*Mark 5:21-43*
This is a story I think we all know well because this gospel story is the tale about the ‘other’, the ‘other’ group or the ‘other’ person. Remember last week when Jesus set out in that boat to the ‘other’ side of the sea (and a big storm came)? Well this week he is headed back to the ‘other’ side. He was sailing to a mostly gentile population, and now he is sailing back to a mostly Jewish one. Two groups of people, groups who know who they are and who that ‘other’ group is, the ones across the sea. If you’re on one side, you’re not on the other.
When Jesus gets back to the ‘other’ side of the sea, we hear a story about two kinds of people. One of them is very important in the community, a leader of the synagogue with presumably a ritually clean home and life, whose name is Jairus, and the ‘other’ is a woman experiencing perpetual bleeding therefore living a perpetually ritually unclean life, who lives on the outskirts of her community, whose name we are never told. One has the strength to advocate for help on behalf of his offspring, the ‘other’ has to grasp and speak up and advocate for herself. One walks with societal privilege, and the ‘other’ is at the point of social death.
These two sides of the sea and these categories that these two individuals find themselves in, this idea of the ‘other’ that societies and people create, that have been created throughout human history, the ‘us’ and ‘them’ categories, the ones that tell you that because you are different than someone else that somehow makes you separated and cut off from them, all these binaries, all these categories of ‘other’, they are completely torn down in the ministry of Jesus.
The politics and institutionalized religion of Jesus’ time and place tried to structure the lives of the people, and although good things may have come from these structures, they also delegated what rights people had and what status they could hold. Under the semblance of stability and good intentions, those with the most power stripped away the shared experiences of humanity amongst neighbours and in its place raised labels of division. Wealth and poverty, righteous and sinner, clean and unclean, saved and forsaken, holy and impure, wise and ignorant, worthy and unworthy. And people became so used to living with these divisions, so comfortable in seeing each other within these categories that they took them as a natural experience of being human. Take Jairus and this woman who was suffering from a constant flow of blood, two very different and distinct people, they knew that about each other, they also didn’t necessarily dislike or hate one another because of their differences, but they understood their degrees of separation, and that separation created boundaries in their ability to experience their shared humanity.
What Jesus did was enter these areas of separation, he mixed with the tax collectors, sinners, pharisees and roman centurions, and he healed the daughter of a synagogue leader as well as a daughter who was living on the margins, and by entering all those different categories he demonstrated that in the eyes of God’s love, there is no degree of separation amongst people. Who was Jesus there for? Was he there to minister to Jews or gentiles? To the outcasts or the privileged? To the morally upright or the sinner? Many religious leaders and roman politicians of his time would have said he supports anarchy by promoting himself as messiah and uplifting the oppressed…they would say he is there for revolution… not for them, yet he commended Nicodemus, and the scribe who asked him what the greatest commandment was, and healed the child of Roman centurion who was ill. So who was he really there for? Who was meant to benefit from his presence and God’s message of the kingdom, of eternal love? Every-body.
A lot of politics and institutionalized religions of our time and place also work at raising structures in society, and although some good comes from these structures, they also end up creating division. We see this when people claim ‘Jesus died for our sins, and the people who proclaim the right to abortion, and the people who live a homosexual lifestyle or embrace this transgender or non-binary thinking are throwing away his gift and going to hell’. And we also hear it when a whole ‘other’ group of people say, ‘Jesus came to love everybody, so if you don’t embrace the outcast of today’s world and uplift those who are oppressed then Jesus wouldn’t love you or accept you’. We see the degrees of separation being enforced when we are told that allowing transgender people to exist will mean we have to put litter boxes in our classrooms or that promoting same sex marriage will corrupt the institution of family. And even outside of 2SLGBTQ+ issues, all we have to do is turn on the news or flip through our social media to see all the categories that we artificially create, you’re either this or you’re that, you belong to these people or those people, you’re kind or you’re not, you’re right or you’re wrong, you’re telling the truth or you’re lying. Binaries are great at keeping us divided.
As we acknowledge and celebrate Pride month this morning, we are reminded though, that Jesus’ wide circle of love, his teachings and healings that he shared, the ones he encouraged his church to be built upon, it was not done within a binary, for one group and not the ‘other’, it was done on a spectrum for every-body: the privileged and the outcast, the righteous and the unrighteous, the clean and the unclean, the wise and the ignorant, the straight person and the gay person, the cisgendered person and transgendered person, the conservative and the liberal, the morally correct and the morally wrong and all the spaces that exist between. His love was meant for all sides of the sea because there are no groups, no parties, no degrees of separation, there is no ‘other’ in God’s eyes, there are only people, people who suffer, people who make mistakes, people who need love.
Pride is about celebrating the diversity that exists within God’s creation, and I know Pride in many ways has created so many categories for us to keep track of, but the sentiment behind each one isn’t to invite further division, rather it’s trying to invite us to see that although we can be different from one another, we are still people, individuals, who are all deserving of love just like every other individual on this planet is. And for us Christians, we are asked to let go of those categories that divide and be neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female nor non-binary, and be simply one, one group of people, one family of spirit. This family has many shades and exists on a wide spectrum, but God’s love is given equally to everyone in it.
So let us strive and continue to stand up for this holy love that looks at the world this way, without division, let us continue to reject extremism on every side and not let ourselves be grouped off from one another, let us work to foster environments where every-body knows they are safe, they are loved, where they are seen and healed by the recognition of a shared humanity. God loves every-body, so on this Pride Sunday let us make it our work to build a house where this love can dwell. Amen.
-Cynthia Reynolds
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