13th Sunday of Ordinary Time, B June 27, 2021
Fr. Albert St. John the Evangelist, Jeanerette
Jesus is not a vending machine. You can’t just go to Jesus, put in some faith, and then get what you want back. Yet, many people treat it like this. You can almost excuse them because it kinda seems to work in the gospels. Every time Jesus encounters someone with faith, he performs a miracle. When four friends bring a paralyzed man, he sees their faith and heals the man. He repeatedly tells people to have faith and rebukes his apostles for their lack of faith, like when they were on the lake in a storm. He tells his followers that they can command mountains and trees to move if they have enough faith. Here we see Jairus ask Jesus for help, evidently believing he can do it, so Jesus obliges and follows along. Most interesting of all is this woman who only has to touch Jesus with faith to be healed.
But Jesus’ reaction to this event points us to something more than a mere exchange of faith for miracles. “Who touched me?” As the apostles point out, he is being jostled by a crowd, so lots of people are touching him. Of course, Jesus means more than physical touch. Who touched me with faith? Take a moment to consider what he doesn’t ask. He doesn’t ask “why.” He asks “who.”
Now, the woman hears this and is afraid. She comes forward and tells him everything, assuming she has to justify her actions to him. But that’s not what Jesus asks for. He is God after all, and we’ve seen him read people’s hearts and minds in other places. He knows why. He knows what happened. He even know who. So why is he asking? Because he wants to meet her. He wants to encounter her as a person rather than as an anonymous recipient of his power.
And the first word he speaks to her highlights this. Even in the original Greek, the first word he says to her is “daughter.” He is glad that she is healed, he is happy that she has faith – he’s always happy when he finds faith and upset when people lack it. What he wants at this moment, however, is to express relationship. He wants to meet her gaze, to meet her, to let her hear him call her his daughter. Jesus tells her that her faith has saved her, but that had already happened the moment she touched him. He didn’t need to say it, but she needed to hear it, she needed to know that Jesus knew her and loved her personally.
This woman faced a serious isolation. Blood is an important symbol in God’s covenants. It represents life. As the first reading tells us, God did not make death. Death came from the devil’s envy, from our sin. Whenever human blood was shed, it was a sign of death, of corruption. Because God did not make death, he did not want his people bringing death and corruption into his presence. So, whenever someone was bleeding, they were considered ritually unclean. They couldn’t go to the temple, and anyone or anything they touched would also become unclean. This was part of God’s long-term plan to teach his people – and the world – that he does not want death.
In this particular case, however, it meant this woman could never go to the temple and worship God and that anyone she touched would be inconvenienced by having to go be purified before they could go to the temple. This is probably the reason she was afraid and tried to touch Jesus without him noticing. Ritual impurity is an important symbolic way God teaches his people about corruption and death, but this does not mean God is afraid of corruption and death, or that it hurts him. Indeed, in the gospels, whenever decay or death comes into contact with Jesus, it’s not the death that spreads, but his power. Again and again, Jesus demonstrates that he has absolute power over death and that our faith enables us to benefit from that power.
But this power is not detached from Jesus as a person. The whole point of Jesus’ ministry, of his healing… the whole point of faith is to bring people into relationship with God. Had she been healed and gone away without that encounter, that personal experience of making eye contact and being called daughter, her healing would have been wasted.
And this preference for the personal continues through the next miracle. Jesus could have simply healed Jairus’ daughter from a distance. In a few other places, that is what he does. This time, however, he takes her hand and speaks to her directly, “little girl, I say to you.” As soon as she’s alive again, he wants her to be fed and taken care of. This moment isn’t just to show that faith overcomes death, but that faith brings us into relationship with Jesus.
Jesus is not a vending machine, and neither is the Church that is his body. We cannot treat our faith like a currency, a coin to put in and get what we want. It is meant to be built upon, to bring us back to relationship with Jesus Christ as a person… with God, the Trinity of three persons.
In a world full of corruption and death, it is imperative that we remember God did not make death. It is imperative that we fight against death by fighting against the source of death, which is sin. We fight against death by resisting sin. We fight against sin and death through faith; through the firm belief, the willful trust that God has and will continue to overcome death.
The servants tell Jairus not to trouble Jesus any longer because his daughter has died, but Jesus simply tells him, “Do not be afraid, just have faith.” He says the same to you and I. Have faith that God has conquered death. Live that faith by turning from sin in confession. Touch Jesus with faith in the Eucharist. Draw on that faith to seek miracles. Only, do not reduce that faith to passive observance or to a secret desire to control God and his plans. Live that faith, above all, by treating Jesus as a father, a brother, a friend… as a person, not a vending machine.