Christ Church

“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.

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“But Jesus turned him about”
A Meditation on the Twenty-fourth Sunday after Trinity

This year the Trinity Season runs to twenty-five Sundays, just one shy of the longest it can be. Its length depends on the date of Easter. Trinity Season and the Epiphany Season push and pull one another accordingly with a variable number of Sundays for each season. If the one is short, the other is long. This year, November 10^th, is the Twenty-fourth Sunday after Trinity. All this is but preamble to the readings which we have on these last Sundays of Trinity because we don’t always have them every year for the reason just stated.

That brings us to an important consideration, however: the idea of an established pattern of Scripture readings. For some Christian traditions, this is anathema as being too formal and too restrictive. The irony is that if left to ministers or even parochial spiritual committees the range and choice of Scripture readings is often quite constrained and limited. At issue, too, is who chooses and upon what basis? What are the principles that determine the pattern of scripture readings called a lectionary?

One feature of the contemporary church and its confusions is the jettisoning of a very ancient tradition of reading the Scriptures embodied in the Eucharistic lectionary, the readings at Holy Communion. Not only ancient, it was also the most ecumenical lectionary, historically speaking. Developed from the fifth century onwards, it was the pattern of reading common to the Western Church throughout the medieval period and into the modern; post-reformation, mutatis mutandi, it remained the common property of Roman Catholics, Lutherans and Anglicans, for instance. This alone is suggestive and compelling. In jettisoning it, we have been left with a rather confusing array of lectionaries which all bear a common shape – three readings rather than two at Holy Communion, for instance – and which claim a kind of ecumenicity.

Despite the attempt at achieving a Common Lectionary, it hasn’t happened. But there is a further problem, the question of what are the principles that inform the pattern of readings. What are the themes and ideas that determine the choice of passages? For the older ecumenical lectionary (wonderfully present in our 1962 Canadian Book of Common Prayer, albeit with some changes to be sure), the principles are inescapably creedal. In other words, the pattern of reading relates to the Creeds, to the foundational and formative principles of the Christian Faith.

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“Whose is this image and superscription?”

Autumn leaves lie scattered on the wind. The glory of the Fall fades into the somber grey of November. At the risk of indulging too much in the pathetic fallacy, not to mention privileging the seasons of the northern hemisphere, there is, it seems to me, a contemplative feel to nature at this time of year. Certainly, the Scripture readings in the Offices and at the Eucharist reflect an emphasis upon wisdom. They recall us to contemplation and reflection.

I love the contrast between the fading of nature’s glory and the opening out to us of the glory of God in the Communion of Saints, the vision of our redeemed humanity. We meet within the Octave of the Feast of All Saints’ and this morning’s Epistle reading reminds us of the spiritual reality of that communion. “Our citizenship is in heaven,” Paul tells the Philippians, and bids them and us “look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ; who shall change this lowly body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body”, words which are echoed in the Service of Committal in the Burial Office. Death and glory.

The Feast of All Saints’ embraces The Solemnity of All Souls’. All Souls’ reminds us of the somber reality of our common mortality but it does so within the vision of the hope of heaven, the vision of our humanity transformed. These celebrations challenge us about how we think about our humanity, about what it means to be human and about our lives in the human community, politically, economically, socially, and religiously. They challenge us about the necessity of making certain distinctions and about understanding the forms of interaction within the varied areas and aspects of our lives. “Our citizenship is in heaven” but we have certain obligations in the political and social communities of which we are inescapably a part as well. The Gospel speaks directly to the questions about their interaction.

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