woman with issue of blood – Art & Theology

NEW SONG + CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: Sing the Prayer from BibleProject: To cap off their five-part podcast series on the Lord’s Prayer this month, BibleProject commissioned singer-songwriters Brian Hall (of the family band TENTS) and Liz Vice to write and record a new setting of the Lord’s Prayer, using the translation by Tim Mackie and the BibleProject Scholar Team:

Our Father who is in the skies, may your name be recognized as holy. May your kingdom come and may your will be done as it is in the skies, so also on the land. Our daily provision of bread, give to us today. And forgive us our debts, just as we also have forgiven those indebted to us. And don’t lead us to be tested, but deliver us from the evil one. Amen. (Matt. 6:9–13; cf. Luke 11:2–4)

(You may be wondering, as I did, where’s the final line, “For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever.” As Mackie explains, that line is not in the earliest manuscripts of Matthew or Luke; the addition first appeared in the Didache, an early Christian teaching manual.)

You can listen to and download Hall and Vice’s new setting of the Lord’s Prayer, which Vice sings to Hall’s guitar accompaniment, at the “Sing the Prayer” link above. In addition, the Good Shepherd Collective video-recorded a more fully instrumented arrangement for a digital worship service; see here. And here are links to the recent Lord’s Prayer episodes of the BibleProject podcast:

All you composers out there can get involved too! Through September 15, 2024, BibleProject is accepting submissions of musical settings of the Lord’s Prayer. You can sing the text verbatim using a translation of your choice, or you can rephrase it or write a song based on the prayer’s themes. Purely instrumental responses are also welcome. Send in a song file using their online form, and they will select some of their favorites to host on their website (for streaming, not download). View the early selections at https://bibleproject.com/singtheprayer/all.

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TV SHOW EXCERPT: Opening montage from season 3, episode 4 of The Chosen, “Clean, Part 1”: Several people have asked for my opinion of The Chosen, a television adaptation of the Gospels created by Dallas Jenkins. I think it’s great! Creatively (not woodenly, as is too often the case) written, culturally and historically immersive, high production values, and humanizing—it portrays the disciples (the Twelve and others, including the women) as complex, rounded characters with backstories, families, and distinct personalities. Jonathan Roumie is fantastic as Jesus; so is Liz Tabish as Mary Magdalene. If I were to identify a weakness in the series, it would be the portrayal of the Roman soldiers and rulers, especially Quintus, as cartoonish, one-dimensional—although that begins to shift with at least one Roman in season 3—and the occasional awkward dialogue that’s used to explain to the audience ancient Jewish practices and law codes with which we’re likely to be unfamiliar.

I’m in the middle of season 3 right now and was particularly struck by the opening montage of episode 4, a narrative embellishment of Luke 10:1, which says that Jesus “sent them [his appointed followers] on ahead of him in pairs to every town and place where he himself intended to go.” In the series, this is the first time the disciples perform healings. They’re surprised and confused by, and even a little fearful of, the power working through them; they don’t understand it and aren’t always sure how to wield it. This eight-minute segment shows them growing into their roles as they bring the gospel in word and deed throughout the region, preparing the way for Jesus.

Hear the cast discuss the montage.

The Chosen is streaming for free on its own custom app, as well as on Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, and Peacock.

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POEMS:

This coming Sunday’s Gospel reading in the Revised Common Lectionary is Mark 5:21–43, which recounts the Healing of the Woman with an Issue of Blood and the Raising of Jairus’s Daughter. Here are two poems based on that passage. (As a side note related to the previous item: The Chosen, season 3, episodes 4–5 center on these two healing narratives; “Veronica’s” arc is especially cathartic!)

>> “Haemorrhoissa” by Leila Chatti: In her early twenties, the poet Leila Chatti [previously] had uterine tumors and suffered from severe bleeding and pain for two and a half years. She explores the shame, discomfort, isolation, and trauma of that condition as well as cultural taboos surrounding women’s bodies in her debut collection, Deluge (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), influenced by her dual Islamic-Christian heritage. In this poem she finds kinship with the unnamed hemorrhaging woman in the Synoptic Gospels and admires her boldness in touching Jesus’s hem. The title of the poem, a transliteration of “ἡ αἱμοῤῥοοῦσα,” is the Greek term used in the New Testament to refer to this woman, often translated as the “woman with an issue of blood” or “bleeding woman.”

>> “Jairus” by Michael Symmons Roberts: The poetry collection Corpus by Michael Symmons Roberts (Jonathan Cape, 2004) also centers on the body, especially on the relationship between corporeality, death, and resurrection. This poem from it, in which the speaker (a disciple of Jesus’s, perhaps?) addresses Jairus, celebrates physical appetite, an instinctive desire that helps keep us alive and that here also represents the hunger for living.

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NEW PODCAST: Curiously, Kaitlyn: Launched this spring under the aegis of Holy Post Media, Curiously, Kaitlyn is a weekly podcast hosted by author and theologian Kaitlyn Schiess in which she and other scholars respond to theological questions submitted by kids, unpacking complex concepts in simple terms. Questions so far have included “Is God a boy or a girl?,” “What will we look like in heaven? ’Cause I want my Nana to look like Nana, but she might want to look younger!,” and the clarification-seeking “Does God bring heaven to earth?” (the latter of which occasioned a super-helpful distillation of a key theme in N. T. Wright’s teaching). I’ve really been enjoying this!

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NEW DOCUMENTARY: God and Country, dir. Dan Partland: Released earlier this year, this documentary produced by Rob Reiner “looks at the implications of Christian Nationalism and how it distorts not only the constitutional republic, but Christianity itself. Featuring prominent Christian thought leaders, God & Country asks this question: What happens when a faith built on love, sacrifice, and forgiveness grows political tentacles, conflating power, money, and belief into hyper-nationalism?”

If you are an American Christian, you need to see this film. White Christian nationalism is becoming an increasingly larger threat in the US as it becomes more mainstream, and we need to be aware of it and denounce it. God and Country features interviews with several folks whom I’ve followed for years and deeply respect, including historians and best-selling authors Jemar Tisby and Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Holy Post podcaster and VeggieTales creator Phil Vischer, political commentator David French, and ethicist Russell Moore. Some of the footage from worship services is disturbing, to say nothing of the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

God and Country is currently available on Kanopy, an on-demand streaming service that many public and academic library patrons have free access to.

Now there was a woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years. She had endured much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had; and she was no better, but rather grew worse. She had heard about Jesus, and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, for she said, “If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well.” Immediately her hemorrhage stopped; and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease. Immediately aware that power had gone forth from him, Jesus turned about in the crowd and said, “Who touched my clothes?” And his disciples said to him, “You see the crowd pressing in on you; how can you say, ‘Who touched me?’” He looked all around to see who had done it. But the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came in fear and trembling, fell down before him, and told him the whole truth. He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.”
—Mark 5:25–34

LOOK: Bleeding Woman by Kimberly Stephens

Stephens, Kimberly_Bleeding Woman — Kimberly Stephens, *Bleeding Woman*, 2010. Mehndi and acrylic on canvas.

Bleeding Woman is part of a series of eighteen biblical paintings originally exhibited in October 2010 at the L&P Hutheesing Visual Arts Centre in Ahmedabad, India, a country where Stephens lived for two years. Mehndi is a powder taken from the leaves of the henna plant and made into a paste. It’s traditionally applied to the skin as a form of temporary body art for weddings, religious festivals, and other celebrations, but Stephens has fixed it in more permanent form on canvas, and she uses it to tell the story of Jesus.

The episode depicted here is found in Mark 5:25–34 (cf. Matt. 9:20–22; Luke 8:43–47). A woman had been hemorrhaging for twelve years, which made her ceremonially unclean, and thus a social pariah, in the ancient Jewish culture in which she lived. Yet Stephens shows her confidently pressing her way through the crowd so that she can touch the hem of Jesus’s garment and be healed.

There is definitely a sense of claustrophobia in the painting, of tightness and crowding, achieved by the many overlapping waves. But something intimate, something private, is happening amid this very public throng: the woman reaches out to Jesus and immediately blossoms upon contact. Jesus restores her not only physically but also socially, emotionally, and spiritually—a holistic salvation.

Jesus and the woman are represented symbolically using the curled lines that are characteristic of mehndi designs, with Jesus’s form evoking the cross he will later die on. The thick, silvery outline around these two figures serves as an aura of sorts that sacramentalizes the encounter and draws the viewer’s attention to it but that also creates some breathing room and suggests the space of clarity and relief into which the woman has entered.

LISTEN: “Talitha Koum, Part 2” by Sister Sinjin, on Daughter of Jerusalem (2018)

Reach out, reach out, the hem of his cloak
One touch will heal the bleeding
Press in, press in, the crowd draws near
Your faith the pow’r is heeding

Written by Elizabeth Duffy and arranged by Kaitlyn Ferry of the group Sister Sinjin, “Talitha Koum” is a trilogy of short songs about three females from the New Testament: Jairus’s twelve-year-old daughter, whom Jesus raises from the dead (Matt. 9:18–26; Mark 5:21–43; Luke 8:40–56); the hemorrhaging woman discussed above; and the widow who puts her two small coins into the offering plate (Mark 12:41–44; Luke 21:1–4). The title is Aramaic, translating to “Little girl, arise!”—the words spoken by Jesus to Jairus’s daughter (Mark 5:41).

The song featured here is the second in the set. The woman with the issue of blood experienced a sort of resurrection herself, as Jesus raised her out of the pain, disruptiveness, and isolation of her condition, making possible a new life for her.

Imagine how freeing it must have felt to receive that jolt, I’ll call it, from the tzitzit (tassels) of Rabbi Jesus’s robe, and to know instantly that you have been healed! For over a decade the woman had suffered from continual bleeding, and no doctor was able to help. She lived on the margins of society. Until Jesus came along and she reached out in faith to claim the blessing of healing.

“Talitha Koum, Part 2” is sung in three-part harmony in G minor, but on the final syllable the key shifts up a half-step to G Major. This harmonic device (ending a minor song on a major chord) is known as a Picardy third [previously], and it’s used to lift what can be heard as sad, dark, or heavy into a lightness and brightness, into joy. I hear it as the woman’s sigh of relief. She had been holding her breath for so long, anxious for resolution, and now she can finally let it out.

Tag: woman with issue of blood

Roundup: Call for Lord’s Prayer songs, two lectionary poems, new theology podcast takes kids’ questions, and more

Lent, Day 7