TEXT

Read all of Mark 5

THEOLOGY

Jesus is a demon chaser and liberator—and he is also a trouble maker.

• He is not afraid to journey to the margins of decent society and find the destructors and the self-destructors.
• And everyone is uncomfortable when he makes the insane asylum no longer necessary.
• This remarkable passage not only teaches us compassion and hope for the obsessed and depressed, the cutters and crack-crazed, but also the need to provide gracious re-entry for the healed to the realm of the “sane.”

Jesus is a healer – and messes up schedules

• Jesus heals, but it’s not on a first-come, first-served basis.
• Notice in both instances the care and tenderness of Jesus:
  • he calls the woman who was haemorrhaging “Daughter” v34 – a term of affection he uses nowhere else.
  • right after raising Jarius’ daughter he “told them to give her something to eat” v43.

POETRY

Credentials by Daniel Berrigan

I would it were possible to state in so
few words my errand in the world: quite simply
forestalling all inquiry, the oak offers his leaves
largehandedly. And in winter his integral magnificent order
decrees, says solemnly who he is
in the great thrusting limbs that are all finally
one: a return, a permanent riverandsea.

So the rose is its own credential, a certain
unattainable effortless form: wearing its heart
visibly, it gives us heart too: bud, fullness and fall.

ART

casting out of demons from the gerasene demoniac – image from a medieval manuscript

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

the healing of Jarius’ daughter – Cathedral of St John the Evangelist, Portsmouth

 

 

 

 

 

healing of a woman with a haemorrhage – Roman catacombs 300-350