Family Communion
- Occurring
- for 1 hour, 15 mins
- Venue
- Kidbrooke, St Nicholas
- Address Whetstone Road Kidbrooke London, SE3 8PX, United Kingdom
Family Communion for the Fifth Sunday after Trinity: celebrant Revd Tola Badejo
First reading: 2 Corinthians 8.7-24
Gospel: Mark 5.21-43
The readings today seem unconnected. In the first, St Paul is writing to the Christians of Corinth, asking for financial support for the persecuted Christians in Jerusalem; he explores the subject in a way that resonates today, explaining how the collection is to be monitored to ensure that it is not misappropriated. He also discusses the whole question of Christian giving, essentially arguing that the realisation of Christ's generosity to us should lead us to be generous to others, and pointing out that the true value of a gift relates to its cost to the giver rather than to its objective size.
The Gospel, in contrast, relates a well-known dramatic episode in Christ's ministry in which he restores Jairus's twelve-year-old daughter to life, and on the way to visit her cures a woman of abnormal and continuous bleeding. It is striking how graciously he deals with the people involved. The episode demonstrates not only that girls and women - one still young, the other well into what should have been childbearing age - have his unequivocal respect, but also that considerations of ritual uncleanliness, distaste or embarrassment have no place in his dealings with them. Neither has self-advertisement: at Jairus's house he sends the crowd away (we may wonder why they were there) and visits the apparently dead girl with only his closest disciples and her parents. This is where we can find a connection between the two readings: both concern the meeting of need where it is found, our duty to follow Christ's example, and the importance of looking after people's physical wellbeing. Jesus's last words concerning the recovered girl are a simple, practical instruction to give her something to eat.
The image above, a painting by the Ukranian artist Ilya Repin; (1844-1930), captures the calm, compassionate authority described by Mark. The story of Jairus's daughter does not seem to have interested earlier artists and their patrons very much, but another nineteenth-century interpretation by James Thomson is attached below.
