The Lord cares for the humble but looks at the haughty from afar

Luke chapter 8 presents us with two very interesting characters. One of them Jairo, the principal of the synagogue, and the other, this woman with the flow that touched Jesus' robe. These two characters offer a very interesting human contrast that reveals something about the personality, about the Ministry, and about the Power and life of Jesus Christ, and that also helps us to better understand how to be effective in our approaches and our prayers to the Lord. Lord when we are in need.

This is one of the important aspects of texts like this. One always asks or must ask: Why did the Holy Spirit decide that these events in the life of Jesus Christ were important to record? so that they would remain for all the centuries for the edification of all the believers.

One of more reasons that I see why the Bible records certain events in the life of Jesus is to teach us aspects of the life of Christ, aspects about His Person, His Ministry, so that we can know Him better, know His Heart, His way of being and acting. And secondly, these passages are important because they also instruct us on what are the springs, so to speak, of the Heart of God, the Heart of Jesus and the Holy Spirit that we can touch to activate the Power of God in our favor when we are in situations of need.

By seeing the behavior of Jairo and the woman with the issue of blood, we can understand how they acted and we ourselves imitate the elements that we see displayed in their behavior, and apply them to our own lives in order to be effective in our own journey of faith. .

So we see here that these two characters, first of all, offer a very interesting contrast with respect to the condition of human beings because Jairo and the woman with the issue of blood represent something like two extremes of humanity. Jairo is the prosperous man, the influential man, the person of importance, significant in his community who has access to the resources of power and who when he is in a situation of need has the resources to go where the solution is. He is a man in a society governed specifically by men, there he is a very religious person and a religious leader, he is like the most important lay person in the local synagogue, it is as if we were to say the president of the elders of the Church or of the deacons of the Congregation, therefore he is a man who has a lot of influence in his community.

The woman with the issue of blood. She is a woman first of all in a culture where women were not very important, secondly she is an anonymous being who simply does not have knowledge of the springs of power, and thirdly she is a worn out person, she should not have contact with the community, her Illness reduces her to a very inferior position and she is expected to spend her life rather in anonymity, away from the public sphere because her illness has a religious aspect that makes it unacceptable to the larger community.

In other words, we have here a contrast of these two types of person, not one at the extreme of power and the other at the extreme of impotence, we could say, but we see that the Lord deals with both and that is very important. As we see here that the Bible says, the Lord is no respecter of persons but He deals equally with the poor as with the rich.

And this is important because sometimes society can go from one extreme to another, and sometimes even religion itself does, where we see that at times in the history of the Church or of religions those who have power, those who are influential in the society are those that attract the attention of priests, religious people, as if they are assigned a preferential place in the Kingdom of God while the poor are alienated and marginalized.

But there are also other moments in society such as in modern times and in some countries of our Latin American region in which for reasons of liberation and revolution movements such as the poor acquire greater prominence and it is said that God has a preference for with the poor and the powerless, and the weak, and there is the idea that God does not associate with the rich because being rich is like a sin and that God does not approve of wealth, let's say. But we see here that God always dealt very equitably with both the poor and the rich, and that what made the difference was their hearts, their willingness to humble themselves before the Lord and seek a merciful intervention from Him.

We see that Jairo humiliates himself. It says here that: "Bowing down at the feet of Jesus, he begged him to come into his house." So Jairo, this important, religious, influential leader humiliates himself in front of Jesus and this is what moves him and motivates him to enter his house to heal his daughter, right? The woman with the same blood flow right? he humbles himself before the Lord, recognizes His Power and seeks a way to make contact with Him to receive power from Him.

So we see that the attitude of the heart and not the external condition of man is what affects, what moves the Heart of God and that is a great lesson for us, right? that we have to ask ourselves: how is my heart when I approach the Lord to ask him? Is it a heart full of faith, is it a humble heart that recognizes its fragility and its sins, and its need, and recognizes the Power and Grace of the Lord? Or is it a heart that believes that: you must take care of me because I am a person who gives money to the Church or because I serve in the Congregation or because I am a fair person and I behave well in society, let's say.

So this is an invitation, first of all, from this passage to check our hearts and approach the Lord with the right attitude because the Word says that the Lord attends to the humble but the proud looks from afar, so let us always keep that humble heart and simple before the Lord to be able to receive from Him. God bless you and until our next meditation.