Yesterday's Bible study, excellently led by one of the group members, proved to be fascinating.

Here are just a few of the intriguing bits...

When we were asked to turn up the passage in Mark, two people already had their Bibles open at the Luke passage and one at the Matthew.  Each was sure theirs was the definitive version.  I don't think any of us had really noticed that this story in all three synoptics, which is intriguing given the subject matter and the style - the woman's story interrupting the Jairus story.  The differences between the three versions are very small, little redactive effort here, which is of itself intriguing, given the other differences we find between the three gospels.  So, an unlikely tale, told three times with minimal editing.

One of the things I shared with the group was about the time when I'd preached on this passage and noticed that the woman had been ill for twelve years, the whole life of Jairus' daughter, and of the significance of the girl being this age, on the brink of adulthood, physical and societal.  There was some debate about how literally we should take the figure of twelve, but I remain of the opinion that it is significant to the story - two separate life-stories meet for a moment in a Christ encounter.

The second, not dissimilar, observation was one I'd never spotted before.  The woman who silently approaches Jesus is commanded to reveal herself, whereas Jairus and Mrs Jairus are commanded to tell no-one (Mk5:43; Lk 8:56).  This is truly bizarre.  No one knew the woman was there and she could have slipped away silently (though of course had that been so we would not have her story) whereas loads of people knew Jairus' daughter was sick and dying, there was no way to hide the outcome.  There seems to be something here about bringing the hidden into the open and almost hiding the visible.

Having a very sick child was an acceptable, if unwelcome, situation; having some unspecified gynaecological condition wasn't (I did once speculate that this could have arisen postpartum, adding further poignancy to the stories). It did make me think again about which forms of disease are 'publicly accpetable' and which are not.  The study guide inevitably centred on things like HIV/AIDS but found myself wondering instead about mental health and addiction, which are very often 'hidden' illnesses.  The stereotype picture of the addict confessing his/her addiction to a support group has some echoes of the woman in the story, forced to say out loud 'it's me' as if the naming is essential to the cure.

We had some really good discussion yesterday, touching on some very tricky topics, such as the efforts made to keep alive very premature or sick babies who have no hope of independent living - i.e. they are unable to breath unaided and/or to to feed unaided - and what we mean by 'quality of life.'  We found no answers, but by naming the questions I think we achieved some good.