It was a story I knew well, but this time it took my breath away. She had been a pariah for twelve long years, desperate beyond measure. But her marginalization didn’t stop him from physically connecting with her.
My wife and I on occasion catch episodes of The Chosen, a well-produced video series based on the life of Jesus. It has a storyteller’s playfulness, even as it works to preserve the integrity of the Gospels. And it is delightfully uncheesy, a breakthrough for Christian filmmaking.
Watching this particular episode – it’s a two-parter we had to catch in one evening – I became riveted by a plot I’ve known since I was a child. Two stories of desperation intertwine, one interrupting the other.
Jairus, a leader in the local synagogue, has a daughter who becomes severely ill. In his desperation, he reaches out to Jesus, but before Jesus gets to the daughter’s bedside, she has died.
A woman, unnamed, has been troubled by bleeding, an illness unsolvable for years. Her unending search for a solution has driven her into extreme poverty. Her condition has propelled her into social isolation. Though the Gospels do not specify, popular thinking is that her condition is chronic hemorrhaging from the womb. Regardless, it leaves her untouchable by respectable people in society.
What The Chosen illustrates is how Jesus’ compassion comes into sharp conflict with the taboos of his day. The woman was as unclean, untouchable, as a dead human body. Yet Jesus is unfazed by such cultural prohibitions. He welcomes the woman when she touches him; he takes the dead girl by the hand.
You can read it all for yourself, including how the stories play out. Mark, usually the cryptic writer, has the most extensive telling in 5:22-43. And then catch it on The Chosen.
As a young man, I was struck by a particular passage, this one found in Matthew 9:36: “When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.”
It propelled me into ministry and to the far side of the globe. And when I returned to the US, it continued to drive me into the margins of our own society. We don’t have untouchables these days – well, we don’t call them that. And yet, individuals and groups of people are being caught up in dragnets of opinion about who belongs and who doesn’t. Some of this marginalization is political in nature. Some of it is social. Some, even more sadly, is religious.
Such marginalization is nothing new; it has been going on for all human history. But that shouldn’t sit well with those of us who follow Jesus, because it didn’t sit well with him. He calls us to the margins where he has already gone. After all, he came to the margins to find us.
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Photo: Jesus and the woman with the issue of blood; from The Chosen, Season 3, Episodes 4 & 5: Clean, Parts 1 & 2: watch at Seasons 1-3 | The Chosen.
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