One of the biggest differences between men and women is the way they behave when they’re ill – that’s what Moira, my wife says, so I dare not argue! According to her, men get a little snuffle of a cold (but call it ’flu), behave as if they’re dying, take themselves off to bed with a hot toddy, and expect to be waited on hand and foot by their loving wives. Women, on the other hand, can catch both malaria and typhoid while they’re suffering from a broken arm and a severe migraine; yet they grit their teeth, get the children ready for school, do a full day’s work (complete with shopping on the way home), cook the evening meal and generally carry on as normal. Well, this picture is clearly a stereotype perpetuated by women in order to demonstrate their moral superiority over men. So it pains me to say that it might, just possibly, contain an element of truth!

Clearly, no-one likes to be ill, whether with a minor cold or something more serious such as this appalling Coronavirus. Yes, we’ve all met people who quite literally did seem to “enjoy” their bad health (and telling you all about it!), but most of us prefer to steer clear of illness. I think one of our biggest fears is of picking up some ailment or condition which isn’t life-threatening but which gives us constant pain and turns life into a constant struggle. I take my hat off to people in this kind of situation who still manage to joke about it saying, “Well, there are many worse off than I am”. I don’t know how they can be so positive about life.

In our Gospel reading, we encountered two different medical situations: one chronic and one acute. The woman with the haemorrhage – we can’t be sure of her exact condition – wasn’t only weak and ill but considered “unclean” in Jewish law, ritually impure. This means that she shouldn’t even have been outside her room, let alone running loose in a crowd and rubbing up against other people: that certainly rings bells with us today! However this lady’s isolation had gone on for twelve miserable years so we can only guess when she had last left her house: perhaps she’d somehow heard that Jesus was coming and so “taken the plunge” of leaving her house because she knew that he was her only hope. Jairus’ daughter, on the other hand, had obviously been healthy until fairly recently; her entire life had been encompassed within those same twelve years. But now she was sick and her situation was desperate. We can easily imagine her parents’ utter desperation at their inability to help.

We may have also noticed two very different approaches to Jesus. The woman, not surprisingly, was diffident, fearful about making a direct approach to Jesus as she knew she might be turned away. So she resorted to the almost magical approach of touching his cloak, hoping that some kind of spiritual power would flow to her without Jesus even noticing (which, as we know, was a vain hope). The synagogue ruler was bolder and more straightforward, although still humble, in asking for help; but even this, when you stop to think about it, was a surprising thing to do, as Jesus wasn’t exactly popular in the Jewish Establishment who saw him as an unauthorised and uneducated country rabbi, a threat to their power, someone to be stopped rather than encouraged. It’s clear that Jairus saw something different in Jesus: a man with spiritual authority who (to put things crudely) was delivering God’s goods. It was worth him going out on a limb and tarnishing his reputation if that meant his beloved daughter could be saved.

So we have two different medical situations and two contrasting approaches to Jesus, but both ending with the same result of healing and wholeness. Yet these stories – as with so many of Jesus’ miracles – do leave us feeling a little bit uncomfortable. Of course we are glad for the lady and the girl who found healing at Jesus’ hands; but we may wonder exactly what was wrong with them, and ask if their conditions simply happened to resolve themselves spontaneously just at the time when Jesus was around. Well, we can pride ourselves on our modern knowledge of medical science; but mustn’t dismiss these people of olden times as ignoramuses. For there was obviously something organically wrong with the lady who reached out to touch Jesus; and the little girl was clearly not suffering from any psychosomatic ailment – not that these are trivial! I think we must accept that these miracles were genuine. Real and complete healing took place; as a consequence, the people involved were able to rejoin their family and wider society.

If the miraculous element is one difficulty we have with these stories of Jesus’ healings, another comes when we start thinking of his 100% success rate. For all through the Gospels people come, or are brought, to Jesus; sometimes he is taken to them. Some of these have great faith (although some have very little), some plead with him, some seem to believe in the magical properties of his clothing, one or two are even dead already – yet Jesus heals them all. True, some of those healings seem to be easier for him to perform than others; and yes, we know he did other miracles which are largely unrecorded. We also realise that there must have been hundreds, probably thousands, of sick people in first century Palestine who never managed to get anywhere near Jesus. Nevertheless, we can’t imagine anyone who actually came to him going away disappointed because he hadn’t dealt with their particular ailment. That scenario just isn’t part of the script.

But we all know that life in our real world isn’t like that. Some people have disabilities, possibly very debilitating and painful, while all of us get ill. That’s not easy to cope with, but we accept it as a natural, if sad, part of life. But we also pray for people to be healed, with more or less confidence that God will intervene. Very occasionally (and obviously I’m not thinking here about trivial illnesses such as the common cold) something does seem to change and the person gets better, although we can’t ever prove cause and effect. But far more often – and let’s be honest about this – it appears that our prayers are not answered, and the person does not recover. All we can hope is that their pain is eased and that they are blessed with peace and serenity in their suffering.

So the question we ask – one which, of course, has been very much to the fore during the pandemic – is “Why don’t our prayers work?” Indeed, I’ve been asked to pray for at least one person who caught Covid and did not survive. So we can wonder whether God is really as able to work today as he did in Bible times (or as he seems to do in some of the more thrilling Christian testimonies we occasionally hear (but always at second or third hand). We can ask if the people who prayed had enough faith to ensure the sick person’s recovery (and if you’re ever tempted to do that, let me say, “Don’t go there, it’s a spiritual minefield”). We can start saying things like “God loved that man so much he wanted to have him in heaven more quickly” or, the other side of the coin, “God healed that woman because he still had a special work for her to do on earth”: sentimental statements with, I think, little basis in the Bible. And one more thought surely sneaks into our minds: “Perhaps God doesn’t heal any more. Perhaps he can’t heal any more. Perhaps he never did heal, and those wonderful Bible stories are just fairy-tales written up by the early Church to enhance his image. Perhaps he doesn’t even exist”.

I can’t answer those questions; except by saying that must remember that miraculous healing is precisely that: something which is possible but which is unusual and never normal. I think we must also recognise that God works in mysterious and unfathomable ways which we cannot comprehend; and we have to always see healing as an act of divine grace. In other words, we cannot criticise God as he is answerable to no-one. If he does choose to heal, we rejoice and give him the glory. But if he does not, but leaves nature to take its course, we cannot point our fingers of blame at him. We dare not tell him what he ought to do.

We could take this discussion further; but that’s not what I want to do this morning. Instead I want to return to that woman with the bleed and to Jairus; and I want to commend their extraordinary courage in coming to Jesus. Admittedly they were both in absolute desperation and knew that he was their only hope; but they were both taking a big gamble about rejection. For the woman, as I’ve already said, would have been considered “impure” in Jewish society: I’m surprised that the crowds didn’t part before her as she tried to get to Jesus but she had locked herself away for 12 years so they probably didn’t know who she was. Nevertheless, she knew – or thought she knew – that if she told Rabbi Jesus about her problem, he would simply recoil and send her away. It’s no surprise that she tried to touch his cloak instead: the consequences of doing that surprised her more than she could have possibly imagined.

Jairus, of course, was respectable – a synagogue leader who was highly regarded. His problem was that, if people knew he’d gone to Jesus for help, his reputation would be stained for ever – even more so if his beloved daughter was not, in fact, healed. He had to decide which was more important, clinging to his status or seeking health for his beloved daughter. He, of course, made the right decision; but other men in his position might not have done as, for some folk, power and prestige are all-important. Jairus could have lost everything, but he did not flinch.

I’m sure that we can all think of people that we’d love to see healed. So would we, with all our doubts, make it known that we had asked Jesus for their healing (or, indeed, for ourselves)? Would we dare to risk the ridicule of others and feel that God had slapped us on the face if our prayers weren’t answered? My honest answer is, “I don’t know”. But perhaps we at least ought to throw caution to the winds and find out.