Today’s readings: Wisdom 1:13-15; 2:23-24; 2 Corinthians 8:7, 9, 13-15; Mark 5:21-43.
In his book The Five Love Languages, author, pastor and counsellor Gary Chapman underlines the importance of physical touch: “Whatever there is of me resides in my body. To touch my body is to touch me. To withdraw from my body is to distance yourself from me emotionally.” Proposing it as one of the ‘love languages’ (the others being words of affirmation, quality time, receiving gifts, and acts of service), he reminds us that touch is not merely beneficial to our well-being, it is essential. All phases and aspects of life are enriched and rendered more meaningful through healthy and appropriate touching.
This is one of the reasons why the abuse crisis within the Church has been so devastating. The horrors perpetrated by some clergymen have poisoned the innocence of physical touch for the rest of us. I still remember my apprehensiveness some years ago when, after catechism classes one afternoon, a young boy innocently grabbed my hand and asked me to help him cross the street because his mum didn’t want him doing so alone. A sweet and pure gesture of trust which would otherwise have stirred paternal feelings within me became fraught instead: “What will people think? I hope they know I’m not that kind of person!”
Like the abuse crisis, the present pandemic is another ‘plague’ that has poisoned physical touch, at least for now. The fear of infecting ourselves and others through touch has been drummed into us for close to 18 months now. Cue the sanitiser and the elbow bumps!
Physical touch was no less fraught in Jesus’s time and culture, albeit for different reasons. Among the myriad Hebrew laws on ritual purity, those concerning physical contact were among the most stringent and constraining. Touching a corpse rendered a person ritually unclean, for instance; likewise coming into contact with bodily fluids.
In today’s gospel we find both.
Two distinct but interwoven miracles are united by seemingly inconsequential details: the aspect of physical contact, and the time frame of 12 years. The haemorrhaging woman who touched Christ’s garments had been ill for 12 years; the dead girl whom he restored to life was 12. This means that around the same time that Jairus and his wife were welcoming the joy of new life, the other woman began her long and solitary via dolorosa, effectively a protracted death. Her illness – an unremitting emission of blood – caused her physical and emotional pain, feebleness, and humiliation. Even worse, it made her ritually unclean, effectively cutting her off from the worshipping community of Israel. It is totally conceivable that she might even have felt forsaken by God.
But God had not abandoned her, and in the person of his incarnate son he allowed himself to be touched by her, both physically and in faith. Consider the scene: aware of the healing power that has just gone out of him, Jesus actively and insistently seeks her out among the crowd. He is not content with healing her body; he also wants to restore her soul and emotions, to remind her that even at her lowest, when she felt an outcast from society and synagogue, she was never an outcast to God.
The second instance of physical contact in today’s gospel is more dramatic, despite its intimate domestic setting. Jesus approaches the dead girl’s bed, tenderly takes her hand, and wakes her with a “Talitha, kum!” (Little girl, I tell you: arise!) as though her death were nothing more than a feverish slumber.
Her dead body – like the sick woman’s touch – does not render Jesus unclean, for death has no power over the author of life. Rather, it is Jesus who renders clean all whom he touches. Death is overcome, life is restored, physical touch is redeemed and once again made holy.