Day: November 14, 2021

“Jesus turned him about”

It is a poignant scene, a scene within a scene. A certain ruler seeks the raising to life of his daughter “even now dead”. “Jesus arose and followed him” only to encounter “a woman, diseased with an issue of blood twelve years”, who “said within herself, if I may touch his garment, I shall be whole.” The story may touch our hearts, too, and make us whole. But what does wholeness or salvation really mean?

It seems that something more is wanted than just a touch, more than just the touch of “the hem of his garment”. Certainly Jesus wants something more for us than just a touch. He wants us to enter into his knowing love for us. Only then are we made whole. The woman both knows and doesn’t know this. To put it another way, she doesn’t know that she knows. She has a hold of something but in an incomplete way.

Yet Jesus wants her to know. He wants us to know. God will not keep his back to us, a Deus absconditus, a hidden God, as it were. That is why he has turned himself to us. Such is Revelation. 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 told to her, face-to-face. She wanted to be whole. But to be whole is to enter into his knowing love for us. And such is the tuning of God towards us in Revelation. Such is Advent.

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, and only so do we find our wholeness. In a way, it is all in the turning.  More than her secret, surreptitious touch, 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 turning and looking upon her and her looking upon him. It is found by our being brought knowingly into his knowing love for us. It is what our liturgy as the symbolic reality of our lives is really all about: our being turned by the one who turns himself to us.

This scene within a scene captures 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 denies the divinity and the uniqueness of Christ. Yet what we most want, healing for a broken world and for our own broken selves, is found in the one whom we ignorantly deny.

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