Touch We Now Thy Garment’s Hem
27 June 2021 Fifth Sunday after
Pentecost (Proper 8 B)
Homily Preached at Trinity Episcopal Church
Ashland, Oregon
8:00 a.m. Spoken Mass; 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass
Wisdom of Solomon 1:13-15; 2: 23-24; Psalm 30; 2 Corinthians 8:7-15; Mark 5:21-43
God, take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.
When I came here to Trinity from Beijing in the Fall of 2011 for interviews, the Search Committee asked me how I understood Church, and how I saw what we do each week here. I could only recite the lines of a hymn I had sung as a chorister as a new Episcopalian, by the iconic 19th century Church of England priest Percy Dearmer. It shows up in the Presbyterian and Methodist hymnals, but unfortunately is not in the current Episcopal hymnal. For me, it captures the sacramental approach to life and faith we Episcopalians hold dear:
Draw us in the Spirit’s tether;
For when humbly, in thy name,
Two or three are met together,
Thou art in the midst of them:
Alleluya! Alleluya! Touch we now thy garment’s hem.
As the faithful used to gather
In the name of Christ to sup,
Then with thanks to God the Father
Break the bread and bless the cup,
Alleluya! Alleluya! So knit thou our friendship up.
All our meals and all our living
Make as sacraments of thee,
That by caring, helping, giving,
We may true disciples be.
Alleluya! Alleluya! We will serve thee faithfully.
“Touch we now thy garment’s hem” the image is drawn from today’s Gospel
reading. A woman, desperate after 12
years of bleeding that has consumed all her resources for a cure and made her
unclean and an outcast, secretly tries to capture some of Jesus’ healing power
for herself by touching “the fringe of his robe”, probably the tsitsit on his
small everyday prayer shawl. Jesus is on
his way to heal the daughter of an important local leader, Jairus.
Touching his garment, she is instantly healed. Jesus, however, notices that something has happened and turns to ask who touched him. The disciples are perplexed. The crowds are pushing in, and it could have been anyone. But he is adamant—he has felt power go out from him.
The woman with the issue of blood
dared not ask Jesus to help her because she is ritually impure. Her unusual bleeding made her contagiously
unclean: mere contact with her conveyed uncleanness. The knotting on that prayer shawl stood for
the 613 commandments in the Torah, among which we read this, just after the
Book of Leviticus’s rules about women with unusual flows of blood: “You must
keep the Israelites separate from things that make them unclean, so they will
not die in their uncleanness for defiling my dwelling place, which is among
them” (Lev. 15).
The woman is an outcast. She wonders how a religious teacher like Jesus could
be expected to pay her any attention, let alone touch her to heal her. So she
takes things into her own hands and secretly touches his prayer shawl’s
tassels. And that is what Jesus
praises, saying it is her trust that has healed her. In Orthodox lore, this woman is named
Veronica, the one who later wipes the sweaty and bloody face of Jesus on his
way to the cross and whose kerchief preserves his image miraculously.
When Jesus finally arrives at the
house of Jairus, the question of ritual impurity again intrudes in this
complicated sandwich of a story. Coming near to or touching a corpse also
transmitted ritual uncleanness. When the crowd tells Jairus that his daughter
is dead, Jesus persists in going to try to heal her, and tells him, “Don’t be
afraid, just trust.”
They leave the crowd behind, and come to the house, where professional mourners are already at work, ululating, weeping, and tearing their clothes. Jairus clearly was a man of influence and wealth. When Jesus announces that the girl is not dead, just asleep, and says he will go and wake her up, the crowd laughs at him. Instead of reaching for his garment’s hem, they laugh.
Most are probably laughing out of nervousness—this guy is not only going to cause a great scene involving a corpse, but is also going to break, right there in public, a great taboo. He would contaminate himself by touching the corpse, and then come out and contaminate them.
Despite the privileged position the little girl had in life, as a corpse she is
just another source of ritual contamination, like the woman with the flow of
blood earlier in the story.
After Jesus puts the onlookers all out, he takes the child's father and mother
and his accompanying disciples, and goes in to where the corpse is. He then
takes her by the hand and says, “Little girl, get up!” (Talitha qumi! It
is recorded in the words he probably actually used in his own native language,
Aramaic.)
We read, “Immediately the girl stood up and walked around (she was twelve years
old). At this they were completely astonished.”
You see, in both cases, the woman with the unusual flow of blood and Jairus’
young daughter, compassion and service took precedence over a desire to remain
pure.
Purity or compassion, Jesus, which
is it? Love, not purity, is Jesus’ consistent answer. This
really marks just how radical Jesus was. The religion of the day declared, with
the full authority of scripture literally cited and interpreted through
authoritative tradition, that impurity was contagious. It spread from the
unclean to the clean. People who want to please God must avoid it if at all
possible, lest they commit sacrilege against the Temple of God. If impurity is
inadvertently contracted, they need to purge it away through rituals.
As a Jew, Jesus respected the rituals. He was, after all, wearing that small
prayer shawl with the fringes. But he
taught that purity and cleanness were not the whole matter, and that goodness
and compassion were far more important. In his view, moral goodness was spread
to others by compassion and service. And the need for compassion and service
trumped the need to avoid contamination at all times.
The theme is a subtext of almost all of Jesus’ public acts and teaching. He
practiced open table fellowship with people that his religion labeled as the
worst of the worst. According to the Law, the table where one ate was one of
the easiest places to contract impurity. He taught that it was what one said
and did, rather than what one ate, that counted. He tended to discount ritual
washings as a core issue and said they did not necessarily touch what really
mattered—the heart. He told stories of religious men avoiding contamination
with what they thought was a corpse in contrast to a heretic and illegitimate
man (a Samaritan) who, despite the same religious rules about corpses, still
showed compassion and thus made himself the fellow countryman ("the
neighbor") of the man who was near death.
In so doing, Jesus was following the very best of the Jewish prophetic
tradition, which itself had consistently criticized the religious
establishment’s concern with purity rather than justice.
Ultimately, it would be Jesus’ uncompromising insistence on this that so
alienated the religious authorities that they conspired to turn him over to the
hated Roman occupiers.
We need never think that our uncleanness or impurity is a barrier keeping us
from Jesus. We need not fear that a disability we may have can keep us from the
love of Jesus. Jesus loves us regardless, and wants to heal us and help us
understand that we are forgiven all.
What keeps us from Jesus is our fear itself. Our fear may make us so nervous
that we, like the professional mourners outside Jairus' house, end up laughing
at God. But the woman with the flow of blood was so desperate that she overcame
her fear. Taking things into her own hands she reaches out to touch the fringe
of his prayer shawl. We too need to reach out to touch his fringe.
We do that by living in the spirit,
by coming together and praying and eating the bread and wine that Jesus shared
in open table fellowship. We do that by
serving and loving and showing the same preference for love over purity that
Jesus showed. Draw us in the Spirit’s
tether. Touch we now thy garment’s
hem.
When Jairus learns his daughter is dead, Jesus tells him “Don’t be afraid, just
trust in me.”
Jesus is saying this today, to each of us, “Don’t be afraid. Just trust in me.”
Let us touch the hem of his
garment.
In the name of God, Amen.
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