JESUS AND A TOUCH OF FAITH
(Luke 8:40-56)
INTRODUCTION _ KEITH
I had just started preaching one Sunday morning when I saw someone come into the church through the doors at the back. The man sat down in the back pew, right next to one of our most welcoming ladies, so I knew he’d be well looked after. After this slight distraction, I quickly got back into the preaching flow and brought God’s word to God’s people.
After singing the final hymn and pronouncing the blessing, I walked down the aisle to the back of the church ready to shake the hands of those who weren’t going to stay for a cup of after-service tea and, as I reached the back pew, I made a point of greeting the latecomer. He was a man aged somewhere in his thirties, looking a little dishevelled and smelling strongly of alcohol. “My name’s Keith” he said in a slurred fashion, “I’m a chronic alcoholic.” With that, he showed me the bottle of cider he had concealed inside his coat. “But don’t worry,” Keith assured me, “I’d never drink inside the church!” After a cup of coffee, Keith left with his bottle of cider still concealed beneath his coat and most of the congregation remained blissfully unaware.
Keith came back to the church each Sunday morning for several weeks after that first one, usually arriving in the second half of the service, staying for a short chat afterwards and then disappearing back onto the street. He came back, he said, because he felt welcome – which pleased me. At one point, he shared with me that the doctors had told him his liver wouldn’t work for much longer – I don’t know how true that was, but he was always under the influence of alcohol whenever I spoke with him.
One Sunday, Keith didn’t slip in at the back of the church and, though I saw him a couple of times after that, walking unsteadily down the street, he never came back to church again. He never once asked for anything – in fact, he kept himself very private and rejected offers of help – he just enjoyed being with us, being with the family of God, and being part of our worship for a while.
Keith is a man living on the edges - for many people, he would be someone to ignore, someone to avoid, someone to fear – but such a man, or woman, must surely find a welcome amongst the people who constitute the Body of Christ, the Church. After all, Jesus Himself without fail welcomed those who were to be found on the margins of His society: the poor, the sick, the disabled, the disreputable. This morning, I want to focus on one of those occasions, when He was – quite literally – touched by the faith of a woman, a touch that transformed her life.
We’re going to look more closely now at the Gospel account of …
JESUS AND A TOUCH OF FAITH
… and I invite you to step into the story with me.
Jesus and His disciples return to Capernaum from a trip across the Sea of Galilee, during which He had cast out a legion of demons from one poor man. By the time their boat arrives, a crowd has already gathered to meet them – by now, Jesus is a teacher and a healer of some repute, so this wasn’t anything out of the ordinary.
As He walks up from the boat into the town, He’s approached by a most respected and significant person, Jairus, the leader of the local synagogue, who falls on his knees before Jesus and begs Him to go to his house to heal his young daughter, who is critically ill. Of course, Jesus, filled with compassion, agrees to go with him and they set off, with the crowd accompanying them. In fact, we’re told that the crowd was so large and that people wanted to get so close to Jesus that they almost crushed Him – I think sometimes we don’t fully understand just what an attraction Jesus was during His ministry. Anyway, this crowding makes progress through the street quite slow and it enables a very ill woman to get close enough to Him to touch His clothing.
But why did she want to do this? Why was it so important to her to touch Jesus’ robe?
We’re told that she had been suffering from bleeding for twelve years and it’s widely accepted that this was continuous menstrual bleeding. What is known is that her condition would have impacted upon her life very seriously indeed. You see, the Jewish Law decreed that contact with blood made anyone unclean, so there were strict rules about dealing with sacrifices and with funerals, and there were set cleansing rituals that people had to go through if they had contact with blood, whether it be from an animal or a human. This woman’s condition meant she was in a constant state of uncleanness and she made anyone or anything she touched unclean, as well – even if her dress so much as brushed against something, it became unclean; if she sat down, her chair became unclean … Leviticus, chapter 15, details the strict regulations that affected her.
So, she must have lived a very lonely, isolated life, with no one wanting to come near her, and, as a result, she must have been extremely poor – indeed, Mark tells us in his Gospel that she had spent all she had on doctors and yet her health was getting worse. This woman was probably at the lowest point she could reach; and, then, Jesus comes to town – Jesus of Nazareth, the renowned healer – she knew this was her last chance.
And so this desperate woman finds a way of touching Jesus’ robe. Matthew and Luke include the fact that she didn’t touch just any part of His robe – they tell us that she touched the edge of it. Like other peoples of that time, the Jews wore a kind of cloak, which they wrapped around themselves, over their tunic, to keep them warm when the weather was cool. It was a rectangular piece of material which reached down to the ankles and, at each corner, the Jews threaded a tassel – in Hebrew, a tzitzit – to meet the requirements of the Jewish Law (in Numbers 15) – and you could always identify a Jew because of these tassels.
I haven’t got an ancient Jewish cloak with me, but I have brought a modern Jewish prayer shawl, which is modelled upon it. You can see that, at each corner, there is a tassel – a tzitzit – with knots in it. The tassels on a Jew’s cloak would have a total of 613 knots in them to remind him of the 613 commandments God had given Israel in the Scriptures.
Anyway, the tassels of a rabbi or Jewish leader, were considered to be a sign of that person’s authority and the Greek word that both Matthew and Luke use indicates that this poor woman reaches out to touch one of these tassels on Jesus’ cloak – you see, she recognises His authority over her illness and, true enough, she receives healing.
But the meaning goes even deeper than that. The corners of the robe through which the tassels were threaded were called kanaf – in English, ‘wings’ – you can see these kanaf here on the prayer shawl. The prophet Malachi had earlier prophesied that “for those who revere my name, the sun of righteousness will rise with healing in His wings” and this was considered to refer to what would happen when the expected Messiah arrived: when ‘the sun of righteousness’ – the Messiah – came, healing would be found in the wings, in the tassels, of His robe. And so it was, that day in Capernaum.
The remarkable thing is that Jesus knows immediately that He has been touched in a particular way and that power has gone out from Him. So, He stops to ask who has touched Him, even though there are many, many people pressing in around Him! How can He possibly ask this question? What makes this woman’s touch different to everyone else’s, such that He can tell? The woman steps forward and falls at His feet, frightened at what He might say.
It’s worth pointing out that, at this moment, Jairus, the synagogue leader, must have been in a state of absolute despair: after all, he has just seen Jesus touched by a woman well-known to be unclean for twelve years, so now Jesus is made unclean and not able to heal his daughter.
Yet, throughout it all, Jesus remains calm: He listens to the trembling woman’s story, then says to her, “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace.” He treats her with respect and with compassion: He addresses her as a daughter of Israel, a daughter of God – for so long, people had treated her as afflicted by God, but now Jesus affirms her as a daughter loved by God. There’s no condemnation, just affirmation. And Jesus tells her in front of everyone, “Your faith has healed you” – and that is how He knew her touch was different: it was a touch of faith … faith in His authority as the Messiah to heal her. It was a tactile prayer for healing; and, as such, it was so unlike the ordinary jostling of the crowd. And, finally, He tells her to “go in peace” – or, in Hebrew, to “go in shalom”. As you might already know, shalom means so much more than the English word ‘peace’ – it means a state of wholeness in body, mind and spirit. The woman has been more than merely physically healed, she has been restored in every way.
What becomes clear, too, is that Jesus has turned Jewish teaching on ‘clean’ and ‘unclean’ completely on its head. According to that teaching, something that is unclean will pass its uncleanness onto something, or someone, who is clean, when it is touched. But it doesn’t work the other way: something clean cannot transfer its cleanness to something unclean … until Jesus comes along! The uncleanness of the woman is dispelled as soon as she touches Jesus – and that can only happen by the almighty power of God.
It means that Jesus can go on to Jairus’ house, but then news comes that the young girl has died – surely it’s a waste of time to bring the Teacher to the house now? But Jesus simply asks Jairus to have faith – the same kind of faith the haemorrhaging woman has shown – and He goes to the synagogue leader’s house to restore her to life. Notice, also, that He takes her by the hand before He revives her – another instance of His cleanness being uncompromised by another’s uncleanness.
But what can we learn from what happened here?
APPLICATION
Well, first of all, we learn that Jesus doesn’t discriminate … In this episode, Jesus meets two daughters of Israel: one who is extremely poor, afraid and alone; and another who comes from a very respectable, financially comfortable family. And yet Jesus doesn’t discriminate between them: both have a need for healing and both are valued equally by Him.
We, the Church today, must recognise that …
everyone has need of the Saviour;
everyone has fallen short in some way;
and everyone is welcome in the Kingdom of God.
So … may we respond to all those in need in the same even-handed way that Christ Himself did.
In addition, when we consider the haemorrhaging woman’s condition and the devastating impact it had had upon her life, it surely prompts us to consider also the difficult lives that are lived by those in our society who find themselves excluded, judged and written off.
Who are these people? It’s likely to be those who are homeless; those affected by HIV/AIDS; those seeking asylum; those with mental health needs; those, like Keith addicted to alcohol or drugs; and probably other groups of people, too.
As we – the Body of Christ – respond to these people, may we remember that Jesus responded to the woman not with condemnation and criticism, but with compassion and concern.
I think we can also learn something about boldness from the haemorrhaging woman herself. You know, she was a really courageous woman: she took a huge risk in coming into a busy place in her condition in order to reach out to Christ; and then she also had the strength to come forward to tell her story – it wasn’t common in the culture of that time for women to speak in public, so this was a big step for her. Yet, by requiring her to speak, Jesus makes it possible for her to be reconciled to her community.
May we, like Jesus, give people the space, the opportunity and the encouragement to tell their stories and to find healing at the feet of the risen Saviour.
We need to remember, too, that, while it was the haemorrhaging woman who reached out to touch Jesus in the street and was healed, it was Jesus Himself who reached out to take the hands of the dead girl in her home and revived her. It’s a timely reminder to us that our own mission is not only to respond when someone approaches us, but also, proactively, to go and make contact with those who are dead in their sins and offer them new life in Christ Jesus.
As disciples of Christ, we need to be constantly aware of people on the edges – people on the edges of our society, like those groups I’ve already mentioned; but, also, those on the edges of our church community: people with whom we may have some contact through church activities, but who have not yet come to Christ themselves.
May we be available whenever people come to us, looking for Christ, but – more than that – may we also be ready to take the power and the love of Christ to them.
This, then, is the challenge of the text for the Church today: to be as Christ to those on the edges, on the margins, and to bring them into the fullness of God’s Kingdom. Are we prepared to rise to it?
Amen.
Postscript: Since preaching this sermon, Keith has again started coming to church!
In preparing this sermon I benefitted greatly from Dr Gary Burge’s teaching on Zondervan’s Deeper Connections DVD: The Miracles of Jesus and gladly acknowledge this.
