The Restorative Power Of Jesus
In the fall of 1985, Ron Woodroof sat in his doctor's office. While he was not usually the kind of guy to go to the doctor, he had recently been experiencing some strange symptoms. The initial visits had not gotten anywhere, and his symptoms had persisted. So now he was back awaiting a fresh round of test results.
His doctor soon called him back and had him sit on that cold paper-lined bench that we all know so well. The scene that followed sounded something like this. The doctor turned to Ron and said, “I am not sure how to tell you this, but you have just tested positive.” “Positive for what?” Ron asked. “H.I.V,” his doctor replied. Ron sat in stunned silence as the doctor continued, “We anticipate that you have 30 days left to live. I am so very sorry.” Following that life, alternating news simply left the room.
Just like that, Ron, this married father of one, found himself in a patient in the last great pandemic to strike this country. He was stuck with a disease that lays waste to the immune system until it is too weak to defend the body against the most common diseases. Ron determined that day that he was going to fight this disease with all he had.
Ron fought hard. He campaigned for experimental treatment, pushed Congress to allow broader testing for his disease. He cashed out his life insurance in support of himself and others fighting the disease. He was willing to do anything for a chance to be healed. Unfortunately, he died of A.I.D.S in 1992.
Ron's story and his quest to be healed invites us into our scripture this morning, where we find two people on that same journey. They are longing for restoration and hope that it can be found in Jesus Christ. Join me this morning by turning to Luke 8:40-56.
Now when Jesus returned, a crowd welcomed him, for they were all expecting him. 41 Then a man named Jairus, a synagogue leader, came and fell at Jesus’ feet, pleading with him to come to his house 42 because his only daughter, a girl of about twelve, was dying. As Jesus was on his way, the crowds almost crushed him. 43 And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years, but no one could heal her. 44 She came up behind him and touched the edge of his cloak, and immediately her bleeding stopped. 45 “Who touched me?” Jesus asked. When they all denied it, Peter said, “Master, the people are crowding and pressing against you.” 46 But Jesus said, “Someone touched me; I know that power has gone out from me.” 47 Then the woman, seeing that she could not go unnoticed, came trembling and fell at his feet. In the presence of all the people, she told why she had touched him and how she had been instantly healed. 48 Then he said to her, “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace.” 49 While Jesus was still speaking, someone came from the house of Jairus, the synagogue leader. “Your daughter is dead,” he said. “Don’t bother the teacher anymore.” 50 Hearing this, Jesus said to Jairus, “Don’t be afraid; just believe, and she will be healed.” 51 When he arrived at the house of Jairus, he did not let anyone go in with him except Peter, John and James, and the child’s father and mother. 52 Meanwhile, all the people were wailing and mourning for her. “Stop wailing,” Jesus said. “She is not dead, but asleep.” 53 They laughed at him, knowing that she was dead. 54 But he took her by the hand and said, “My child, get up! 55 Her spirit returned, and at once she stood up.
In this one section of Luke, we see the restorative power of Jesus on display not once but twice. Two different individuals come to Jesus out of desperation in their hearts. One comes for her benefit, and the other comes to plead the case of his daughter. They have been to the doctors, they’ve gotten prognosis, and they’ve asked what they are willing to do in order to be healed?
They have one hope left, and that hope is Jesus. If this passage reveals anything to us it reveals to us this: You can trust the restorative power of Jesus. Let’s hear that again, You can trust the restorative power of Jesus. As we have said here before, in Jesus’s name, broken things do not have to stay broken, and dead things do not have to stay dead. Jesus is the redeemer and restorer of the world. This restoration begins in the lives of this woman and this little girl and continues in the lives of you and of me.
God is still restoring things in the midst of our broken world, and this restoration includes all of our lives. In order to truly grab on to this restoration to see God at work in our real lives, we hold too tight to promise that God sees us. We trust and believe that God sees us, and no one knows what it is like for God to see them better than the bleeding woman in Luke 8.
The woman in scripture this morning has been bleeding for 12 years. It is difficult for us to understand or to overestimate the social consequences of this woman’s ailment. Due to the laws of her day and the nature of her ailment, she is seen as ceremonially unclean; however, it does not stop there. Not only is she unclean, but anything she sleeps on or sits on and anyone else who touches those things would also be considered unclean.
All of this has the effect of making her socially radioactive. So radioactive that none of the gospel writers who told this story, including Luke, use her name, instead they identify her by her disease. She is effectively in a quarantine that would make what we endured in the early part of 2020 look like child’s play, and she has been in it for 12 years. Her only hope and her only way out of this quarantine is for her bleeding to stop.
So with faith, hope, and courage, this unclean and ignored woman pushes through the crowd trying to touch the son of God. When she finally makes contact, her bleeding instantly stops. Twelve years of isolation. Twelve years of disconnection. Twelve years of side eyes and snide remarks. And in one singular moment, it is over. Healing has arrived.
Before she has a second to gather her thoughts, the man that just healed her turns to the crowd and asks, “who touched me?” And now the woman faces the second question of faith. She was willing to push through the crowd in order to touch the teacher with the hope of being healed. Now she must decide if she is willing, to own up to what she did, in front of the whole crowd of people. She must decide if she is willing to admit to this religious leader and the entire crowd, that she an unclean woman touched him.
Finally, she decides that she will tell the crowd what she has done. That she will tell them even though she does not know what their reaction is going to be. She stands up in front of the crowd and proclaims, “I was the one who touched you, and I was bleeding but have been healed.” Then she braces for the impact of Jesus’s response. Jesus replies to the faith and courage of this woman, “Daughter, your faith has healed you go in peace.”
Jesus healed this woman. Jesus refused to let her go unnoticed. Jesus called her not “the bleeding woman,” but his daughter. When everyone else failed to see her; God saw her.
As we exit the Christmas season I do not know where you are spiritually. Maybe you simply trying to summon the courage to reach out to God. Maybe you had a dramatic encounter with him, and you are able to proclaim to the world that God sees you. Maybe you are somewhere in between. Wherever you are, rest in the knowledge that God sees you. That he is here in our midst and has good works for us to do.
The story of the bleeding woman is only half the story. Because of her dramatic encounter with Jesus, and the focused attention that Jesus gives her we forget that she interrupts an action that is already in progress. Our scripture began with Jairus asking Jesus to come to his house to heal his daughter. Jesus is on an urgent mission to recover a dying child when the bleeding woman interrupts the journey.
When Jesus asks the question “who touched me,” he is literally delaying his journey to the dying child. Peter had to be beside himself when he told Jesus, “Master, the people are crowding and pressing against you.” Jairus had to be looking at Peter like, how do we get this guy to move along? Jesus is clearly in no hurry to get to Jairus’s house.
Jairus watches as the bleeding woman summons the courage to speak and tell her story. He listens as the woman tells her story of being healed. Now, he has to be getting excited because he first came to Jesus on the faith that Jesus could heal his daughter, but now he has seen that Jesus can deliver the goods. All he has to do now is get Jesus to his house, and his daughter is going to live.
It is at this exact moment when Jairus’s hopes had to be at their highest that the crushing news comes. His daughter had died, and in the words of his servant, “there was no point in bothering the teacher anymore.”
Jairus had to be crushed. Surely, he began running all of the scenarios through his head. What if he had left a little earlier? What if he had found Jesus sooner? And the much darker if that woman had not interrupted Jesus would he have made to my house in time to save my daughter?
In this midst of this darkness Jesus looks to Jairus and says “don’t be afraid; just believe.” At that moment Jairus is left with the same choice that all of us must face. Does he trust that God knows what he is doing? He has already seen God do amazing things, just as we have, but he is faced with another challenge of faith. He has watched this Jesus heal the sick but raising the dead is another thing entirely. Jairus does not respond to Jesus’s words they simply start walking home together.
Do you believe that God knows what he is doing? That his plan is loving and good? In 1931 the Von Bonn family in Madison County Nebraska was not so sure. They had been hit by the double whammy of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. Their family farm was deeply underwater, and they were simply unable to make their mortgage payments to the bank. Not long after ceasing their payments that got word that a representative from the bank was coming to auction off all of their equipment and land in order to settle the loans. The Von Bonn’s braced to lose everything their neighbors, however, were hatching a plan.
The day of the auction came, and the Von Bonn’s items were out in the lawn, ready to be auctioned to the highest bidder. A piece of heavy machinery was the first item on the auction block, and a neighbor opened the bidding five cents. An out of towner then sought to raise the bid. One historian describes what happened; next, he says, “[the man that attempted to raise the bid] was requested not to so – [by force]” All day long, the neighbors bid on the Von Bonn’s items, never entering more than two bids. The bank, which had anticipated leaving the with a few hundred if not a thousand dollars, left the Von Bonn’s property with just $5.35, which is about $85 in today’s dollars. The neighbors then returned the items to the Von Bonn’s.
This was the first recorded penny auction in United States history. The Von Bonns woke up the morning certain that they had lost everything. They were positive the bank would take it all and that they would have to find some other way to feed their family. But God knew what he was doing.
When Jesus arrives at Jairus’s house, he finds a scene that is worse than what happened to the Von Bonns. He finds a family overcome with grief that their beloved daughter has died. He tells them to stop wailing the little girl is going to be fine. Then unlike Jairus, who was silent when Jesus told him to not be afraid the family laughs in his face at the thought that this little girl is going to be fine. The girl was dead in their minds; there was nothing that Jesus could do about it.
If we are honest, as we begin 2021, many of us are in the place. We are the Von Bonn’s waking up on foreclosure morning. We are Jairus’s family laughing at the thought that our weeping could be brought to an end. We’ve endured Christmas dinners that were missing key players. We have comforted scared loved ones over the phone. We’ve watched our children’s reading levels slip. We’ve wondered, can we really trust that God knows what he is doing?
Thankfully Jesus does not respond to our questions or laughter of Jairus’s family with anger. Rather he responds with action. With the laughter of the crowd still ringing in the other room, Jesus takes his most trusted disciples and the girl’s parents in to see her body. With her body growing colder on the bed he walks over, grabs her by the hand, and says, “little girl, Get up!” And instantly, her spirit returned, and she stood up.
At that moment, everyone in that room discovered that not only can you trust that God knows what he is doing, but you can trust that whatever Jesus touches is restored. You can trust that whatever Jesus touches is restored.
The bleeding woman is proof of this. The living girl is proof of this. It is the touch of God that restores our life, and God is still in the business of restoration.
Painting by: Paolo Veronese 1546
