Jesus, Interrupted

Today on Summit Life, Pastor J.D. Greer looks at the stories of two people seeking a miracle.

Poor Jairus. This story had started with him pleading with Jesus to rush to his house because his little girl was on death's door. And now here is Jesus stopping to take extended time to deal with a woman's chronic ailment. Her ailment is not life threatening. She's cutting in line. If Jesus were a medical doctor, this decision would not just be insensitive.

It would be malpractice. Welcome to Summit Life, the Bible teaching ministry of pastor, author, and theologian, J.D. Greer. I'm your host, Molly Vidovitch. We're a little over halfway through our teaching series called The Whole Story, discovering how every chapter of the Bible from beginning to end is all about the gospel. Today, Pastor J.D. walks us through the story of two people who came to Jesus looking for physical healing. But as we'll see, these stories are about so much more than just getting your prayers answered. I'm sure you've heard this passage before, but maybe never quite like this.

So let's get started. Pastor J.D. titled this message, Jesus Interrupted.

Mark five, we're going to be down around verse 22. Today, we are going to see the story of somebody who cut the line, so to speak, to get to Jesus. And she does so because she's desperate.

And desperate people tend to do desperate things. And while what she does may seem rude, Jesus's reaction to her is maybe even stranger. And the whole encounter is going to teach us something very important about faith. In fact, several important things about faith, even if it's not a good model for how to order food at a fast food restaurant, because it shows us the kind of faith that Jesus responds to. And it also shows us what Jesus wants from us when he does not seem to be responding to us. Mark five, verse 22. Let's begin here. Then one of the synagogue leaders named Jairus, by the way, is the leader of the synagogue.

That means he would have been one of the leading officials in the city, one of the most important men in the town. He came and when he saw Jesus, he fell at Jesus's feet. He pleaded earnestly with him. My little daughter is dying.

Please come and put your hands on her so that she will be healed and live. What's striking about this is, first of all, his posture toward Jesus. Grown men in those days did not plead, particularly men of that stature.

It was considered shameful for men of stature to show that kind of emotion and for a ruler to prostrate himself at another man's feet. But this man's little girl is dying. And you see things differently when you are desperate. Luke's account of the same event tells us that this was his only daughter. The fact that she's 12 years old and that it's his only daughter is a pretty good indication that his wife and he probably thought that they weren't ever gonna be able to have kids and they managed to have this one. So you're looking at someone who is very precious to him.

This little girl meant the world to him and he's desperate. So he pleased, verse 24. So Jesus went with him, verse 24. A large crowd followed and pressed around him and a woman was there in that crowd who had been subject to bleeding for 12 years. Now that's a very polite way in the New Testament of saying that she had an uncontrollable menstrual flow, which meant that not only was she sick and likely in pain, she was unable to have children. And even more, she was ceremonially unclean, which meant that nobody could touch her. She was not allowed to go into public worship because she was unclean.

She really should not be in crowds because she might touch somebody and make them unclean. She's been this way for 12 years, which means that for 12 years nobody has touched her, nobody has hugged her. For 12 years nobody's laid a hand on her to pray for her. She is an outcast, she is lonely. Verse 26, she suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors and she'd spent all that she had, yet instead of getting better, she only grew worse. She spent her entire family's fortune trying to get various doctors to cure her, but nothing's helped. In fact, the attempted cures have just made her sicker and she's given up hope. One other thing that you'll notice about this woman is she's not given a name.

This is in contrast to Jairus, you see, who's got a name that everybody knows. In fact, her whole story is supposed to be read in contrast to his. He's got a daughter who's 12 years old and sick.

She's been sick for 12 years. He's the ruler of the synagogue, she's not allowed in the synagogue. He was respected, she was rejected.

His was a household name, hers is a name nobody knows. Verse 27, when she heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak because she thought, if I just touch his clothes, if I could just touch his clothes, I'll be healed. Now, you have to wonder what exactly had she heard? Maybe she'd heard the prophecy given by Malachi in Malachi 4, 2, that when the Messiah came, he would rise with healing in his wings.

We know that already by the time of Jesus, there was a legend that had grown up that the Messiah would be so powerful that even the wings of his garment, the fringes of his garment would possess healing power. So maybe she'd heard that and maybe she thought, you know, maybe just maybe this is my chance, but here's her dilemma. She's not even supposed to be in public. I told you in case she touched somebody and made them unclean, but this is her only chance. And so she risks the public scorn, she fights her way through the crowds trying to keep her face covered up so that people don't recognize who she is and expose her. By the way, I love that the crowds could not keep this woman from Jesus. And I say that because I see a lot of people who get kept from Jesus by what they assume everybody else is going to think. Oh, if they're going to make jokes around me, jokes about me around the office, my parents are going to say that I joined a cult. The woman says, forget the crowds.

I got to know the truth about this man because he just might be able to change my whole life. So she fights her way through the crowds to him. And as he goes by, she reaches out and just touches the hem of his clothes. The word touch there, by the way, verse 28 literally means clutched. In other words, she grabbed it and she pulled it. In verse 29, immediately her bleeding stopped and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering. It was like she grabbed hold of a rope and she pulled it and just rang this bell and power rung out of him. Verse 30, at once Jesus realized that power had gone out from him. Notice the passive nature of how that's stated. It's presented as if he is not even in control of it, which leads me to ask you a theological question.

You ready? Here's your theological question. Is Jesus not in control of his miracles? Is God not sovereign over the outpouring of his power?

Of course he is. It's presented this way because Mark is trying to teach us something about the faithfulness of Jesus. And that is that he responds to faith so reliably that it might as well be a reflex. And so he turns around in the crowd and he asked, who was it?

Who touched my clothes? Now again, does he really not know? Surely he's God. He can figure this one out on his own.

Here's how I see it. When my kids were younger, I'd come down and there my three, you know, my four kids are sitting down there in the living room and there's a lid off of the cookie jar and all, you know, three of my kids are sitting there with clean faces watching TV and one of them's got chocolate smeared all over their face. And so I say, was one of you guys in the cookie jar? Now I'm not asking that because I don't know. I'm asking that because I'm giving one of them a chance to come clean. Of course, my kids were always like, no, I mean, maybe it was on a mom's friends or a cookie gremlin or a cookie rapture.

We don't know what happened, dad. What Jesus is doing here is he's inviting her to come forward and publicly confess what she's done. Because you see, there's always, there's a very important public dimension to all great acts of faith. God wants you to own it. That's one of the reasons we say baptism is so important here. You're not supposed to keep your love for Jesus private. You're supposed to declare it.

That's as important for you as it is for everybody else. God wants you to own it publicly. Well, the disciples who are, as I've told you, not always the spiciest Doritos in the bag, they think Jesus is genuinely asking a question. So they say, well, uh, Jesus, you, you see the people crowding around you and yet you ask who touched me. The disciples have this amazing ability to fill silence with stupidity. And you almost can picture Jesus going, really guys, you, you really thought I didn't know that there were a lot of people around me that were touching me.

I'm thank you for all your amazing insights. By the way, these are going to be the appointed leaders of God's church in the coming years. You almost get the impression that Jesus is going to build his church, not because of the awesomeness of his leaders, but despite their severe lack thereof, Jesus kept looking around to see who had done it.

Verse 33. Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her came and fell at his feet and trembling with fear. She told him the whole truth.

There's something really, really sweet here. I think this scorned alienated woman, who's now coming forward in the sight of all she had been trying to hide herself. She didn't want to be seen now, trembling with fear, wondering, have I been caught? Is he going to reject me also? Is he going to publicly shame me?

He knows I'm not supposed to be here. He probably doesn't appreciate that me and unclean woman has touched him. What happens next might be, might be the most important teaching moment in the life of Jesus. Maybe the most important teaching moment at all of scripture, because it is the central question of all religion.

What is it like to be exposed in all of your defilement, all your guilt and all your shame before a holy God? Verse 34. He said to her, daughter, your faith has healed you. The word daughter that he uses here, scholars tell us is a term of the most intimate endearment.

You would never use it of someone that you just met. And by the way, this is the only person that Jesus ever refers to in the gospels by that term. The girl that nobody wanted has just been called precious daughter by the ultimate father. The girl that nobody would touch is embraced by the strongest and most tender arms in the universe. The name that nobody else knew is precious to God.

Do you see the contrast? Jairus is a dad who is pleading the cause of his daughter before Jesus, but this woman has no father. So Jesus becomes her father. To Jairus, you're going to see that he will be the healer. To this woman, he will be both father and healer because he becomes to us whatever we lack. To those who are lonely, he is the friend. To those who are fatherless, he is the father. To those who are guilty, he becomes cleanliness. To those who are in shame, he becomes their honor. To those who are poor, he becomes their riches.

He is everything. And so he says, verse 34, go in peace, daughter, and be freed from your suffering. Now there's something here that you and I, if we're Americans, and I know most of us are, we usually miss, but if you're a Jew or a Muslim, you immediately pick up on it. In fact, I love telling this story to Muslims a whole lot more than I love telling it to you people because they always see something in it we don't see.

And just reading the story, they're jolted by it as you tell it. Here is this woman, unclean and defiled, touching somebody that everybody regards to be a holy man. What happens when an unclean thing touches a clean thing?

Well, the clean thing gets defiled by the unclean. Now I, you know, most of you know that I live for a couple of years as a missionary over in a Muslim country. And while I was there, I was single and I lived with this family, very strict Muslim family. And I became quite close with the family. And so their prayer room, they were wealthy enough, they had a prayer room in their house.

And so, but to get to it, you had to walk right past my room. So they had a teenage daughter and as she would make her way to the prayer room, sometimes I would see her coming and I would just hide like right behind my door. And when she walked by, I jumped out and touch her face, at which point she would get mad and she would like start saying so she had to go back and wash again because I'm unclean. I'm unclean because I'm not a Muslim and she would have to go wash again.

I would not suggest doing that by the way with a Muslim woman, unless you are very, very close to them and their family. But when somebody that is unclean touches somebody who is clean, then the one who is clean gets defiled by the unclean. That's why she'd have to go watch again, wash again. We understand that concept with sickness. What happens if a sick person comes in close contact with a healthy person? If I'm sick and you're well, your wellness does not make me healthier. We don't say my kid is sick. I think I'll drop them off in the nursery with all the well kids so that their wellness will rub off on my kid.

If you think that way, please go to a different church, okay? If I'm sick and I sneeze on you and you get sick, we say I gave my cold to you. That doesn't mean unfortunately that I don't have my cold anymore.

That would be pretty awesome, right? Like I just gave it to you. I mean, you know, if I just give it to you and then I sneeze on somebody, I didn't have it. What it means is now we both have it. Because when the unclean touches the clean, then the clean thing becomes unclean. Here's what's so shocking about all of this. In this story, when the unclean thing touches the clean thing, when the sick one touches the one who is well, she, the unclean, becomes clean.

She, the sick, becomes healthy. So it raises a question, what has happened to the uncleanness? That's the million dollar question of the gospels. The answer is Jesus silently and invisibly takes it into himself. You see, he is going to end his life on a cross where he literally becomes our sin and bears our shame. Isaiah had prophesied that the Messiah would bear our griefs and carry our sorrows, that he would be wounded for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities.

The core of the gospel is substitution. On the cross, he took our defilement and our condemnation so that his healing, his cleanliness, his fellowship with the father could be passed into us. That didn't just begin at the cross. That was certainly the ultimate moment of it. It happened all throughout the life of Jesus.

Here you see him taking her uncleanness and taking it into himself. Our moment of salvation is being illustrated here. We touch Jesus in faith and the guilt and the shame and the penalty of our sin passes into him and his wholeness and his purity and his forgiveness and his sonship with the father pass unto us.

This woman goes home to her family and Jesus heads to the cross. Verse 35, while Jesus was still speaking, some people came from the house of Jairus, the synagogue leader. Now, has you forgotten about Jairus?

You probably had. Mark reminds us again who Jairus is since it's been so long since we thought about it. You see, all this is just great for this woman, but poor Jairus. This story had started with him pleading with Jesus to rush to his house because his little girl was on death's door. And now here is Jesus stopping to take extended time to deal with a woman's chronic ailment. Her ailment is not life-threatening. She's cutting in line and her issue is something that could easily wait another hour, right? I mean, she's had it for 12 years. Surely she can wait another 30 minutes.

Meanwhile, this little girl is at death's door. Listen, those of you in the medical community will immediately recognize this. If Jesus were a doctor, if Jesus were a medical doctor, this decision would not just be insensitive.

It would be malpractice. And he does it intentionally. And then the worst happens. While Jesus is talking with this woman, literally as he's in the midst of a conversation, a message comes from Jairus' house.

Your daughter is dead. They said, why bother the teacher anymore? And now comes Jairus' great test of faith. Why bother? Is he going to think the situation is so hopeless that not even Jesus can help? Do you know how many potential miracles have died with a thought? Why bother? It is never too late with Jesus.

It's always time to bother. Verse 36, overhearing what they said, Jesus told him, don't be afraid, just believe. He did not let anyone follow him except Peter, James, and John, the brother of James. And when they came to the home of the synagogue leader, Jesus saw a commotion with people crying and wailing loudly. He went in and he said to them, while this commotion and wailing, some of the worst moments in my life have been when I was with someone after their child died. This guy, his 12-year-old little girl is dead. And Jesus looks at him and his wife and he says, why are you crying? Is Jesus being insensitive?

What kind of question is that? Then he says, the child is not dead, but asleep. There's 40, but they laughed at him. They laughed at him. This is not a laugh like they think he's confused. This is bitter scorn.

This is you insensitive fool. And he put them all out. He took the child's father and mother and the disciples who were with him. And he went in where the child was and he took her by the hand and he said to her, talitha kum, talitha, which means little girl. Talitha say, scholars say that it's a very, very tender term that could almost be translated sweetheart, kum, it just means get up, not be thou resurrected or come forth, but nothing regal or resurrection sounding simply sweetheart, get up. I get the image when I read that of sitting on the bed, on the edge of the bed of my eight-year-old girl on a summer afternoon when she's been napping and saying, hey, sweethearts, it's time to get up. Here we have Jesus facing the most fear devastating enemy the human race has ever known, death. And he treats it like he's waking up a little girl from a nap. Verse 42, and immediately the girl stood up and she began to walk around.

She was 12 years old. At this, they were completely astonished. Let me spend the remainder of my time telling you the meaning of these stories for us. Here's the first meaning shows us how Jesus delivers us from death.

Don't get this wrong because a lot of people do. These stories are not primarily about how to get miracles from Jesus. They are pictures of how we become Christians.

They are reenactments of what it looks like to be converted to Jesus. You see, we are all like this woman. Our sin has left us diseased and unclean. We are guilty and cast out.

Unlike this woman who was suffering through no direct act of her own, we're in this condition because of our sin. Like this woman, we are hopeless. All the cures have failed. Education can't fix it. Scientific progress hasn't fixed it. Romantic relationships haven't fixed it.

That's where a lot of us turn, right? We think, oh, if I could just get married, then my life will be complete. But like I've told you, lonely, insecure, single people become lonely, insecure, married people.

In fact, they become worse. None of these things, the scientific progress, education, they just, scientific progress and education have simply made us more sophisticated in how we pursue our selfishness. Dorothy Sayers was a British socialist in the early 20th century, a British socialist who believed that education, equality and scientific progress would cure all the problems of mankind. Then she said, I lived through World War II. She wrote this essay afterwards called Creed or Chaos. She was a big influence on C.S.

Lewis. She said, we were given to believe that humankind, talking about her as a British socialist, we were given to believe that humankind consisted of essentially good human beings, gradually evolving into higher, better beings that we as a race were essentially teachable. And so she said, the appalling outbursts of bestial ferocity in the totalitarian states, talking about Russia and Germany and the obstinate selfishness and stupid greed of unregulated capitalist societies were not merely alarming to us.

They were the utter negation of everything in which we have believed. Most psychologists will say that modern psychology is built on the theory of Carl Rogers, that humans are essentially good. You just have to remove the things that are keeping them from being good.

What you see with Jesus is a totally different story. Education can't fix it. Relationships won't fix it.

Scientific progress won't fix it. Religious rules won't fix it. I've told you religious rules is like telling an alcoholic not to crave beer anymore.

He might agree. She might agree that her craving for wine or craving for beer is not good, but they can't just make themselves stop. Religious rules can tell us how we ought to be, but religious rules cannot make us that way. I told you that religious rules are often like railroad tracks that point us the direction that we ought to go, but they are powerless to move the train along the tracks.

That takes something entirely different. Not only do these things not fix our problem, like with this woman, these things tend to just make it worse. Really, religious, proud, selfish people are worse than regular, proud, selfish people.

Isn't that true? I mean, if you meet somebody proud and selfish, keep them away from religion because they're just going to become even worse. Really educated, proud, selfish people are worse than regular, proud, selfish people.

Really rich, proud, selfish people are worse than regular, proud, selfish people because he probably because he problems like pride and selfishness are not cured by education. They're not cured by scientific progress or not cured by government regulation. They're only cured by something entirely different. Like this woman, we got to fight through the crowds and we have to reach out for Jesus intentionally. Jesus is the only cure for our broken world. Boy, if there are a message for today, that is definitely it. Think about what it would look like if the world simply embraced Jesus right now. Thank you for listening to Summit Life with Pastor J.D.

Greer. He will continue this message tomorrow, pointing us to faith, miracles, and the power of the gospel. Today's message is from our teaching series called The Whole Story. We're getting an overview of the major themes of the Bible and learning how the whole book, From Genesis to Revelation, is really just one story, the story of Jesus.

We've been at this for a while now, so if you've missed any teaching along the way, you can find it at jdgreer.com. To go along with this series, we have a new resource simply called The Books of the Bible Cards. This set of cards will help you as you read to make connections with the context of the original audience. Each card includes an illustration representing the book, details about the book, three key truths gleaned from the book, where the book points to Jesus in the gospel, and finally a reflection question to help you apply the book's message to your life. Use each of the 66 cards as you read through the Bible to help you better identify where you are in the grand narrative. Use them around the dinner table to discuss as a family or review them every few weeks to keep the overviews of each book top of mind so you can apply these concepts in your personal time with the Lord. We want to spend our days helping you really understand the Bible because we believe it is how God has revealed himself to us and because we believe it holds the hope we so desperately need for today. We'd love for you to have this resource as a reference for any time you're reading through a book of the Bible. They come as our way of saying thanks when you donate to support this ministry.

Summit Life is funded by listeners like you and we're so grateful. Ask for The Books of the Bible Cards when you give today by calling 866-335-5220. That's 866-335-5220.

Or if it's easier, you can give and request the cards online at JDGrier.com. I'm Molly Vidovich. We are so glad that you join us. Don't forget to listen again tomorrow when Pastor JD tackles the challenging topic of praying for the seemingly impossible. Ever tried that? I bet you have. So we'll see you Wednesday on Summit Life with JD Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by JD Greer Ministries.