On Being Interrupted

There is a chapter in Mark, the Jairus daughter bible story, where a man’s daughter dies because Jesus stopped to talk to somebody else.

I want to be careful with that sentence, because it sounds like an accusation and it is not. But it is what happens, and Mark tells it in a way that makes the delay impossible to miss.

The scene

A synagogue leader named Jairus finds Jesus in a crowd and falls at his feet. His daughter is twelve years old and dying. He asks Jesus to come and lay hands on her so she will live.

Jesus goes with him. And a large crowd goes too, pressing in on all sides.

Then, on the way, a woman who has been bleeding for twelve years reaches through the crush and touches his cloak. She is healed instantly.

And Jesus stops.

He asks who touched him. The disciples point out, reasonably, that a crowd is pressing against him and the question makes no sense. He keeps looking. She comes forward in fear and trembling and tells him the whole truth. He calls her daughter, tells her that her faith has made her well, and sends her in peace.

It is a beautiful exchange. It also takes time.

And then verse thirty-five: While he was still speaking, there came from the ruler’s house some who said, “Your daughter is dead. Why trouble the Teacher any further?”

While he was still speaking.

Sit with Jairus for a second

We know how this ends. He did not.

He is standing there, having watched a stranger receive what he came for, while the errand he begged for was postponed. And then the messengers arrive with the sentence every parent’s body knows before the mind processes it.

Why trouble the Teacher any further.

I find that line unbearable. It is not cruel. It is the reasonable conclusion. The thing you needed him for is over. There is no point now.

Mark does not soften any of this. He could have compressed the timeline or left the woman for another chapter. He put her in the middle, on purpose, and let the delay do its work on the reader.

The two twelves

Mark gives you a number twice and never comments on it.

The woman has been bleeding for twelve years. The girl, as Mark mentions almost in passing in the last lines of the episode, was twelve years old. One of them has been dying for exactly as long as the other has been alive.

There is more in those twelve years than the delay. Mark says she had suffered much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had, and was no better but rather grew worse. Twelve years of treatments, and the money gone.

And under Leviticus 15, a discharge like hers left her ceremonially unclean for as long as it lasted, and made unclean anyone who touched her or what she had touched. Whatever else those years cost her, they cost her ordinary contact with people. It is also why she comes at him from behind through a crowd instead of asking.

What happens when she touches him runs the wrong way round. Nothing transfers to him. Something transfers to her.

And then he stops the whole procession to find her, in the open, and will not move until she has told him the whole truth — which is the one thing twelve years had trained her never to say out loud.

The pattern

Once you notice it in Mark 5 you start seeing it everywhere in the gospels.

Jesus withdraws to a quiet place and a crowd follows him, and he teaches them. He is on his way somewhere and a blind man shouts from the roadside and will not stop. He is at a meal and a woman comes in uninvited with a jar. He is asleep in a boat and is woken. He is trying to eat and cannot.

An extraordinary amount of the ministry is what happened while he was going somewhere else.

That is a strange thing to notice about a life we usually describe as purposeful. We tend to imagine purpose as a straight line — knowing the mission and executing it. The narrative keeps showing something different. The mission keeps being conducted through the things that got in the way of it.

What this does and does not mean

I want to be honest about the limits here, because this can be turned into something sentimental very quickly.

It does not mean every interruption is God. Some interruptions are just badly managed calendars, or other people’s poor planning, or your own inability to say no. Treating every disruption as providence is a good way to never finish anything and to call it holiness.

It does not mean Jairus’s grief was fine because it worked out. It did not feel fine in the walk to that house, and Mark lets us feel it.

And Mark himself will not let it become a rule. Four chapters earlier, Jesus gets up long before dawn and goes out alone to pray. Simon comes after him with what sounds like an emergency — everyone is looking for you — and he does not go back. Let us go on to the next towns, that I may preach there also, for that is why I came out.

Same gospel, same author, a few pages apart. He takes the interruption in chapter five and declines it in chapter one. There is no formula here, which is inconvenient, and probably honest.

What it does mean, I think, is narrower and more useful.

The interruption is not automatically the enemy of the work. We assume it is. We experience the person at the door as an obstacle to the day, and the day as the real thing. In this chapter the day is the person at the door, and also the other person, and the sequence never resolves into a tidy schedule.

For the people whose whole life is interruption

I think this passage lands hardest on a particular kind of reader.

Parents of small children. People caring for someone elderly. Nurses. Anyone whose day is legitimately impossible to plan because it is made of other people’s needs arriving without notice.

There is a specific discouragement in that life: the sense that you never got to the real work. That the day was consumed by things that came up and you have nothing to show. That your actual calling is waiting somewhere behind the interruptions for a season when they stop.

Mark 5 is a chapter in which the Son of God gets to almost nothing he set out to do, and two people are given their lives back.

What happened to Jairus

Jesus overhears the messengers and says to him, Do not fear, only believe.

Then he goes anyway. Which nobody expected, because the reason for going was gone.

He takes the parents and three disciples into the room, takes the girl by the hand, and says two words in Aramaic that Mark keeps in the original — Talitha koum. Little girl, get up.

She gets up and walks. Mark puts two instructions at the end, in that order. Jesus strictly charged them that no one should know this — a hard thing to arrange in a house already full of mourners — and then, in the same breath, the detail I love most in the whole passage: he tells them to give her something to eat.

That is the note the chapter ends on. Not a speech. Dinner.

The practical part

Two things I have taken from this, and I offer them lightly.

The first is to stop grading days by whether the plan survived. Most of mine do not. The question worth asking at the end of the day is not whether I got to my list but whether I was present to what arrived.

The second is that the delay is not always evidence of neglect. Jairus had ten minutes of believing he had been passed over for a stranger. He was wrong, and he could not have known he was wrong, and nothing about his fear during those minutes was unreasonable.

You may be in a stretch that looks exactly like being passed over. That is a real feeling and I am not going to talk you out of it.

But it is worth knowing that Mark put those two stories inside each other deliberately, and that the whole point of the arrangement is that the delay was not what it looked like.

It is a habit of his, and it has a name — scholars call it a Markan sandwich. He begins one story, breaks it open, tells a second one inside it, then goes back and finishes the first. He does it with the fig tree and the temple, with Jesus’ family and the argument about Beelzebul, and he does it here. The inside story is never padding. It is how he expects you to read the outside one.

Every tradition reads this chapter. None of them has ever needed to explain the delay away.