Christ Church

“If I may but touch the hem of his garment, I shall be whole”

The Church year runs out in compassion and healing, wisdom and judgment. Today’s Gospel presents a most poignant and touching scene of healing and resurrection, a picture of human redemption in its fullness. What is it about? Simply, the radical meaning of Christ’s Incarnation in Christ’s turning to us. This Sunday points us to next Sunday, the Sunday Next Before Advent; signalling both an ending and a beginning. We stand at the end of the Christian year and contemplate the radical meaning of all the forms of Christ’s turning to us but only so as to begin again. Such is his Advent. In his turning to us we find healing and wholeness, but only, too, if we are turned to him. Our healing anticipates our being raised up and participates in the grace of his Resurrection; radical new life.

It is a double miracle a scene within a scene, as it were. A “certain ruler” tells Jesus that his daughter is “even now dead” and asks him to “come and lay thy hand upon her, and she shall live.” He has, it seems, an insight into the power and truth of God in the person of Christ. Matthew tells us that “Jesus arose and followed him” along with his disciples. But as he went he encounters a woman diseased with a long-standing ailment of an issue of blood who “came behind him and touched the hem of his garment.” The whole scene captures the meaning of the Christian Faith. “For she said within herself,” Matthew tells us, that “If I may but touch his garment, I shall be whole.” All rather wonderful but at the very least a bit of a problem. What does it mean to steal a cure from Jesus without him knowing it? That is not to be fully aware of who Jesus truly is; an incomplete understanding of divinity and humanity united in the person of Christ and what that means for us. Yet what we most want, healing for a broken world and for our own broken selves, is found in the one whom we ignore or deny, on the one hand, or, surreptitiously, and rather superstitiously, presume to steal a cure from him unawares, on the other hand.

Christ comes into our midst, into the heart of darkness, as it were, to bring light and grace and salvation. That puts real demands and responsibilities upon us who have heard his word. “Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father in me,” Jesus tells us, for that is crucial to the idea of Revelation and to the nature of human redemption. “Or else,” he says, “believe me for the sake of the works themselves.” Good works are done in faith, implicitly or explicitly. Yet they have their fullest meaning and truth only in the name of the one by whom they are done. Sometimes deeds and actions speak louder than words, but they have their radical meaning in Christ who would have us know even as we are known in his all-embracing love.

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“They desire a better country, that is, an heavenly”

Mercy is not only at the center of the Beatitudes; it underlies and shapes all the Beatitudes from beginning to end. The truth and dignity of our humanity is found in blessedness, especially the blessedness of suffering, as we explored last Sunday, paradoxically as that seems. Yet that is the more transcendent form of blessedness that belongs to the good of our humanity in the immediacy and immanence of the divine found in human experience but only as its corrective and its redemption. The unity of the communion of saints is ultimately grounded in the unity of God. “I and the Father are one,” Jesus says. Thus, the Beatitudes provide a way to think about the difficult things of suffering, like persecution and loss without being defined by them, and even to things like war and its atrocities. These are the things that Remembrance Day properly concerns and which should concern us. It is certainly not about the glorification of war.

Beginning in the mid-11^th century in western Christianity, The Festival of All Saints was followed by The Solemnity of All Souls. The remembering of all the faithful departed and of human mortality is embraced within the Communion of Saints. “These all died in faith,” Hebrews tells us and speaks explicitly of those who suffered (Heb. 11. 32-37), even those “of whom the world was not worthy” (vs. 38) who are understood to be enrolled in that so “great a cloud of witnesses” (Heb. 12, 1) which concludes the Epistle. It signifies the hope of “a sea-change into something rich and strange” (Shakespeare, The Tempest). All Souls’ was part of the Cluniac Reform of the Benedictine order initiated by Abbot Odilo of Cluny (c. 962-1048). The thread of glory runs through the grave of our common mortality. It became, more or less, universally observed in the West by the 13^th century and, perhaps, inspired such deeply reflective hymns like Dies Irae (1260) “Day of wrath, O day of mourning” on the theme of judgement and death sung in Advent and at requiems.

For our contemporary world, these ways of thinking have been associated with Remembrance Day, ever since November 11^th, 1918, the end of the First World War. Remembrance Day is really a secular form of All Souls’ Day. We gather at cenotaphs, the empty tombs, in our communities where the names are written of those who left our communities, our churches, our schools, and went off to the ‘great wars’ that have had such a profound and devastating effect upon our contemporary world. They didn’t return. That is the point. Our Maritime communities are defined in no small measure by the immensity of their sacrifice, a sacrifice in the sense of commitment to what they thought was significant and worth dying for, to some extent or another, in all of the confused mixture of motives and intent that belonged to the forms of cultural and communal identities. It was not about the later abstractions of democracy and freedom. To read the names at the Windsor cenotaph is to be reminded of all the little places in Hants County from which they came and to realize in a moment how entire generations were wiped out; a legacy of loss that has affected those communities to this day.

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