“If I only touch his robe, then I’ll be healed.” So said the woman with a chronic, bleeding hemorrhage, which we heard about in today’s reading from St. Matthew’s Gospel. Now, if we were to read St. Mark’s Gospel, we would learn that this woman suffered under the care of many doctors who, not only couldn’t heal her, but even made her condition worse. “If I only touch his robe, then I’ll be healed.”
Now, some say the woman was superstitious. She superstitiously thought Jesus’ clothing had some power permeated within it. So, if she touched Jesus’ clothes, the power within His clothes could heal her. It was as if she saw Jesus’ clothing as something magical and she wanted some of that magical power to benefit her.
Now, I think the people who think the woman was superstitious are the superstitious ones. For they hold the idea of God and His power as something abstract. It’s as if they see God as an abstraction, a disembodied being, who does whatever it is that God does. But with such a god, they fail to recognize two truths, which our English translations obscure.
First, the word translated as “well” or “healed” is also the same word that we translate as “save.” The woman with the chronic bleeding problem wasn’t only looking for physical healing. She was looking for a rescue from this body of death. And to be rescued from this body of death is not real if it’s an abstraction. For, you see, our fallen flesh is not an abstraction; it’s a true reality–and so it needs a real flesh-and-blood salvation.
The woman knew that. She knew enough to know that sitting in her room and thinking about God wouldn’t do it. She had a real flesh-and-blood problem and so she needed a real flesh-and-blood solution. So she went to go see God in the Flesh, Jesus Christ.
Jesus said, “No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). One doesn’t come to God the Father apart from the Son. And one doesn’t come to the Son apart from the flesh-and-blood Jesus born from the Virgin Mary, nailed on the cross, and raised from the dead. Apart from that Jesus, there is no coming to God.
But what good does that Jesus do us now? He’s now in heaven. We can’t leave our house and go to Jesus like the woman did. He’s not here anymore; He’s in heaven! Ah, but He is present in His Church, in His Supper, where He gives us Himself in His body and blood. Jesus is not an abstraction.
Perhaps, there are other ways to come to Jesus. But, if so, God the Holy Spirit has not chosen to reveal those other ways to us in the Scriptures. And so trying to seek Jesus in those other ways only leads us down the many empty roads of speculation.
Well, what’s the other idea masked in our English translations that are clearer in the original? The second is that our translations say the woman touched the fringe of Jesus’ robe. But that word for “fringe” refers to the distinctive tassel on a Jewish man’s clothing. The tassel was a sign of someone’s obedience to the Law, a reminder of the mandate to be holy and fully live in the Commandments.
But only one Man in all of human history was fit to wear the tassel. Only one Man fulfilled what those tassels represented. Only one Man flawlessly kept the Law and fulfilled the Commandments–our Lord Jesus Christ.
When the woman grasped Jesus’ tassel, she touched more than just a tassel. She touched the One who fulfilled the purpose of that tassel. She touched the obedient One, the One who delighted the Father, the One who did everything well. She touched the only One who loved God with His entire being, and who loved His neighbor as Himself. She grasped an obeying of the Law that she could never do for herself.
The woman grasped the tassel of the robe that had wrapped the flesh-and-blood God, the God who wrapped Himself in our flesh and bone. She touched the Great Physician who does what no other doctor can do. He is the Creator who came to rescue His fallen and suffering creation. Only the flow of blood from His spear-pierced side could stop the flow of blood from this woman, which had made her life a living hell.
She touched the tassel, and from it flowed the power of God, for that robe was wrapped around God Himself. No, the woman wasn’t superstitious. Instead, she recognized who was inside that robe–and that made all the difference.
So, if the woman’s thinking was faulty, it wasn’t because she went to go see Jesus. If anything, it was that she held too low of an opinion of our Lord’s compassion. Perhaps, she thought to touch His tassel because she wanted to be healed but didn’t want to bother Jesus. After all, He was going to see someone who had died.
Like with her, our concerns don’t bother our Lord. We don’t do ourselves, or God, and favors when we withhold from Him what’s going on within us. Don’t protect God from your feelings. Don’t act shy and self-conscious. That’s an insult to His compassion.
Going to God in prayer is an act of intimacy. To hold back in your prayers is to hold out on God. To hold out in some areas shows that you don’t fully trust Him in all areas. If you won’t ask God for what He wants to give you, that may mean that you think God doesn’t care about that. Or, can it be that you don’t think He has the power to deal with whatever is going on in your life?
God wants you to open your heart to Him in prayer, to lay yourself vulnerable. Why won’t you trust Him? Repent! Don’t be afraid. He loves you. He loves your prayers. Your prayers won’t shock Him, any more than a four-year old shocks his mother when he says that he wants every toy he sees or wants to be a superhero.
If there was a fault in the woman, it wasn’t that she was superstitious. Jesus felt the power go out of Him, so He knew that He had been touched by faith. And He wasn’t too busy to stop and speak to her, even though He was going to raise a dead girl, even though He was in the company of a distraught father. He had time for her. He always has time. And even if she was hesitant, He wasn’t angry. He loved her and her faith.
He said, “Your faith has made you well.” But as I already hinted, we might better translate that as, “Your faith has saved you.” Either way, that was highest praise from the same God-in-the-Flesh who rebuked His disciples for having little faith. She had faith and Jesus praised her for it.
After Jesus healed the woman, He then made His way to Jairus’ house. He was the person in our Gospel text whose daughter had died. From St. Mark’s Gospel, we learn that Jairus’ daughter was 12-years old when she died. The woman whom Jesus had just healed had a hemorrhage for 12 years.
And so the girl’s birth matched the beginning of the slow death for the woman who had suffered a hemorrhaging of blood for 12 years. Yet, these two women were connected in more ways than Matthew happening to include them in the same paragraph.
Jesus touching them and their touching of Him was the true connection. Jairus asked Jesus to place His hands on His dead daughter. But instead, Jesus took her hand, as though she was the one placing her hands in Him! The woman with the chronic bleeding reached out her hand to grasped Jesus’ tassel. Both touched Jesus.
That describes faith! For faith is the hand that grasps grace. The woman had faith. She recognized that our Lord could do what the medical doctors couldn’t do. That faith saved her. The girl also had faith. But in her case, our Lord slipped His hand under hers to give it to her. She was dead. So He gave her the hand, the grasp, that grasped Him, and He called her back from death.
Jesus’ raising the dead girl explains the faith of the bleeding woman. Her faith saved her. But where did that faith originate? It came from Jesus, the same Lord in the Flesh who slipped His hand under the dead girl’s hand and guided it to Him.
That’s how it is with faith. It seeks the risen, living, bodily Jesus because the Holy Spirit gives and upholds such faith. That’s what the Holy Spirit does–He always testifies to, and of, that same Jesus.
That’s why we also come to the holy Supper. For we aren’t here just to think about Jesus. We are here to touch Him, to be healed, saved, and raised. This touch is not a metaphor. It is real, physical, even as Jesus is real and physical.
Jesus did not rise as a disembodied spectre. He is flesh and blood, alive from the grave. That’s why Jesus doesn’t come to us as an idea but as a body, crucified and risen, in His holy Supper.
Spiritually speaking, we are all bleeding to death. We are in danger of losing our lives, slowly bleeding to death because of sin. So, as our Great Physician, our Lord gives us a blood transfusion–His blood. He pours His risen blood into us in His Supper. That not only stops the blood loss, that is, forgives our sins, but also infuses us with His own life, which will raise us to life eternal.
“If only His body is placed on my tongue, I will me made well, I will be saved,” says the Christian. “Take heart and rise,” says the Lord. “Take and eat. Take and drink. Your faith has saved you.” Amen.
