For Sunday, June 28 – Mark 5:21-43
On the way toward what we expect our lives to be, we encounter many interruptions. Learning to befriend the surprises, whether pleasant or difficult, letting them do their healing work in us, is key to our growth on the journey.
Jesus is on his way to “the other side” when he is interrupted by Jairus, one of the leaders of the synagogue. Jairus has been interrupted from his busy life by his desperate concern for his little daughter who is “at the point of death,” that most notorious interrupter of all. He begs Jesus to come and touch her so that she might live. On their way they are interrupted by large crowds pressing in. A woman who has been interrupted from her normal life due to suffering hemorrhages for 12 years—the entirety of the dying girl’s life—interrupts the crowd, pushing through them to touch Jesus. He says her faith has now interrupted the flow of blood, and she can go in peace, no longer trapped in dis-ease.
And so the river of life rolls, from interruption to interruption, disguised messengers of life’s best secrets. Interruption says, we don’t need to know what will happen next. We can reach out for help. We are part of a story much bigger than our own. When we try too quickly to classify interruptions as good or bad, helpful or disruptive, we risk never receiving the miracle. We risk never touching and being touched by the regenerative power of losing control and trusting that we are loved. What if Jairus had seen illness as God’s punishment, or had seen his daughter as undeserving, less dear to him than a son? What if the bleeding woman, who likely had been shunned for 12 years, had believed the established “fact” that she was unclean? She would have missed hearing Jesus call her his daughter, greatly beloved. Jesus interrupts all the lies, all the tipping points of death, within us. He says to each of us, “Rise up!” Little one, come back into your life.
That’s what the interruptions can do for us if we let them. They are life’s little instructions, guiding us sometimes by gestures of affection and at other times, a firm yank in a new direction. They are warning, they are invitation, arriving daily, reminding us we are more loved than we know, more ready to give ourselves away for what really matters. There is life in our life even yet. Even yet we can become who we are.
