Episcopal Church of the Incarnation

West Point, Mississippi

The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost [Proper 8 B]

Wisdom of Solomon 1.13-15, 2.23-24 Psalm 30 2 Cor. 8.7-15 Mark 5.21-43

May the Lord be in my mind, on my lips, and in my heart,

that I may rightly and truly proclaim His holy Gospel.

“She had heard about Jesus, and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, for she said, ‘If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well’” (Mark 5.27). Psychologists define magical thinking as nonscientific causal reasoning, such as the idea that we can influence the physical world by how we think, or how we might mistake correlation for causation. Magical thinking is common in people subject to extreme stress, such as those in combat, who are known to regularly have a “good luck piece” (the most prized of all being a bullet that has missed you), or a ritual, such as that common among members of Bomber Command in the Royal Air Force in World War II, who were known to say “rabbits” or “white rabbits” as the first words to be spoken on the day of a mission. (Before you scoff, imagine the stress level of the typical bomber crew in World War II, members of which knew that the probablity of their survival was near zero.)

So much for magical thinking. It’s common for cynics to point to a story such as Mark’s of the woman with the hemorrhage, and to start speaking about magical thinking. But there’s a problem in this reasoning. The problem is that the belief, “If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well” worked. “But,” you say, “magical thinking includes mistaking correlation for causation.” Fair point, so let’s look into the problem presented by the woman’s healing; the problem presented in this scientific worldview by Jesus’ words, “Daughter, your faith has made you well” (Mark 5.34), and His admonition to Jairus when told the synangogue leader’s daughter is dead, “Do not fear, only believe” (Mark 5.36).

Unless we dismiss Mark’s account as a fabrication (in which case, why are we speaking about faith at all?), we are faced with the problem that miraculous healing just doesn’t fit into a cause-and-effect scientific model. This does not mean that faith is unscientific; it means that science cannot explain faith and cannot explain miracles using any testable hypothesis, the essence of the scientific method. But that’s the essence of a miracle. Something happens which cannot be explained by the laws of nature, or–and here’s the rub–something happens and we can describe the mechanism of causation but not the reason of causation. We can say that the Theory of Natural Selection (what we call evolution) is a pretty good model to explain the development of life forms, but we can’t say why life arose other than to point to a First Cause, to the Creator.

Let me give you an example from my own experience. In England I ran a biotechnology company which was working to develop treatments for autoimmune conditions such as arthritis and lupus. In an autoimmune disease, the body’s immune system attacks tissue which it does not recognize as “self,” but treats as “foreign”. The attack is made with special immune system cells called T cells. These cells are always present (the immune system is not dormant, waiting to be switched on) but tolerate tissue which is self. The instructions to T cells as to whether to treat tissue as self or foreign are mediated by a genetic sequence called “Notch,” and so we were working on how to reprogram the Notch signal to switch off a T cell attack.

One day, in a meeting to review progress on the development of a signalling construct, it occurred to me that we were only working on a switch-off signal, a “Notch antagonist,” and I thought, “What about a Notch-agonist, a construct to instruct T cells to attack specific tissue? What if you could program the body’s immune system to recognize cancer cells as foreign, and attack them?” And so I started looking through the literature and found a number of rare cases (maybe one in 100,000) in which a documented tumor just disappears. One day there’s a one kilogram solid mass, and next week it’s gone. A miracle? Perhaps we can say that the immune system “flipped” and the T cells decided to attack the tumor, but we can’t say why they did, just that sometimes –very rarely–they do.

When a healing like this occurs we are dealing with a higher power, the “why” behind the T cell switch, the why behind the cessation of the blood flow, the why behind the little girl rising and walking in response to the command, “Talitha cumi” (Mark 5.41). Faith in God is belief in a higher power, but not just a “higher power” in the sense of some vague idea of a creator. Faith is about belief in Jesus Christ as God incarnate, as the primal cause of all come to dwell with us, that He might bring us to dwell with Him.

Let’s review what Mark depicts in his narrative. So far in this gospel Jesus has exercised power over an unclean spirit (Mark 1.25), He has cleansed a leper (1.41), healed a paralytic (2.11), healed one with a withered hand (3.5), commanded the sea and air to be still, calming a storm (4.39), and cast out and destroyed a legion of demons (5.13). By Jesus’ actions and by Mark’s narrative we are to understand, clearly, that Jesus is not just a moral exemplar; He’s not just a great teacher. He’s a lot more, a point made clear earlier in Mark’s Gospel, when the scribes claim that Jesus casts out demons by invoking the prince of demons. Jesus says, “[N]o one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his goods, unless he first binds the strong man ...” (Mark 3.27). In other words, “I cast out demons by binding their master. I remove disease by binding the power of decay and death,” to which Mark adds, “Do not fear, only believe” (5.36).

Power. It’s about power; it’s about the greatness of God to which He calls us, and the response of faith is a response which recognizes Jesus for who He is. The believer does not fear, for he or she knows that “If God is for us, who is against us?” (Rom. 8.31). The believer knows that life itself, every day, is a miracle, and gives God the glory and thanks for this.

It’s about power which we can have in our own lives. Throughout the gospels Jesus tells His disciples and the crowds, “the kingdom of heaven has come near you”. He does not say “Here is the kingdom of heaven,” and that’s where we see the fulcrum of power made plain. Those who claim that salvation is universal ignore that Jesus speaks more about hell than about heaven, and they are silent about the necessary corollary to universal salvation (which is that we can realize the kingdom of heaven on our own). The kingdom of heaven has not been delivered, it has been made near, which means that we have to choose it. We have to “opt in” by recognizing that the power of salvation is not ours; it is God’s, but it is the power that is available to us when we believe in Him and believe that He offers us salvation.

“Do not fear, only believe.” “If God is for us, who is against us.” The one who can bind the powers of death, of evil, of decay, does bind them. He has come to be with us. He offers deliverance and salvation, pays the price for our failures, offers the kingdom of heaven. But we have to choose. We have to opt in to this kingdom. We have to recognize and rely upon the stronger One who binds all that would destroy us.

Does this mean that we engage in the same emotional and thought process which had bomber crews saying “rabbits” first thing before a mission? No. Faith and magical thinking are not the same thing. In magical thinking a person believes in some impersonal force, such as “luck,” which is invoked by a special phrase or ritual. In faith we do not believe in a force, but in a person, Jesus Christ, and we do not seek to manipulate Him to our will, but to conform our will to His. We know who Jesus is. He has told us, repeatedly. Despite the laughable, ahistorical efforts to discount his existence, the evidence for the life and ministry of Jesus is far, far more complete than what exists for any other person in the ancient world. (When was the last time you heard someone argue that Socrates never existed, even though we have only one witness to his existence–Plato?) More importantly, the evidence of His existence now is manifest when we recognize His lordship and seek to follow Him; when we seek to reach out to God’s power not to try to bend this power to our will, but to place ourselves within this power.

Let’s look again at the woman with the hemorrhage. She has suffered for twelve years. She has spent all of her money, been ostracized, and has endured much under many would-be healers, but has grown worse. And now she has heard about Jesus. What has she heard? that He has healed and cleansed others; that He has cast out demons, and even commanded the air and sea. In other words, she has heard that one has come who comes in power. She doesn’t seek to manipulate this power, but rather seeks only to come into contact with it; to accept this power, believing in the ability of Jesus to do what others have told her He can do. And by this belief, this faith, was is cured.

We don’t seek to control God to do our will. We seek to conform our will to His, and when we pray and ask that He do something, it is because Jesus has told us that we can, and because we know, in the words of the Wisdom of Solomon, “God created us for incorruption, and made us in the image of his own eternity” (2.23). Knowing this to be God’s will, whatever troubles we may face, we remember that Jesus is with us, and say “Do not fear, only believe”.

Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit;

as it was in the beginning is now, and will be forever. Amen.