Healing touch! This is a story about touch, one of the five basic, human senses that keep us in contact with the world around us. It seems to be our most basic sense, the first sense that we use in our mother’s womb before we ever hear, taste, see, or smell anything. In most cases it is also the last sense that we lose when we die as I recently experienced when I ministered to my sister Ruth just before she died.
We all too often undervalue and underappreciate its significance for us in our relationship with each other in our families, in marriage and in every community. Its proper use enhances our well-being us, while its abuse harms us greatly. It is both a blessing and a curse. The severe restrictions during the current Covid epidemic have taught us just how vital touch is to our physical health and mental well-being. In fact, some psychologists claim that these severe restriction of physical contact with others has hampered the personal emotional and social development of many young people.
Touch also plays a vital part in our spiritual lives. Many stories of Jesus in the Gospels stress that simple fact. They show us that God’s Son became a man with a human body to help people by touching them. He even reached out to touch untouchable people, like lepers, and heal them, as he did with the corpse of dead girl when he took her by her hand and restored her to life again. They also show us how Jesus went about in public so that people who were sick and in any kind of need could reach out to him and touch him. Because they believed in him and his promises they came to him and touched him. People even brought others to Jesus for him to touch them, like the mothers who brought their little children to Jesus for him to bless them (Mark 10:13-17). By my count Matthew tells us ten stories about this in his Gospel. They show how people received healing and help by touching Jesus or being touched by him.
That is still so for us today. Jesus travels with us to offer us his helping hand and healing touch. Best of all, he meets with us here every Sunday, so that he can reach out to us and we too can reach out to him for ourselves, like the woman in today’s story from Matthew’s Gospel. So let’s see what we can learn for ourselves from her story which is recorded more fully in Mark 5:24-34 and Luke 8:43-48.
What was her trouble?
It was hard for others to see what plagued her because she stuck to herself and avoided contact with them as much as possible. She did everything she could to remain overlooked and unnoticed. She staying in hiding even when she was out and about. She did not isolate herself because she was shy but because she was ashamed of herself and her secret ailment.
So for twelve long years she had been plagued with abnormal menstrual bleeding, a debilitating haemorrhage that got worse and worse as it hit her again and again. She spent all her money on many different doctors who could not help her and heal her. That irregular discharge ruined her life and health as a woman. Because of it she couldn’t get married or remain married and she couldn’t have children. Physically speaking, she was slowly dying.
Worse than that, her bleeding polluted her. It made her feel ugly and unclean, a worthless, useless woman. The people who knew her treated her like a leper, because they didn’t want to be polluted by her and infected by her sickness. Since she avoided physical contact with everybody, she has not been touched by anyone for 12 years.
Worst of all, as a Jewish woman her discharge made her spiritually unclean, unfit for contact with God. Her spiritual impurity cut her off from God. There was no spiritual remedy for it in God’s law. So she had to stay away from worship at the temple and in the local synagogue to avoid desecrating God’s holiness with her impurity. She felt that God was punishing her for something evil that she had done, or something shameful that had happened to her. Here ailment made her feel dirty and worthless, hopeless and helpless, discouraged and disheartened. She was so ashamed of herself that she often wished that she was dead. In fact, she often felt that she was dead, even though she was still physically alive. That terrible sense of shame troubled her even more than the bleeding.
What does she do about her trouble?
The turning point of her life came when she heard about Jesus and his treatment of sick people. So she hatched a plan to approach him secretly, unnoticed by him and the people around him. Then she hears that he is in Capernaum, the town where she lived, and is on his way from Matthew’s house to visit the home of a man whose daughter had just died. So what can she do that won’t embarrass Jesus and shame her publically by audacity? She is too ashamed approach him directly and tell him what she wants. She is afraid that she will pollute him if she actually touches some part of his body. She is afraid that he will have nothing to do with her and spurn her.
But she also believes that she will be healed by him if she respects him and his holiness by only touching some part of his clothing. So she joins the crowd of people around Jesus and his disciples and approaches him from behind because she does not Jesus to see her. So she reaches down and touches the special fringe with tassels at the bottom of his cloak that all Jewish men wore a sign of their devotion to God (Numbers 15:37-41), like the cross that some Christians wear. That’s a safe kind of touch for her and him.
How did Jesus react to her touch?
Even though he is surrounded by people who swirl around and jostle him, Jesus immediately senses that someone has touched him. He senses that spiritual power has flowed out from him, the healing, cleansing power of the Holy Spirit. So he turns around and looks for her. He does not look for her to tell her off and shame her publically as she fears for stealing something from him. Instead, he looks around to affirm her. And he sees her as she has never been seen before, with compassion and affection, with tenderness and love as he says: Take heart, daughter; your faith has healed you. He encourages her by telling her to take heart because she now has nothing to fear and much to enjoy. He calls her ‘daughter’, a term of endearment that no one except her father has ever used to address her. He commends her for her faith in him and praises her by saying, Your faith has healed you; your faith has made you well; your faith has saved you. He tells her that he approves of her and assures her that is very pleased with her and what she has done.
These words of Jesus do not just heal her physically, then and there; they save her in body, soul and spirit, so that she has a new life to live, eternal life that begins now and never ends, life with God in a new supernatural community. For the last twelve years she had in many ways been an unseen woman, but now she is seen by him, seen as a whole person rather than a victim, seen as a lovely woman ‘with the imperishable beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is precious to God’ (1 Pet 3:4). She remains seen by him for the rest of her life and forever in the life to come, seen with warm affection and tender appreciation, compassionate love and great delight.
My dear sisters and brothers, how many of you are secretly or openly burdened like this woman? Some of you are sick or unwell, undergoing treatment or recovering from treatment from some ailment. Some of you are burdened by trouble or ill health, anxiety or depression. Some of you are ageing and infirm. Some of you feel shameful and unclean, unnoticed and unappreciated, unworthy and insignificant, disheartened and discouraged, weak and fearful. Some of you just want to be comforted and strengthened or long to be affirmed and blessed by Jesus.
If that is so, you are in the right place, because Jesus is here for you today. Like the woman that was troubled by her bleeding, you can reach out to him to receive healing and help, comfort and blessing. He wants you to come to him and touch his body by taking the bread in your hand and mouth in his holy supper. So put your faith in Jesus as you come to receive his body, and say in your heart, If only I touch his body I will be healed. As you touch him like that with faith in him, he will say to you, Take heart, my dear daughter; take heart, my dear son. Your faith has healed you. Your faith has saved you. Go in peace.
