracle plus” passage, we may, perhaps, view this Sunday’s Gospel as an “OH, boy!” plus passage!

In the passage just preceding, Jesus has cured the Gerasene demoniac. Cool! A nut case returns to his senses and stops bugging the neighbors, right? Yeah, but! At a cost---Jesus, as you may remember, sends the demons possessing the guy into about 2000 pigs (causing instant “Mad Pig Disease!) who charge down a cliff into the lake and are killed. The Gerasene stock market takes a nose dive and the townspeople beg Jesus to get outta town.

Back across the lake he comes and has the first “Now, what?” or “OH, boy!” experience: Fresh crowd. Fresh problem. Fresh can of worms.

One of the leaders of the temple, Jairus by name, has a sick daughter. Very sick. Sick enough that he fears for her life. He’s frightened enough to step out of the role of leader and throw himself at Jesus' feet in the role of supplicant. OK. Fine. That is how it’s done in those days: You want a favor like this, you grovel. Jesus responds. Off he goes with him. And the crowd which “pressed in on him.”

You would think that would be enough for someone fresh from the Gerasene experience to have on his plate but, oh no, along the way he’s accosted by “a woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years.” Second “OH boy! experience.

Now this is complicated: Her situation is pretty sad. Not only has she a debilitating medical condition. “She had endured much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had; and she was no better, but rather grew worse!” It appears she has no husband to take care of her. She is alone. If she had any resources they were probably used up as one after another unscrupulous physician, as was the custom with the poor in those days, took advantage of her without helping her. Like the temple leader, she’s desperate. Desperate enough to turn to a faith healer.

She approaches Jesus in a different way than Jairus. And, by doing so, she puts Jesus between a rock and a hard place. She doesn’t follow the rules. In fact, she breaks them big time!

For one thing, the crowd isn’t about to part for her to get through. She’s not a leader; she’s a nobody and, worse yet, an unclean nobody. Because of her condition she wouldn’t even have been allowed to sleep inside the city gates. She had probably been raped and beaten, as such people were, as well. And, remember, this is a culture that regarded anything that suggested the leaking away of power, such as loss of blood, as unclean and inappropriate for contact with the divine. So now we have a poor, unclean, woman (and women were second class citizens in that culture in those times), doing a “hit and run,” stealing the healer’s “juice,” which, again could be seen to diminish him and his power, in addition to distracting him on his way to serve the “quality” people. WOW!

And what does he do? Does he brush her off and double time it to Jairus’ house. NOO. He takes time, seeks her out. Praises her faith, makes a positive example of her before the others!

Even before the people who came from Jairus’ house to tell them it had taken too long and the little girl had died, I’ve gotta believe Jairus and the others were seething at being put in second place and at this disrespect for the purity code. For who? A nobody! And Jesus has got to be thinking, “Uh oh. Father, work with me here. We gotta pull this thing out.”

As we know, it does work out. But it isn’t easy and it isn’t without surprises. Jesus doesn’t encounter a lot of faith, if you know what I mean, at the leader of the temple’s home: Third “OH boy!” experience. “he saw a commotion, people weeping and wailing loudly.” When he challenged the lack of faith their behavior reflected, telling them the child was not dead (lost) as she appeared, they laughed at him. The very people, some of them, who had just seen him cure the woman with the hemorrhage who had demonstrated faith!

So, it’s all about faith, its relationship to healing, who’s likely to have it and who is not, and who Jesus is likely to prefer and why.

Clearly, in this passage, the more genuine faith is displayed by the woman with the hemorrhage who will risk disapproval, even the crowd’s violence to reach the healer and who throws herself at his feet not to get the goody (She’ll settle for the crumb---“If I but touch his clothes I will be made well.”) but in humble thanksgiving for having gotten the goody! You don’t hear Jesus telling her to keep it quiet! But Jairus’ family he treats differently (“He strictly ordered that no one should know this.”). He wants witnesses like the outcast woman - the 1st century street person.

Why? Well, one of our bishops commented once that the poor are often closer to faith than those who are better off because they live on the edge. It is such who are keenly aware of their creaturehood. They are most psychologically available to see and feel the action of God in their lives.

Such faith is key to healing. In my secular job I am an evangelist of a sort. I am responsible for evangelizing my clients who are the unemployed, of all levels all the way from the maintenance person to the CEO. It is my job to give them a reasonable hope, to instill a faith in them that they can be re-employed quickly and well if they will but trust us, the method of going about finding a job that we teach, and the partnership we offer them in putting it to work to find new employment. A way that is very different from the one most jobseekers use and, therefore, quite threatening to some.

I have to convince them their age, the “market” or what’s “out there”, where they live be it an isolated area or a city, or how much they made won’t matter very much to how long it takes them or how well they do in getting as good or better a position than the one they left. Instead, how well they follow instruction, how willing they are to put themselves in front of people who, as far as they know, can’t offer them a job and won’t be able to, how willing they are to wait to chase opportunities until we can teach them how to do so---those things will make the difference.

If you think about it, we may find the faith that gets us through in the most unlikely places. It’s been said, “If you want to solve a problem you’re having working with your computer look for an 8-year-old.” Why? Because they are not afraid of breaking the thing. They play with it. A mistake is just the occasion for playing some more. Similarly, it’s easier to teach a child to swim because they haven’t learned to be afraid of the water. Often it’s easier to teach a child a foreign language.

I’m sure you have plenty of examples of your own. Suffice it to say, this Gospel lesson teaches us the value our Savior places on simple faith, humble faith, and that such faith has the power to heal. I think it also teaches us to look for that faith in the less fortunate, the unsophisticated. It may be they have much to teach those of us who may occasionally think we already know all that needs to be known. And, finally, it teaches us to move outside our comfort zone and realize if we always do what folk have always done, we’ll get what they’ve always gotten. That may mean staying stuck where we are as opposed to being healed of what ails us, be it disease, unemployment, non-swimmer status, or cyber-ignorance, you name it.

May God add God’s blessing to this reading and exposition of the Word.