JESUS, HEALING, AND HUMAN TOUCH

The spotlight falls on the synagogue official, Jairus, whose twelve=year old daughter was gravely ill and dying. The father came to Jesus to ask Him to intercede and make her well. St. Luke abruptly shifts to an entirely different scenario, highlighting the woman who had spent 12 years suffering with a hemorrhage of blood. She made her way through the bustling crowds in the city to reach out to grab the hem of Jesus’ robe.  Unknown to Him, Jesus “felt power go out of Him” at that very moment. Both Jairus’ daughter and the hemorrhaging woman were healed thanks to their proclamation of faith in the Rabbi from Nazareth who was therein revealed as the Messiah of God. Faith, courage, and persistence are three possible themes for our spiritual development that are tucked away in this parable. Yet there is another, less spoken of by preachers, but compelling nonetheless: it is the spiritual power and Christian meaning of human touch.

Jesus came from the rich tradition of Hebraic theology. As a rabbi, He knew well the prescriptions of the ancient faith, one of which was that human touch played a critical role in the formation of the believing community.  The late German biblical theologian, Gerhard von Rad, wrote that, in the Israel of Jesus’ day, “touch became a force for transmitting that which was holy or that which was unclean.” Who and what the people touched, or avoided touching, was the marker of their membership among God’s people.  The fear was that touching could transmit spiritual uncleanness, immorality, and even physical harm – as well as blessing. Lepers, foreigners, outcasts, public sinners, people of other religious beliefs, and even the sick were branded as untouchable.

Ever the wise physician, St. Luke expressed Jesus’ understanding of touch in radically different terms than the Old Testament.  In the ministry of Jesus, “laying on of hands” is strongly associated with healing. The expression occurs 40 times in the Gospels, predominantly in connection with miracles performed by Jesus and the Apostles. There are approximately 22 instances in the synoptic Gospels of Jesus initiating touch. In at least 17 of those instances, the touch is associated with healing, physical or spiritual. Jesus rarely healed without touching, and the touch itself was understood as a sign of the arrival of the New Covenant of the Kingdom of God. Human touch became an announcement of a totally new order of belief. Far from being a source of contamination with Jesus it was a means of blessing, healing, and wholeness.

In every recorded case, Jesus’ touch violated the Jewish religious norms, such as in Luke 5:13 where Jesus reached out to touch a man suffering from leprosy, and in Luke 13:13 where Jesus laid his hands on a crippled woman to heal her.  Here was God, taking the initiative to touch his human people – and under the new covenant, that touch extended beyond Israel to include women, the poor, the outcast, and the sick. In the anonymous touch of the woman with the hemorrhage of blood, Jesus actually felt the power of healing exude from Him. The Lord wasn’t worried about keeping the Jewish law. He was concerned about freeing those held captive by the “demons” of their nature.

Prof. Vladimir Lossky, of blessed memory, the influential Russian theologian, in his book The Meaning of Icons, writes of today’s Gospel passage: “As our Orthodox iconography illustrates, in the healing of Jairus’ daughter, Jesus doesn’t simply use His words – He grabs her hand and pulls her from her deathbed to Himself – life came through touch.”.  St. Luke portrays the Lord as a “hands-on” preacher, reflecting his own background as a healer, physician, and instrument of genuine mercy. If there is anything that can counteract the “intellectualization of God” – meaning the reduction of faith into mere rational concepts – it is human touch. In the reality of human touch, God becomes real.

The Orthodox Church teaches that the human body is a “sacrament”, a temple, and it reveals the Divine. The Son of God was not the least bit reticent to touch, to lay His hands on a person, to deal with them not as disembodied spirits, but as the “fleshed” presence of the Thrice Holy God. What was the Nativity of Christ but the infusion of the Unseen into the seen, of Spirit into flesh, of eternity into time.  In the birth of Jesus the Christ, God said to us: “Touch me!” He took our flesh to Himself and thereby blessed it. He gave us in return His own body and blood in the Eucharist and thereby assured us that He was as near to us as our own skin. The Christian faith is not mythological and esoteric as are many Oriental religious beliefs. It is physical, it is the presence of God mystically united to our flesh and therefore seeable, lovable, and touchable.

Sunday’s Gospel passage teaches us that touch is a means of connection in the Church. From very early on in the Church’s history, Christian communities described themselves as the Body of Christ (1 Cor. 12). This understanding of corporate embodiment, this imaging of the Church as “body” is a fundamental aspect of the common Christian life, both in the way individual members feel a tangible sense of attachment to each other, and how they reach out together to each other and to the world around them.

Think of Mary Magdalene meeting the Lord, unsuspected, in the garden after His Resurrection – she longed to embrace Him. Think of Thomas the Apostle who would not believe until he had put his hands into Christ’s wounds. Think of the two disciples who recognized Jesus at Emmaus in the physical breaking of the bread. This is the human instinct for closeness and connection. A handshake, a pat on the back, a hug, a kiss, a meaningful gesture, just being physically close – all of this is a sign of God’s desire to get close to us, to be near us, to touch both our strengths and our weaknesses and to make us whole again. For us believers, graced human touch is a pathway to the Divine!

As we continue to face the COVID-19 virus upsurge, when we are advised to socially distance ourselves from others, not to shake hands, to wear masks, to avoid contact with large groups, to quarantine ourselves, to refrain from contact with grandparents so as not to endanger them, even to limit the number of our fellow believers with whom we can worship – through all of this we need to remember Luke’s Gospel passage and the connection between us that is symbolized by human touch.  We miss it, we feel out of sorts, we instinctively react against necessary efforts to dis-connect us from others. In the face of this disturbing whirlwind, God is here. When something seems wrong with us or our world, God touches us in the deepest part to assure us that, in the words of the old hymn – “all is well with our souls.”

He seeks to take our flesh to Himself again and again in the hopes that though we may touch less, we still are joined together, we still are the Body of Christ, we have within us the courage of Jairus and the determination of the woman with the hemorrhage of blood. We are reaching for God with the surety that, despite the upheaval we experience around us, He is reaching back to us to touch our hearts with His love.  May that love protect you and keep every one of you today and always!  Amen.

Faithfully in the love of Christ,
Fr. Dimitrios