Spiritual Hiccups - What's It Say?

Lots of Christians speak of "believing" the Bible.  I suppose that most Christians believe something about the Bible, but believing the Bible requires first figuring out just what it is saying, no easy task.  We struggle in the United States to agree on what our US Constitution says, and it's only a few pages.  The Bible is a huge document written by lots of different people over hundreds and hundreds of years.  It has passages that seem to contradict one another, and it has many sorts of writing: laws, songs, prayers, letters, stories, history, etc.  How does one believe a song?

Today's gospel reading is a miracle story.  Jarius, a synagogue leader, asks Jesus to come and heal his young daughter, but on the way, Jesus is delayed when a woman comes up to touch him, hoping this will heal her from a long ailment.  Jesus stops to find out who has touched him, and by the time he's finished, word comes that Jarius' daughter has died.

What is this story about?  Is it about Jesus' healing power?  That is certainly there.  Is it about how Jesus, no matter how busy he is with important work, always has time to stop and restore someone to wholeness? (This woman's condition would have made her religiously unclean.)  Is it about Jesus' power over death? 

I suspect that if you asked Jarius and the woman with the hemorrhage what had happened in the story, you might get very different accounts.  They probably saw very different things happen.  Even the gospel writers themselves often tell the same story a bit differently, each thinking the meaning of the story lies in a slightly different place.

Do you, in some way, believe the Bible? We Christians might all get along a bit better if we agreed that different folks can believe in the Bible fervently without agreeing on exactly what it says.

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