Mark 5:24-34

Healing

When we hear the story of the healing of this woman we tend to focus on the end, the moment she is healed.

But there are twelve years of suffering before this moment.

And of these twelve years, we are told only that she has endured much under many physicians, that she has spent all she has and was no better but rather grew worse.

We know nothing about how she spent her time during those twelve years of suffering.

Whether she sat at home doing nothing, listless, inactive, succumbing to despair

Or whether she had a family, children to care for, a house to organize; whether she cooked meals for them, found any pleasure in twelve years of suffering.

JoAnn suffered for many years too, and perhaps her the way she lived her life helps us to see in new ways.

Suffering didn’t define JoAnn.  

Though it limited her, it did not stop her from enjoying life but rather sharpened in her a sense of fight and of focus.

She did what she loved and what brought her deep pleasure.

Cooking splendid meals from scratch, without measuring, drawing on what she had been given her, passed down to her from her foremothers.  

How to set a table and gather around it, how to savor life around the table, family gathered with all the foolishness and joy that goes along with it.  

Life on a farm is a family affair, and JoAnn tended to that life also, bottle feeding calves and mucking about in her barn boots rain and shine.

She loved being with people; suffering didn’t change this.

She loved meeting people, getting to know the regulars, sharing stories and the news of the day.

Yes, she suffered and for too long, but suffering did not define her; she would not let it be the story of who she was as a person, who she was for her family, who she was in this community.  

No, she found a way to thrive despite all of that, and her family will tell you that she was a lot more than the illness she suffered, 

that when the diagnosis was bad news, she did not withdraw but focused on the life she loved, the people she loved, the people who say she was strong and resilient and undaunted.

She too suffered much at the hands of physicians, and got better sometimes, but over time grew worse.

But though she grew worse, she chose the better, 

to thrive through giving to her family, to celebrate the grandkids she loved so well; they tell JoAnn’s story, of how strong she was, how much fun she was, how she found ways to make all their lives better right on through her own suffering.  

In the end, the story of the woman whose years of suffering end when she reaches out and touches Jesus is also JoAnn’s story.

For both, the end is a beginning.

The end of suffering is healing.

One woman reaches out and touches Jesus’s clothes, but there are many ways to reach out, many forms of touch–

And in all of them, in the end…there healing begins.

Food and laughter and good hard work, the ways now we, as JoAnn did in her life, reach out to one another, take care of one another, give our lives to loving no matter our own suffering.

…in all of this there is healing, and by faith we believe that in this end, in the end of JoAnn’s suffering, she is healed.

She begins a new life, and so do we.

Thanks be to God.