“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.
Christ has come into our midst, into our heart of darkness, as it were, to bring light and grace and salvation. We are meant to grow into the understanding of God’s good will towards us. It is the burden of the Epistle reading from Colossians “that [we] might be filled with the knowledge of his will in wisdom and spiritual understanding: that ye might walk worthy of the Lord unto all pleasing, being fruitful in every good work, and increasing in the knowledge of God”.
Should that be too hard to believe, then consider the works that are done in Jesus’ name. It is what Jesus says to us because of the darkness and the hardness of our hearts: “believe me that I am in the Father and the Father in me; or else believe me for the sake of the works themselves” (John 14.11). We learn and believe from the word proclaimed and heard as the cause in itself or from the word in motion in its visible effects. Such is God in himself and God for us, “the word of the truth of the Gospel; which is come unto you, as it is in all the world, and bringeth forth fruit and increaseth, as it doth also in you,” as Paul tells us.
Always and everywhere, the ones most committed to the truth of Jesus Christ are in the midst of the world’s suffering and woe, the thousands of thousands of quiet 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, out of an awareness of the reality of Incarnate Love. They face the sufferings of the world in the awareness of the redemptive sufferings of Christ.
True compassion struggles with the hardest of things without presuming 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 poverty of the world. The divinity of Christ, the doctrine of the Resurrection, Heaven and Hell, are exactly the teachings most relevant to the conditions of our humanity in all its folly and disarray. It is really all about God’s turning to us presented most powerfully in Jesus Christ. Here Jesus “turned him about” even as next Sunday in the Gospel for the Sunday Next Before Advent, “Jesus turn[s]” to us and bids us “come and see”. His turning to us is our wholeness. It belongs to this time of endings and beginnings. The whole Gospel is summed up in God’s turning to us in Jesus Christ, at once an ending and a beginning. “In my end is my beginning”, as T.S. Eliot puts it (Four Quartets, East Coker), for “to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from” (Little Gidding), as this Sunday teaches us, I think.
In this turning, God has made himself present to us. Such is Incarnate Love in Jesus Christ, 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.
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. To know even as we are known.
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 deathbed. In between is this scene within a scene only after which Christ raises the ruler’s daughter, a raising signifying resurrection. The ruler goes away with 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.” 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 is more than “a little touch of Harry in the night”, as Shakespeare puts it about Henry V going about in disguise to strengthen his troops on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt (Henry V). We are brought knowingly into the knowing love of Christ for us. But only by way of the Cross. On the Cross, Christ looks down upon us, not with disdain, but with compassion. We then turn to look upon him who has turned to us to bear all the sufferings and deaths which our sins have occasioned. There is simply our beholding him in his beholding us. We are at once convicted and convinced of his love for us. It is what he wants us to know. It is more than just a touch. It is Incarnate Love, the love in which we find all our beginnings and all our endings. “If I may but touch his garment, I shall be whole.” To be sure, but only through Jesus turning to us, the great theme of Advent which signals the whole pageant of our lives in faith. It is all about the turning of God towards us out of his very nature in whom we find our good, our healing and our wholeness.
“Jesus turned him about”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 24, 2021