Church law requires those charged with the responsibility of leadership in religious communities at stated times to visit their members and those entrusted to their care. This is an ancient prescription in the life of the Church that dates way back to a time when personal visits were very time-consuming and otherwise difficult and challenging, but they were nonetheless seen as necessary and desirable for communication and community. Nowadays, we communicate much more frequently and in many varied ways. Even so, direct personal face-to-face interaction retains a certain privileged status. Indeed, as you are undoubtedly aware, there is a lot of concern in our society today about the breakdown and failure of interpersonal interactions, thanks to the dominance of technological alternatives. However modern we may be or want to be, nothing quite can replace personal presence in human relations.
And so it was also in today's Gospel passage [Mark 5:21-43] in which Jesus has been called upon in desperation to visit a home where a young girl is sick, at the point of death, a visit he happily makes even after the girl is reported as dead. Along the way, he has another important interpersonal encounter, also initiated by someone in severe distress.
Ancient people typically treated blood as sacred, the repository of life. Being sacred, it was presumed to be dangerous, with all the dread and awe that typically surround the sacred in traditional societies. So, the plight of someone afflicted with hemorrhages for 12 years was much more than a merely medical condition. It set I motion whole set of social and religious restrictions, that gave her illness had a public, social dimension, rendering her ritually unclean, effectively excluding her from the community. Imagine living like that for 12 years! Imagine what that would do to her sense of herself – and her relations with others! What happens to a person when the very way one is has been socially defined as dangerous?
Suddenly, into all this sadness and suffering, into this burdened woman’s world, walked Jesus, famous already for his powerful acts of healing, revealing what kind of God our God really is, a God who (as we just heard in the 1st reading) does not rejoice in the destruction of the living [Wisdom 1:13].
Somehow, something about Jesus’ personal presence empowered her to take a chance. Taking advantage of the cover provided by the crowd, she boldly touched Jesus’ cloak. And immediately her bold faith was rewarded.
What the expensive medical establishment could not accomplish in 12 years, Jesus cured in an instant – and for free! And, in the process, Jesus set her free, not only from her illness, but from all its catastrophic social consequences and its oppressive emotional and psychological burdens.
Jesus had recognized in her a Daughter of Israel, a member of God’s People. And, because she was a member of God’s People, she deserved to be included in the community. Jesus. therefore, would not permit her healing to remain private. (Obviously in that crowded scene it certainly could have remained hidden.)
And so she fell down before Jesus and told him the whole truth. She said what needed to be said; and in response Jesus promised her liberation from her suffering and told her to “Go in peace.”
In a little while, we too will be told to “Go in peace.” Jesus’ words were not meant to comfort just one woman who happened to have been afflicted with hemorrhages for 12 years and just happened one day to touch his clothes!
Jesus’ words are equally addressed to all of us today - whatever hidden or not-so-hidden burdens we bear, whatever sad (or not so sad) secrets define us - to do as she did, to take the chance that she took, and so experience in our own lives (in some instances, perhaps for the very first time) the coming of God’s kingdom – a kingdom of healing and honesty, and so begin to become ourselves active agents of God’s kingdom’s reconciliation and peace.
Homily for the 13th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Saint Austin Church, Austin, TX, June 30, 2024.
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