I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Mark 4-5.

    Several times when Jesus told parables He said, “Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear.”(NIV) The NLT translates something He says a short time later as an expansion on that (in other Gospels, all of the translations have Him say something like this). Jesus tells us that those who listen and understand will gain more understanding, but those who do not pay attention will lose what understanding they had in the first place. Those who pay attention to Jesus’ teachings will continually gain greater understandings while those who don’t pay attention because they think they already know what He has to say will gradually drift further and further from understanding what Jesus taught. In some ways I have discovered that this applies to my Bible reading. Since I have been reading through the Bible every year so as to write this blog I have discovered new meaning in passages which I though I already fully understood. The other side of this is important as well. If we think we understand something and therefore stop working to understand it even better, we will gradually lose what understanding we have. This applies to many things in addition to what God teaches us.

    This passage ends with two stories about having faith in God’s healing power. The two stories are intertwined and both tell us a lot about having faith. In one a leader in the synagogue comes to Jesus because his daughter is sick. Jesus went with this distraught father. However, while they were on the way, a woman who had been suffering for years touches Jesus’ robe and is healed. I am going to look at that one first. The woman was sure that if she could just touch the merest hem of Jesus’ robe, she would be healed. She did not need His undivided attention, she did not believe she needed His attention at all. She thought that she could be healed without Jesus paying any attention to her. She was right, and she was wrong. Yes, she was healed when she touched Jesus’ robe without Him paying any attention to her, but Jesus would not leave it at that. He chose to turn His attention to her. He chose to let her know that the healing she received was not given impersonally by performing a ritual. She was healed because Jesus cared.
    Back to that distraught father, just as Jesus is back on track to heal his daughter messengers arrive telling him not to bother. His daughter has died. If only Jesus had not been delayed by that woman, his daughter might have been saved…but wait, Jesus ignores those who think it is too late. Jesus does not listen to the naysayers and, with a little encouragement from Jesus, neither does the distraught father. When they got to the house, Jesus sees all of the people putting on a show of mourning and asks what all the commotion is about because the little girl is not yet dead. The people laugh at Him (and by proxy at the father who dares to believe his little girl might yet be saved). Are we willing to face the mockery and scorn of those who do not believe as this father did? Are we willing to be singled out from the crowd, as the woman was?