Mark's Gospel Part 9 - Touched by the Saviour

If you'd take a Bible and turn in it to Mark's Gospel, this term we're working our way through bit by bit through the first uh eight chapters of Mark's Gospel.

Before I pray and read, the Word of God today it confronts us very frankly with human weakness.

That's the weakness that leaves us in hospital.

That's the weakness that leaves us at a graveside.

It also confronts us with moral weakness.

Reminds us that if we are unforgiven, then we are cut off from the love and life of God.

But we are shown here really wonderfully our Saviour Jesus.

And we are encouraged for the first time or the umpteenth time to rest upon him.

And we're shown too what it means to have faith in Jesus.

So let me pray and I'll read the Word of God.

Almighty God, Heavenly Father, we pray that you would lead us in your truth.

We ask that you would teach us, for you are the God of our salvation.

We pray for Jesus' name's sake.

Amen.

Amen.

So Mark chapter one, Mark chapter five, even.

I'll read from verse 21.

And when Jesus had crossed again in the boats to the other side, a great crowd gathered about him, and he was beside the sea.

Then came one of the rulers of the synagogue, Jairus by name, and seeing him he fell at his feet and implored him earnestly, saying, My little daughter is at the point of death.

Come and lay your hands on her, so that she may be made well and live.

And he went with him, and a great crowd followed him and thronged about him.

And there was a woman who had had a discharge of blood for twelve years, and who had suffered much under many physicians, and spent all that she had, and she was no better, but rather grew worse.

She had heard the reports about Jesus and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his garment, for she said, If I touch even his garments, I will be made well.

And immediately the flow of blood dried up, and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease.

And Jesus, perceiving in himself that power had gone out from him, immediately turned about in the crowd and said, Who touched my garments?

And his disciples said to him, You see the crowd pressing around you, and yet you say, Who touched me?

And he looked around to see who had done it.

But the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came in fear and trembling and fell down before him, and told him the whole truth.

And he said to her, Daughter, your faith has made you well.

Go in peace and be healed of your disease.

While he was still speaking, there came from the ruler's house some who said, Your daughter is dead.

Why trouble the teacher any further?

But overhearing what they said, Jesus said to the ruler of the synagogue, Do not fear, only believe.

And he allowed no one to follow him except Peter and James and John, the brother of James.

They came to the house of the ruler of the synagogue, and Jesus saw a commotion, people weeping and wailing loudly.

And when he had entered, he said to them, Why are you making a commotion and weeping?

The child is not dead, but sleeping.

And they laughed at him.

But he put them all outside and took the child's father and mother, and those who were with him, and went in where the child was.

Taking her by the hand, he said to her, Talitha kumi, which means little girl, I say to you, arise.

And immediately the girl got up and began walking, for she was twelve years of age, and they were immediately overcome with amazement.

And he strictly charged them that no one should know this, and told them to give her something to eat.

Thanks be to God for his good and true word to us.

So the Lord Jesus, he gets out of the boat on the other side of the lake.

Do you remember he's calmed the storm, the power of the Creator?

He's encountered that demon-possessed man and rescued him, redeemed him, his authority over evil.

He gets out of the boat, now again on the other side of the lake, and straightaway comes up to him this man, uh Jairus, which is every parent's nightmare.

Gyrus falls at Jesus' feet, he begs him, he knew of the power of Jesus to heal, and his little daughter is dying.

So come lay your hands upon him.

And Jesus goes.

And then there is this agonizing interruption, as was so often the case, a great crowd, it thronged around Jesus, and in the midst of it, there is this woman.

And we're told, we're told her story, or some of it at least, a story of despair.

Her life was filled by this terrible, this chronic illness, constant bleeding for 12 years, and the doctors can't do anything, and she spent all her savings, and with it, we can only imagine the pain and the shame and the disability.

It's amazing she was out of doors.

Some of us we know, don't we, what uh chronic sickness is like, what it does to bodies, what it can do to your soul.

But for this lady in the crowd, there was even more to her suffering.

According to the law of Moses, the Old Testament law of God, this discharge of blood from her body meant that she was unclean.

She was defiled.

That is, it's not just she felt unclean, but she was ceremonially, ritually unclean.

And the law said she had to be apart from other people, she could not draw near to worship.

Now we might think to ourselves, why would the God of the Bible require such a thing?

And the very short answer to that is that the Lord wanted to teach his Old Testament church about the Savior who was to come.

And so he built into the law, the law of Moses, uh, things that said that normal everyday parts of life, life in a fallen world, would be a bit like parables of sin and salvation.

So things you could not avoid, you know, even bodily processes and bodily infirmities, weaknesses, you know, like blood being shed.

Leviticus 15, it lies behind this woman's plight.

And some things God said would be unclean.

Not that they were sinful in and of themselves, no, but they were to teach about sin.

So here is something, something that comes out of us, that bars you from fellowship with God, that cuts you off from his people, and you need to be made clean.

And blood was one of those things, blood shed from the body.

It's actually a picture of deathliness.

And the Lord is a God of life.

Now, it's an alien uh set of concepts, that isn't it?

If we're if we're Bible people, we're we're probably familiar with it.

We're not all familiar with that, though.

Uh the world around us, on the one hand, wants to affirm us always you're fine, you're okay.

But also there is the nagging sense that so many folk have that that is actually not the case.

We're not fine, we're not okay, we're not clean.

Bobby don't have an answer.

This lady, we can infer, knew this.

That's why she is so secretive.

She creeps up behind Jesus in the crowd.

She just wants to touch his clothes.

Must have been such a sense of shame.

She knew herself as an outsider.

For her to touch someone else would actually have made them ritually unclean.

They would have to be separated from others until they had been cleansed ritually.

Fast forward on to the little girl.

It's the second story of despair that we're given here.

Um, poor gyrus.

Poor gyrus.

Some of us have had to wait for an ambulance.

You know, you ring and then you wait, and you wait.

Some of us have to wait for critical surgery.

Or gyrus.

Uh, there is a delay, isn't there?

Well, Jesus uh interacts with this woman.

Uh while they're delayed, the messengers come from his home.

She's dead.

It's pretty brutal, isn't it?

She's dead.

Don't trouble the teacher anymore.

And she was dead.

The mourners, they are, they are weeping and they are wailing loudly.

Verse 38 tells us she is dead.

That's why the crowds laughed at Jesus when he said, Oh, she's just asleep.

It's a laughing of mockery.

You know, how foolish.

Don't you know a corpse when you see one?

A bit further on in the New Testament, the Apostle Paul says of death that it is the last enemy.

And it is our enemy, isn't it?

Death, it is hateful.

Death ought not to be.

At the beginning of the Bible, our forefather Adam, when he sinned, he brought into the world sin and decay and death.

And all of us, if we live long enough in this world of death, we learn its bitterness.

We mourn and we grieve, and we have a creeping sense of our own bodily weakness.

So into this world of despair, into these two very specific lives, this woman, uh Jairus and his daughter, this world of uncleanness, of death, comes the Lord Jesus.

This Jesus who possesses in his body all of the power necessary to bring redemption.

Sometimes in the Gospels, Jesus speaks a word of command.

So for example, the storm, do you remember he speaks, and the storm is still, he commands verbally the demons.

Sometimes, though, he reaches out and he touches, like with a leper in Mark chapter 1.

Mark 1 · chapter mention

And it is the touch of Jesus that is before us here.

So here's this lady.

Uh remember, she is she is bleeding, she is suffering in her body, but she is also ritually unclean.

Now, according to the law of God, uncleanness spreads.

Cleanness doesn't spread.

Think of it a little bit like this: if you shake hands with someone whose hands are filthy, you get dirty hands.

It's not the other way around.

Except with Jesus.

So Jesus in himself has power to clean the unclean.

He has power in himself to give cleanness.

So this lady, she grasps at Jesus desperately.

Maybe there was a bit of superstition about her.

But as her hands take hold of him, the Lord Jesus voluntarily and immediately responds to her.

And we see there, verse 29, that she knows it, she feels it.

Must have been wondrous beyond belief.

You know, a sense of life and health and healing flowing through her body from Jesus.

Come on in the story to Jairus's house.

So he goes in, takes no one with him except Peter and uh James and John, and the little girl's father and mother.

And this Jesus, who is the resurrection and the life, he takes her by the hand, he touches her.

And he speaks these words of power and of love.

So they're in Aramaic, Talitha Kumi, a little girl, get up, arise.

Now to touch an unclean body, actually to touch a dead body, a little bit like touching the unclean woman, it ought to make a person again ritually unclean.

Jesus ought now to be unclean.

He ought to need to be cleansed.

But with Jesus, the opposite happens.

He touches her, he speaks this word of command that it's not that deathliness flows from her to him, but life flows from him to her.

And so she arises, resurrected.

Give her something to eat.

And for Jesus, death is just like sleep.

Parents, we are used to waking our children in the morning.

Well, Jesus comes to the dead body of this child and he wakes her.

So the Lord Jesus, we see here his beautiful love and his wondrous power.

Just think, the world of Jesus' day, like every culture, it had its insiders and it had its outsiders.

The insiders would have been the rich, the strong, the influential.

It is not to the rich and the strong that Jesus comes.

He comes to a woman who is defiled and who is suffering.

And by the way, this lady was very special to Jesus.

She may not have been special to anyone else.

She's the only person in the Gospels Jesus calls daughter, like this.

He comes to a little girl, lowly and weak.

And he comes with power, stupendous, godlike power to drive out sickness and uncleanness and death.

And it's contained in him.

It's in him, in the Lord Jesus, and in his body, and salvation and life.

It is nowhere else to be found.

Just consider, though, for a moment, how is it that these true Bible stories, how is it that they actually worked?

How was it that Jesus could make the unclean clean?

How was it that Jesus could raise the dead?

And this does actually really matter.

If this is just a fiction, then we are left unclean, not just ritually unclean, but actually dirty and defiled in the eyes of a holy God.

We are unforgiven and unforgivable, not just for twelve years but forever.

And we're left facing the grave, death with absolutely no hope whatsoever.

And a grave which is deserved and right.

It's the right end of those who break the law of the Lord.

So just think about our Saviour Jesus.

God the Son, he came to us and he became a man.

He took on a human nature, not only with a rational soul, but also with a true body.

And as a man, he lived obediently, a holy life.

He was righteous.

And then as a man, he died upon the cross.

That is, he took upon himself the uncleanness of others.

He became sin.

He bore our sins in his body on the tree.

That's what the Christian can say.

And he bore the deserved judgment that others deserved.

So he died, he experienced bodily death and that second death of separation from God the Father for the sake of others.

And as a man, he was raised bodily to life, such that he can now give life, he can give cleanness to any who are joined to him.

And in these two people here, the woman, the little girl, we see this previewed, beautifully previewed.

They're like trailers of Jesus' love and power.

I mean, just imagine this cleansed woman, and this imagine this little girl running and jumping, all because our Savior, He became a man with a human body.

He shared in uncleanness and death.

He participated in uncleanness and death in order to deliver people from it.

So how do we benefit from this Jesus?

We can't come up behind him in the crowd like the woman did, can we?

We can't come up behind him and touch his garments.

We cannot bring Jesus physically to the bedside of a loved one who is dying or dead.

Well, the Bible would say that the Lord Jesus is completely reachable.

He is completely touchable by what the Bible calls faith.

The word faith is very misunderstood and it is actually quite a hard word to pin down.

What does faith mean?

Am I exercising faith right now?

Sometimes stop and you think about yourself.

What does faith look like if I'm faced by a chronic illness or I'm dying?

Or sin.

The Christian is someone who is joined to Jesus.

We're joined to him, we're in him, we're united with him.

It's not a union we can see with our eyes, but it is real.

It's a union affected by the Spirit, the Holy Spirit.

He brings Jesus to us to dwell in us.

And our response is one of faith.

All through these passages in Mark 4 and 5, we get different pictures of faith, sometimes false faith, sometimes true faith.

Here is why this lady who had been bleeding for 12 years, she is so wonderful.

She's given us here as a picture of saving faith.

If the Lord Jesus can say to her in verse 34, Daughter, your faith has made you well.

Go in peace, be healed of your disease.

She is a picture of the faith that joins a person to Jesus such that they benefit from Jesus, his love and his power.

And until you're joined to Jesus, well then all of his benefits, you have none of them.

Principally, she shows us what it is to have full reliance on the Saviour.

When that lady came to Jesus, she had no confidence in herself, did she?

In her ability to fix her own problems.

She came in absolute desperation.

She had no confidence in other people to fix what was broken in her.

Only the Saviour will do.

That's the heart of saving faith, isn't it?

Only the Saviour will do.

If I touch him, I will be made well.

It's not he can, you know, it's not uh, can you heal me?

It's he will heal me.

So when we think about our need for cleansing, you know, for the removal of actual sin, the removal of actual shame, Jesus says to us, you know, trust me, rely on me, rely on me entirely.

He invites us for the first time or the umpteenth time to come to him in prayer, you know, to reach out to him and have him clean us up.

But this lady also shows to us what you might call a godly fear and trembling.

That's how she comes to the Lord in verse 33.

She comes in fear and trembling.

She's already been healed.

This Savior, he has all authority and power, he is God the Son.

And so she comes in fear and trembling.

Sometimes the Lord leads us into circumstances that are fearful.

The Bible doesn't say to the Christian, by the way, that when you suffer sickness or when you experience evil or you face bereavement or death, it doesn't say those things are not fearful, because those things are fearful.

But there is another fear that runs alongside them.

This is a fear which is to be cultivated, to be grown, and that is a loving fear of the Savior.

That's what the lady here was knowing and showing and growing in.

The Lord Jesus, he is awesome.

A love of Jesus, a closeness with Jesus, and a fear of him.

They actually go together in the life of faith.

What about Jairus?

What does Gyrus teach us?

Jairus encourages us to take Jesus at his word.

Think of what Jesus says to Jairus, the little girl's dad.

Only believe.

She's not dead, she's only sleeping.

Now, when in the Bible Jesus gives us commands, faith says, I will obey.

When Jesus gives us warnings, faith says, I will tremble at them.

And when faith when Jesus gives us promises, faith says, I'll embrace them, I'll rest on them, I'll believe them.

And it's the promise of God that is in view here.

Jesus says to Jairus, here is a promise of resurrection, here is a promise that all will be well, even beyond the grave.

Believe me.

But it's a promise that was given to Jairus in the midst of death, in the midst of deathliness.

And Jairus's experience in this chapter, it's a little bit like a parable of the Christian life.

Teaches us that faith in Jesus requires us to wait.

I mean, just think about Jairus' experience here.

At the start of the passage, Jesus goes with Jairus.

Then there is this, then there's this interruption, this terrible uh delay.

Do you trust Jesus, Jairus?

And it's not an accident that this happened.

You know, Jesus is sovereign, he knows everything, he knows the motions of our hearts, he's planned this all.

It's not an accident that Jairus had to wait painfully for hope to be realized.

And then comes the news that your daughter is dead.

And Jesus says, Trust me, believe me, there is a resurrection to come.

And it's a bit like that is the point at which we find ourselves called to trust the Savior.

So we are not yet in a renewed creation.

We do not yet have those resurrection bodies that Christians are promised.

We are not yet seeing the Savior face to face.

We are those who have to wait.

Trusting the goodness of Jesus, trusting the faithfulness, the reliability of Jesus whilst we live in a veil of tears.

It means, by the way, that we need those faith strengtheners that the Lord gives us.

It's a battle, isn't it?

To rest in the goodness and the power of the Lord while we wait.

We need his word to strengthen our faith.

We need the Lord's Supper to strengthen our faith.

We need prayer to strengthen our faith.

We actually need each other to keep going in the fight of faith.

But the fight of faith will come to an end.

It'll come to an end.

Well, when what these miracles pictured comes to fruition, you know, that that world with no more sickness or defilement or sin or death, faith will give way to sight in the presence of the Savior.

And how can this be assured to anyone?

Well, because Jesus promise it is sealed with his own body and blood.

Remember?

He gave himself, he gave his body to get people like us to be with him.

Let's bow our heads.

Uh, I'm going to pray.

Let's pray.

Father in heaven, uh, we praise you for your son, our Savior.

We thank you that in him is all life and holiness and grace and kindness.

And we thank you that he is not apart from us, but has given himself for us.

Thank you that you delight to join people to Jesus by faith and by the power of your Holy Spirit.

We ask for ourselves, for any who are not yet uh joined to Christ, for that gift of union and saving faith.

Pray for your gift of repentance and faith.

We pray for your people today as we live life in a world of tears and sickness and weakness.

We pray for your sustaining grace.

Uh, we are weak.

And we say to you, Lord, we believe, help us in our unbelief.

So we thank you for our Savior.

We thank you for his sufficiency.

Uh, give us grace to rest in him for Jesus' name's sake.

Amen.