Sermon for the Twenty-Fourth Sunday after Trinity
“If I may but touch his garment”
It is a very touching scene, if you will pardon the pun! The mise-en-scene or context is actually a scene within a scene. It opens us out to the drama of salvation. But it is a kind of interlude, something which happens in between something else. In this case, a healing happens while Jesus is on his way to raise the daughter of “a certain ruler” who is presumed dead. It happens in a crowd; an event which is at once public and private.
An unnamed woman, desperate and ill, afflicted with a debilitating sickness, an issue of blood twelve years, “came behind him, and touched the hem of his garment.” It is a touching act, quite literally of course, but there is such a gentleness of wisdom in this scene which is quite revealing. We are allowed to know the inner thoughts of the woman in her reaching out to touch Jesus. “For she said within herself, If I may touch his garment, I shall be whole.” And we see his marvelously gentle yet revealing response, “Daughter, be of good comfort, thy faith hath made thee whole.” Her desire for healing is more than the physical healing of her affliction; it is about wholeness. She seeks to be made whole by reaching out and touching Jesus as if there were something mystical and magical even about his robes, like Prospero’s “magic garment” (The Tempest). A kind of superstition, we might think; certainly an attempt to steal surreptiously a cure from Jesus unawares.
The attribution of special properties to the clothing of special persons is an interesting concept. At the very least, it suggests that she sees something special in Jesus and by extension to anything and everything associated with him such as his clothing. But it is an inaccurate and incomplete, and even dangerous view of God’s dealings with our humanity. It confuses the person with the things. It mistakes the real nature of God’s redemption of our humanity. The touch is real and yet unnecessary. Whether we touch him or not, Jesus can touch and heal us either close at hand or from afar, as we have seen in other Gospel stories.
