Our text today should make you hungry. Two stories told as if Mark is making a sandwich of them. In fact, that’s what scholars call this technique Mark uses three times in his gospel—the Markan Sandwich. The story in the middle of the one on both ends is the lunchmeat to the two slices of bread: it adds taste to the whole thing. To change the sense, then, from taste to touch: these are touching stories, stories of touch, touches of grace.

Jesus crosses back over the Sea of Galilee after casting demons out of a man in Gentile territory. The demons go into a herd of swine and plunge headlong off a cliff into the sea. Jesus sorts out the clean and the unclean and makes sure all that is unclean is destroyed and all those touched by it are restored. Now he goes back to Jewish territory and does the same. No place is off limits to Jesus’ presence or power, and no person off limits either.

So he comes ashore with his disciples and a crowd meets him at the dock. This tips us off to something about Jesus: his ministry is public right from the start; he is out to bring healing and salvation to ordinary people in their ordinary lives; he is not passing secret wisdom to a few. What’s more, he is out to change the way public life is set up wherever it makes ordinary life impossible for ordinary people.

Jairus comes running up to Jesus, desperate. He falls on his face and begs Jesus to heal his little daughter, who is at the point of death. Just come and touch her, he says. Just lay your hands upon her and she will be made well and live. Jesus is touched by this and goes with him.

Note for later, Jesus went with him. But note now Jairus. He’s a big shot around town, a leader in the synagogue. Which means he is charged with the responsibility to see after the welfare of the Jewish people, to oversee the worship life of the people, and to see to strict adherence of the Law of Moses. They are far from the Temple in Jerusalem, but a man like Jairus is supposed to keep the temple in his heart in such a way that synagogue worship will reflect true worship as if the temple were in his hometown. Jairus falls down at Jesus’ feet and beg for his daughter’s life. He humbles himself and forgets who he is: a proud man who never begs; a spiritual man who trust God’s will entirely; a religious man who keeps the law perfectly. But he is, a man, after all. He is a father, after all. He is a father with a dying little girl, after all. So he begs, and in his begging Jesus Jairus does not forget who he is, he remembers who he is.

When we fall at the feet of Jesus and beg we are humbling ourselves, not humiliating ourselves. We remind ourselves that we are human and not God, that our reputation does not buy us grace, that we need God just as much as the lowliest in society.

And speaking of the lowliest in society, here comes the interruption in the story. On his way to Jairus’s house an equally desperate yet unnamed woman reaches out in the midst of the crowd and touches Jesus. Everything about the woman says she is nobody special and someone to disregard. She is polar opposite to Jairus. He can go to the synagogue any time he pleases; she can’t go at all. Not because she is a woman, although that in itself restricted how much she could participate. But because she was ritually unclean in religious terms. Instead of being excluded from worship once per month in a regular cycle of womanhood after which she could have ritually bathed and been readmitted, this woman discharged daily and so was daily discharged from the life of the community. Imagine a day before sanitary napkins. Her white clothes would stain red and people would whisper about her in the streets. She might have once had money, but no more. She spent it all on quacks with remedies that were as demeaning as the bleeding: eating onions cooked in wine; drinking tonics made of vile, bitter things, like alum, and ground grape stones, and pine bark; wearing ashes of ostrich eggs round her neck in a linen bag for months; rubbing herself with terrible smelling salves made of God knows what. Nothing she tried worked on her problem but everything she tried made her more of a problem. [Helen Bruch Pearson, Do What You Have the Power to Do (Upper Room, 1992), p. 108.]

So she comes up on Jesus stealthily. He’s being pushed and pulled like a World Cup soccer star among adoring fans. She touches him, and immediately, Mark says, using one of his favorite words. Immediately she feels in her body that she has been made well. After twelve years of humiliation and hopelessness, immediately she is healed. And when she is healed physically it means she is healed socially, and in the eyes of others spiritually.

The Law of Moses was clear that she would not be admitted to the assembly because her body was impure. There were good reasons early in the development of Israelite religion to draw such distinctions in order to teach people to be holy before God. But as time went by the issue of blood must have become less about the woman’s relation to God and more about her relation to the community of God. Here Jesus happily breaks a barrier to acceptance, as he must anytime in our religious life we have allowed things intended to bring us to God rightly to keep us from God’s people wrongly. How many barriers do we erect in the church that had a logical beginning but are man-made and now Jesus needs to destroy in order to open up his church to everyone that comes to him?

Well, Jesus feels the power slip from him as the woman is healed. He stops and asks who touched him. The disciples are busy directing him to the important man’s house. Jesus knows something else equally important is going on. When the woman confesses to her improper touching, she falls on her face just like Jairus. Jesus tells her that it was her faith that made her whole. He calls her Daughter. He is on his way to a dearly beloved daughter of a respected man, but he looks at this woman and calls her a daughter of God, beloved by God as much as the little girl of Jairus. Curiously, after this moment, the Jairus is not mentioned by name again: he is called a leader of the synagogue, further showing his likeness to the woman and that Jesus is no respecter of persons.

Now, did the woman’s faith make her whole or was it the power of Jesus? Yes. The power of Jesus was needed for the healing to happen, but so was the woman’s faith. Like a live electrical socket, it does no good for pressing your shirts unless you plug your iron into it. And although Jesus stands ready to heal and restore us, we have to plug ourselves into him. We have to touch him like a live wire and feel the current of his love flow through us.

A woman I know was struggling with forgiveness toward her husband, who had hurt her deeply. She stumbled onto the image of a heart transplant that saves the life of someone whose heart could not longer do the job itself. She imagined the heart of Jesus transplanted into her, the blood of Jesus coursing through her veins and bringing life back to her, giving her the strength to forgive and love again.

The church does not promise that everyone that has enough faith in Jesus will be healed every time—although if you stay up late enough and watch TV and send in your contributions to some evangelists, you’d think it would increase your odds. It doesn’t. Healing remains a mystery that we must hope for, but faith does not obligate God to do what we want done.

In case of this woman healed, the church learns not just that Jesus mysteriously heals some of us sometimes, but also that Jesus is not interested in taking the credit. He is always the man for others. When he says her faith has healed her, he gives her a standing in the community none could ever deny again. Jesus raises her to new life when he praises her faith. He restores her dignity.

And now for the top piece of bread on the sandwich. We had the set up of the sick little girl, and we had the lunch meat and mayo of the woman’s healing. Now the piece d’ résistance. Now to top it all off, Jesus will raise the little girl from the dead.

The woman was ill for 12 years. The little girl is 12 years old. Coincidence? Or is this a way of telling us that we are not dealing with stories of physical healing here; we are dealing with stories of religious healing. The number 12 was symbolic of the twelve tribes of Israel, and we should hear it as symbolic of the church, too. What Jesus does in these touching stories is to put the healing finger of God upon any sick religion. Anyone the unclean woman would have touched would have become unclean, too. Guilt by association, don’t you know?! And anyone who touched a corpse would also be unclean.

Jesus does both. He is a hands-on messiah, and he wants a hands-on church. He wants us to see that when we are separating people into categories of clean and unclean, worthy and unworthy, welcome and unwelcome, we have a sick family of faith. The unclean need precisely to be among us, first because none of us is clean ourselves, and second because we are all in need of the healing touch of God. So if any of you feels yourself unworthy of being here today, join the club—or rather join the church. And if any of you deems another unworthy of being here, join the club instead of the church. “The club” is where those kind of distinctions are defended, but don’t try making that defense in the church—certainly not this one. All you will find here in church are sinners being saved by grace, the soul-sick being healed by the touch of Jesus.

Anyway, Jesus is not dissuaded by the news that the girl has died. And Jairus doesn’t seem angry that Jesus took his time with the woman and let his daughter die. Good for him. Jesus sends away the professional mourners, who played a legitimate role at times in the grieving process of the people. But professional mourners can sometimes be too good at their job. In the church we have people who make it their business to search out signs of death and cry aloud. The church gets the feeling it is a walking corpse. Jesus dismisses them. She is sleeping, he says. And who gets to say, after all, what her stutus is before God? She can be awakened, he means. And so can so many people and problems in any church. We must not declare people or churches prematurely dead, just because their vitals signs are flat.

Once he gets inside a small group of those with a life interest for the little girl, Jesus touches the little dead girl’s hand and speaks to her. Talitha cum, he says. No special magical words. Just ordinary words: Little girl, it’s time to get up. She’s had probably heard her daddy say those words to her a hundred times with the sunrise. And now Jesus is acting like ordinary life is restored. She is raised. She wakes up to new life.

And so can any of you. And so can this church and any church. By the healing touch of the grace of God.