by CCW | 18 November 2012 15:25
It is a poignant scene, actually a scene within a scene. What she said “within herself” is heartfelt: “if I may but touch his garment, I shall be whole.” Perhaps such thoughts may touch our hearts as well. But is that all? Just a little touch? It sounds suspiciously superstitious, as if there is some sort of mystical healing property to “the hem of his garment.”
Clearly Jesus wants something more for us than just a touch. He wants us to enter into his knowing love for us. Only then will we be whole. The woman both knows and doesn’t know this. To put it another way, she doesn’t know that she knows.
Jesus wants her to know. He wants us to know. God will not keep his back to us. He has turned himself to us. Such is the nature of Incarnate Love. “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 can only happen because Jesus turns to us. Advent, so soon upon us, is about God’s turning towards us and speaking to us face-to-face.
It will not do to steal a cure from him unawares, to be healed by him 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, by our being knowingly in his knowing love for us.
This scene within a scene captures in a way the entire gospel. To steal a cure from him is to be unaware of who he truly is. More strongly, it denies the truth of God Incarnate. It means denying 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 ignorantly deny or ignore.
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 denials and refusals. But 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 as this Gospel passage shows.
True compassion struggles with the hardest of things and does not presume the illusions of control, whether to be relieved of our own pain at the pain of another, or to wink away by some magical formula the pain and poverty of the world. The divinity of Christ, the doctrine of the Resurrection, the spiritual realities of Heaven and Hell, are exactly the teachings most relevant to the conditions of our humanity in all its folly and disarray.
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. Jesus goes with the one who “worshipped him, saying, My daugher is even now dead; but come and lay thy hand upon her, and she shall live.” What follows is this scene within a scene after which Christ raises the ruler’s daughter, a raising signifying resurrection. The ruler goes with a greater awareness of who Jesus is because of this scene within scene. After all, he has just heard Jesus’ word to another daughter of Israel: “Daughter, be of good comfort, thy faith hath made thee whole.” The wholeness comes not just in the healing but in the awareness of the one who has healed. We find our salvation in the knowing love of Christ for us.
It begins here with a desperate prayer for healing, “if I may but touch his garment.” It ends with a profounder understanding of healing and human wholeness. It happens because Jesus turns to us. In him we see the face of God and find the true face of our humanity as well. There is simply our looking at him in his looking upon us, our being found in the infinite and compassionate love of God. We find our wholeness in his looking upon us face-to-face, yet it begins with the desire to touch and be touched.
Fr. David Curry,
Trinity XXIV, 8:00am
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2012/11/18/sermon-for-the-twenty-fourth-sunday-after-trinity-800am-service/
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