by CCW | 14 November 2010 14:07
The year runs out in the themes of compassion and healing. This morning’s gospel provides us with a most poignant and touching scene of healing, a picture of human redemption in its fullness. What is it about? Simply, the radical meaning of Christ’s Incarnation. Next Sunday is the Sunday Next Before Advent. We stand at the end of the Christian year and contemplate the radical meaning 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.
It is a double healing story. The healing of the woman with a long-standing ailment of an issue of blood is a scene within a scene. It captures, in a way, the entire gospel. To steal a cure from him is to be unaware of who Jesus truly is. It shows an incomplete understanding of the divinity and the uniqueness of Christ. And yet what we most want, healing for a broken world and for our own broken selves, is found precisely in the one whom we ignore or deny.
There are, of course, the social implications of the gospel itself. Christ has come into our midst, into the heart of darkness, as it were, to bring light and grace and salvation and 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 says, for that is crucial to the idea of Revelation and to the nature of the Redemption of our humanity. But he also says “or else believe me for the sake of the works themselves.” Good works are done in faith, implicitly or explicitly. Yet they have their fullest meaning in the name of the one in whose name they are done. Sometimes deeds and actions speak louder than words, to be sure, but they have their radical meaning in the Word made flesh.
Always and everywhere, it seems to me, the ones most committed to the truth of Jesus Christ are in the midst of the world’s sufferings and woes, like a Mother Teresa or a Jean Vanier or the thousands of thousands of quiet Christian souls who work with the poor, the sick, the dying and the downtrodden. They do so out of an awareness of their own incompleteness, out of an awareness of their own need for the grace of Christ, and out of an awareness of the reality of Incarnate Love. They face the sufferings of the world in the knowledge of the redemptive sufferings of Christ for us.
True compassion struggles with the hardest of things and does not presume the illusion of control, whether to be relieved of our own pain at the pain of another, or to wink away by some magical formula the poverties of the world. The divinity of Christ, the doctrine of the Resurrection, the realities of Heaven and Hell, are exactly the teachings most relevant to the conditions of our humanity in all its folly and disarray.
God has made himself relevant to us. Such is Incarnate Love – the love that looks at us face-to-face in all the modes of our incompleteness. This is the love which compels us to face with compassionate dignity the sufferings of one another and even our own sufferings. It is the only love which has anything to say in the face of the hardest things. All that stands in its way are our ignorances, our denials, and our refusals. Such is our irrelevance in the face of God who has made himself relevant to us. He has come into our midst and engages us in the most compelling way.
No doubt there are those who reach out to touch but who have not been brought face-to-face with Christ who is the wholeness they seek, either for themselves or for one another. Therein lies the task of the Church: to proclaim him in whose name we act; to make his love known and to be known in his love.
It is what happens in this gospel. This scene takes place between his being approached to heal the daughter of “a certain ruler” and his arriving at her death bed which will result in her being raised, a raising signifying resurrection. As they make their way, this quiet, long–suffering woman, comes up behind him, thinking only to touch but the hem of his garment in order to be made whole. She senses something divine and holy in him and about that she is right.
“Jesus turned him about and when he saw her, he said, Daughter, be of good comfort, thy faith hath made thee whole.” These are wonderful words. They are saving words. They are said to her, face-to-face. She wanted to be whole. But to be whole is to enter into his knowing love for us.
It is not enough to steal a cure from him unawares, to be healed by him, as it were, without him knowing it. Such is an incomplete awareness about the one from whom we seek wholeness. Jesus turns and looks at her, face-to-face. More than her secret, surreptitious touch of him, there is his turning to her, his looking upon her and his speaking to her. Such is salvation – her wholeness and ours. It is found in his looking upon her and her looking upon him. It is found by our being knowingly in his knowing love for us.
Advent is about Christ’s turning to us face-to-face. It is signalled in the psalmist’s recurring refrain in Psalm 80. “Turn us again, O Lord; show the light of thy countenance, and we shall be whole.” The refrain is repeated but with an increasing intensity of address. “Turn us again, O God” … “Turn us again, O God of hosts” … “Turn us again, O Lord God of hosts.” Our being turned to God depends upon God’s turning to us. “Show the light of thy countenance, and we shall be whole.” Jesus turns to this long-suffering woman. He sees her face-to-face. Only so is she made whole.
The ruler, too, learns from this healing interlude. He gains a greater awareness of who Jesus is because of this scene within scene. He has just heard Jesus’ word to another daughter of Israel: “Daughter, be of good comfort, thy faith hath made thee whole” and learns what the raising of his daughter will mean. Wholeness comes not just in the healing touch but in the knowing awareness of the one who heals. We find our salvation in the knowing love of Christ for us.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity XXIV, 2010, 8:00am
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