Is it too late?

       The four-year-old is standing on a grassy hilltop with arms outstretched against the sky. “Ta-li-ta-koum!” she cries. She waits a second in hopeful expectation and then cries out again, with a magician’s flourish, “Ta-li-ta-koum!” Nothing happens. Growing agitated, she continues to shout “Ta-li-ta-koum!” over and over again until her fierce determination turns to sobs. The little girl is Ponette, in the award-winning French film of the same name, who has just lost her mother in a tragic car accident. In her grief, the deeply heart-broken little girl desperately picks up every scrap of religious language that adults carelessly drop her way, every miraculous story that they tell to make her feel better, and she weaves them all into a patchwork of determined, imaginative faith, as only a child can do. Having learned from her young cousins that Jesus brought back a little girl from the dead with the “magic words,” talitha koum, (Aramaic in today’s Gospel for, “Young woman, arise”) Ponette decides to try the words herself in order to bring back her mother. Of course, she fails. And her valient attempts rip our hearts in two as we watch.

What makes Ponette one of the most poignant, heart-wrenching stories about grief that I have ever seen is the contrast between Ponette’s unshakeable, courageous, yet misinformed faith, and the harsh reality of death that we, the adult viewers, know she must accept. Like her father and aunt and teachers, we know that her mother is not going to come back to her, at least in this world, for her mother is dead. But Ponette refuses to give up. When she chooses to sit and wait for her mother rather than to play with her young cousin, even he warns her: “Dead people don’t come back.”

Ponette patiently explains, “Jesus did it for his friends. I’m more than a friend. I’m the daughter of my mommy.”

“Granpa never came back,” argues her cousin.

“That’s because no one was waiting for him,” counters Ponette with certainty.

In scene after scene, I wanted to shout to her, “No, Ponette, it is too late. Give up. Go play with your cousins. Live your life. God hears your grief, but it’s not going to bring back your mother to you. Please don’t keep waiting for something that is not going to happen.”

We live in a world in which it is often too late. It is too late to bring back the homes that have been destroyed by raging fires in Colorado. It is too late to hug a loved one who has died. It is too late to have taken that other life path 30 years ago. It is too late to take back the cruel word that has destroyed a friendship. It is too late to remove the pain of a child who has been abused. It is too late to take back the drinks that have resulted in the fatal car accident. When we feel the rush of time heading into the moment of “too late,” we panic. We grasp at straws; we cry out in desperation; we try to hold back the time that is slipping inexorably through our fingers. As Ponette sobs and claws at the earth on her mother’s grave, trying to dig a pathway to the one that she loves, we claw at time, trying to tunnel our way past the blur of events in our lives that are so quickly becoming “too late,” in order to reach some kind of better resolution.

In our Gospel story, both Jairus and the bleeding woman act under the looming threat of “too late.” The woman has already spent all of her money seeking a cure for her affliction for the past twelve years, yet nothing has worked. She is at the end of her rope. Her bleeding has made her unclean, a total outcast in her community, as feared and despised as a leper. Like Ponette, digging her way through the grave to her mother, the bleeding woman grabs at Jesus’ cloak as he passes, reaching out in total desperation for that last bit of hope for her life to be restored. If this story weren’t in the Bible, wouldn’t you want to cry out to her, “Stop, you’ll just make a fool of yourself. Such desperation won’t get you anywhere!”

Jairus, too, while as wealthy and respected as the woman is poor and outcast, is also just as desperate. He, an important, respected leader of the synagogue, is frantic enough to throw himself at the feet of a poor, itinerant teacher and beg him to come and heal his daughter before it is too late. When Jesus accepts and then tarries to help the woman, letting valuable time slip away, Jairus must have been beside himself with impatience and anxiety. “My little daughter is dying,” he must have felt like shouting in Jesus’ ear. “Hurry, before it is too late!” “Oh dear, the little girl is going to die. Jesus, don’t let her die,” we plead alongside her grief-stricken father.

It is never too late for the healing, saving power of God’s love, says Mark, by weaving together these two stories of desperation and healing. This is the Good News of our Gospel. It is not too late for a powerful, theologically educated man, who publically asks Jesus for help. It is not too late for a poor, powerless woman who dares approach Jesus only secretly. It is not too late for a young woman whose sudden sickness renders her unable to do anything but lie in bed and wait for a healing that doesn’t come until after she has died, and it is not too late for an older woman with a hopelessly chronic disease. The healing that Jesus offers is poured out on every kind and manner of human being. Jesus’ touch brings abundant life out of living death, and it is never too late.

“But wait,” you must be saying to me. “That all sounds nice and pious in a sermon. But why aren’t these healing stories like the fairytales that Ponette’s relatives tell a motherless child to make her feel better? How can you say that it is never too late when four-year-olds lose their mothers? When sin and death hound us every day? We know better than to fall for such pie-in-the-sky happy endings in real life."

The trouble is that we tend to treat the individual healings like some kind of magic. Like Ponette, confusing “talitha koum” for “abracadabra,” we focus on the amazing feats, the suspension of the laws of nature in Jesus’ miracles. “Wow, Jesus heals someone who just barely touches the edge of his cloak. How does he do that?!” we wonder. “Wow, he raises a little girl from the dead,” we squeal.

The author of our Gospel, however, knows that this is the path to misunderstanding, rather than to eternal life. That is why Mark’s Jesus always insists that no one, neither the one who was healed nor the bystanders, should spread the news about the healings that he has just done. Jesus is not just some cool worker of wonders who puts on a good show. Jesus is the crucified and risen Lord who has come to defeat the powers of both Sin and Death. The miracle cures that happen during Jesus’ lifetime are because of what happens at the end of his story; they are because of the power of resurrection. It is no accident that Mark points out that Jairus’ daughter is “merely sleeping,” the code word in his early Christian community for the death that leads to resurrection. It is no accident that Jesus says, “Little girl, arise,” instead of “little girl, get up,” choosing the same word used for his own arising from the dead. Seen apart from crucifixion and resurrection, Jesus’ miracle stories are only amazing stories to be gossiped about in the marketplace and misunderstood. But seen as part of a dawning new creation, they transform the present by way of the future. We only understand their true power after we know the end of Jesus' story. In our lives, the choice is not between the blind belief in magic words or deeds and the hopeless resignation that, as Tom Long says, “God is dead. Ad-lib the ending.”[1] In our lives, the small glimpses of God’s healing power that we grasp all around us open us to a familiar Easter ending, an ending in which we are invited to live in the present, an ending which makes the present never too late.

In the movie Ponette, the little girl’s mother returns to visit her, “in her body and in her bones” so that Ponette won’t be afraid. Many movie critics snort at the unrealistic sentimentality of the movie’s ending, unhappy that a film that so honestly portrays the reality of grief “cops out” at the end and turns to fairytale. I would disagree, however, and find the ending to be an imaginative Gospel one, not a fairytale one. Ponette’s mother doesn’t come to stay or to put the family back together happily ever after. Ponette’s mother answers the grief-filled cries of her daughter by paying her a loving visit, insisting that she is dead and cannot return again, and teaching her how to jump up in the air and catch a fistful of memories, memories of her love that will sustain Ponette throughout her life. She tells her to live, to enjoy her world and each moment of her life. Her mother grounds her in a love that goes beyond death, a love for which it is never too late.

In a world in which it is never too late, we too are challenged to live, deeply live, into the Easter truth. Grounded in love, knowing the ending of the story, can we face Death with grief, yet not despair? Can we offer healing to the poor and the outcast, as well as to the influential and the comfortable? Can we make room for forgiveness? Can we let justice and peace peek through the clouds? Can we drive off, like Ponette at the end of the movie, with a weary, yet knowing smile, a smile that recognizes that it is never too late for joy.

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[1] Thomas Long, Preaching from Memory to Hope, 115.