Good morning, My Cherished Friends,
There is a story in the New Testament that we have all heard from our childhood. We don’t know this woman’s name, we know nothing of her family; all we know is, she is a woman whose body is in trouble. She is a person in pain. She’s been to many doctors, it says; she has spent her days in waiting rooms, in emergency rooms, she’s been poked and prodded and tested, and still she suffers.
Medicine has done all it can do for her. She has no hope left, she is completely at the end of her rope, except for one thing: if she can just touch him — the Master, the Helper, the Healer, if she can get close enough to even touch his robe. That would be enough, because it’s been said that this could be the Messiah, and the Messiah is the one who heals. God has the power to heal our infirmities, and to make us whole again.
And so, in the middle of this crowd, she reaches out, in one desperate attempt to touch Jesus (Mark 5:24b-34). She says to herself, “If I can only touch the hem of his robe, I will be well!” This was her last hope. If this didn’t work, if the power of God didn’t work, then she had nothing.
The story of the woman who touched the hem of Jesus;’ robe is one of the strongest images of faith I know of, in the entire New Testament. Her hand, reaching out from the margins of the crowd, where she has been pushed by her poverty, her pain, her gender: reaching out to touch Jesus, the Lord, the giver of life.
When she does, Jesus knows it immediately. He wants to know who it is who has touched him. The woman trembles, but when Jesus speaks to her, he tenderly calls her “daughter,” which is to say, an intimate designation that honors her, that places her within the family, the family of God. Interestingly, Jesus doesn’t claim to heal her. He said, “Your faith has made you well.”
Do you know what desperation does? It trims away from your life all the fear and replaces it with faith — and then only one thing becomes important to you. I hope it’s alright for me to wish that each of us (now, I don’t wish for you to get sick), but that each of us, just once, would be desperate enough to suddenly realize that there is stuff in my life that needs healing.
Is it alright if I pray that all of us, sometime, gets desperate enough that we would reach out to God, or at least, the hem of his garment? Is that alright?
In the name of the giver, the preserver, the restorer of life,
Bruce Jones, Pastor
Imagine Church
