The Profound Touch
Michiel Peeters - After calming the storm, we see Jesus and his disciples sailing back to the western shore of the lake, maybe to Capernaum, his “headquarters.” There is a large crowd again, so dense, that people press against him from all sides. Suddenly, He says: who touched me? His disciples think this is a bizarre question: “You see how the crowd is pressing upon you [from all sides], and yet you ask, ‘Who touched me?’” But Jesus’s words and behavior make clear that standing in a crowd around Him—even so close that no one else can pass through—is still something other than “touching” Him. Many have physical contact with Him, but this is not what He means here by “touching” (cf. Luke 13:26–27). By far not all flocked around Him “touch” Him, that is, recognize Him as the extraordinary presence He is (“If I but touch his clothes, I shall be cured”), and hence, can be changed by this presence, like today’s woman, who had been ill for many years.
Who are those, in the midst of the whole intrusive crowd, who can “touch” Him, that is, acknowledge Him (“your faith has saved you”), and therefore, truly seek Him, ask Him (“trouble the teacher”), and undergo His healing, His saving power? Only those who have a need, a necessity, a burning wound, an urgent question, such as the suffering woman, and Jairus, the synagogue official, whose child is gravely ill.
Jesus then follows the latter to his house. Some try to prevent this, as if to say: this “personality” has better things to do than leave a large crowd to enter your hopeless situation. But Jesus has nothing better to do than to enter the house—the circumstances, however despairing—of those who “touch” Him in the sense just said, that is, who acknowledge Him, who “have faith,” who “trouble Him,” that is, seek Him and ask him.
Once inside, he sees life in the child that no one saw anymore: “[She] is not dead but asleep.” Mark’s Gospel does not say whether the child was really already dead
or just appeared so to all bystanders. But for Jesus, she is sleeping, she can be awakened. He sends away those who have decided that certain things cannot happen—whose desire apparently is not so great that they uphold the category of the possible—, takes the child by the hand, and says, “arise!” “The girl, a child of twelve, arose immediately and walked around.” To those who allow themselves to be touched by him, Jesus gives life. For He came to revive man, who otherwise would die—physically, but also before: from meaninglessness, from existential loneliness, from the despair that results from suppressing one’s infinite desire.
All this He does as a human being, as ordinary human companionship for man, for man with his real problems: Jesus shows his extraordinary, life-giving presence to those who have a deep, urgent need and can thereby recognize, seek, and ask His extraordinary presence. But that presence is human, profoundly human, “daily” human, cordially human, “exceptionally” human, as we see from the fact that in the midst of the consternation, amazement, enthusiasm, even disbelief, he says that now they should give the girl something to eat. Something tasty!
Homily by Fr Michiel Peeters, Tilburg University Chaplaincy. Unrevised notes and translation by the author.
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