"The Healing Touch"
Polk City United Methodist Church
June 19, 1997
Mark Haverland


2 Corinthians 8:1-15


1And now, brothers, we want you to know about the grace that God has given the Macedonian churches. 2Out of the most severe trial, their overflowing joy and their extreme poverty welled up in rich generosity. 3For I testify that they gave as much as they were able, and even beyond their ability. Entirely on their own, 4they urgently pleaded with us for the privilege of sharing in this service to the saints. 5And they did not do as we expected, but they gave themselves first to the Lord and then to us in keeping with God's will. 6So we urged Titus, since he had earlier made a beginning, to bring also to completion this act of grace on your part. 7But just as you excel in everything--in faith, in speech, in knowledge, in complete earnestness and in your love for us [1]--see that you also excel in this grace of giving. 8I am not commanding you, but I want to test the sincerity of your love by comparing it with the earnestness of others. 9For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich. 10And here is my advice about what is best for you in this matter: Last year you were the first not only to give but also to have the desire to do so. 11Now finish the work, so that your eager willingness to do it may be matched by your completion of it, according to your means. 12For if the willingness is there, the gift is acceptable according to what one has, not according to what he does not have. 13Our desire is not that others might be relieved while you are hard pressed, but that there might be equality. 14At the present time your plenty will supply what they need, so that in turn their plenty will supply what you need. Then there will be equality, 15as it is written: "He who gathered much did not have too much, and he who gathered little did not have too little." [2]


Mark 5:21-43


21When Jesus had again crossed over by boat to the other side of the lake, a large crowd gathered around him while he was by the lake. 22Then one of the synagogue rulers, named Jairus, came there. Seeing Jesus, he fell at his feet 23and pleaded earnestly with him, "My little daughter is dying. Please come and put your hands on her so that she will be healed and live." 24So Jesus went with him. A large crowd followed and pressed around him. 25And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years. 26She had suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors and had spent all she had, yet instead of getting better she grew worse. 27When she heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, 28because she thought, "If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed." 29Immediately her bleeding stopped and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering. 30At once Jesus realized that power had gone out from him. He turned around in the crowd and asked, "Who touched my clothes?" 31"You see the people crowding against you," his disciples answered, "and yet you can ask, `Who touched me?'" 32But Jesus kept looking around to see who had done it. 33Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell at his feet and, trembling with fear, told him the whole truth. 34He said to her, "Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering." 35While Jesus was still speaking, some men came from the house of Jairus, the synagogue ruler. "Your daughter is dead," they said. "Why bother the teacher any more?" 36Ignoring what they said, Jesus told the synagogue ruler, "Don't be afraid; just believe." 37He did not let anyone follow him except Peter, James and John the brother of James. 38When they came to the home of the synagogue ruler, Jesus saw a commotion, with people crying and wailing loudly. 39He went in and said to them, "Why all this commotion and wailing? The child is not dead but asleep." 40But they laughed at him. After he put them all out, he took the child's father and mother and the disciples who were with him, and went in where the child was. 41He took her by the hand and said to her, <"Talitha koum!"> (which means, "Little girl, I say to you, get up!"). 42Immediately the girl stood up and walked around (she was twelve years old). At this they were completely astonished. 43He gave strict orders not to let anyone know about this, and told them to give her something to eat.


As some of you may know, I have a business which provides health information to ordinary people. As this business has grown and developed, I have gradually come to realize that my principal purpose is to empower patients. When I spoke recently at a conference in Mpls, the organizer of the conference titled my presentation: "How to use your personal computer to second guess your health plan and your doctor." Now this is not how I wanted to title my presentation. I didn't really want to raise any more antagonism from the providers of health care and insurance than necessary. They are my principal customers. But as I thought about what I have to say, this really does describe what I do. People use the information I provide to, among other things, check up on the care they are receiving.


They do this because they are increasingly sceptical of the traditional healers in our midst. Doctors and hospitals are increasingly suspected of having clay feet. Now I am not really a doctor basher. I trust the medical community to do a pretty good job when I need professional attention for my health concerns. But it is not hard to understand how people are becoming suspicious. For instance, I read this week an article in Men's Health magazine by a doctor who was placed in the hospital for cardiac problems. Doctors are always amazed at what it's like to be a patient. He ended up having emergency bypass surgery because the doctors ruptured an artery during an angiogram. Things got even worse with a heart attack while waiting for surgery and eventually a life-threatening staff infection. The article goes on to warn people of the dangers of hospitalization and provides some suggestions for minimizing the risks. Here's how the author, a board certified practicing internist, puts it: "The reality is that complications like the ones I had occur daily in hospitals - good institutions as well as bad - throughout the country. According to a study by the Harvard School of Public Health, hospital-related errors in treatment kill an estimated 180,000 American each year. Adverse drug events (bad reactions to drugs or errors in prescribing them) alone occur in 6.5 percent of hospitalized patients and may account for up to 140,000 death per year... What's more, 5 to 10 percent of hospitalized patients will develop an infection - sometimes a lethal infection - that they didn't have when they entered the Hospital."


So we need not feel smug nor smirk when our Gospel reading notes that the poor woman had spent all she had on twelve years of treatment by many doctors to no avail. We need not suppose that such problems don't occur for us with all our modern medicine. She may, in fact, have been lucky. At least the health care of her time didn't make things worse, which I might add, was much more likely than it is today..


At any rate this poor woman is in search of a cure. And she seemed to know that she needed the touch of Jesus to be healed. She was willing to risk a great deal to touch or be touched by Jesus. In fact, she broke lots of important laws to get to Jesus. And these laws were not mere misdemenors. They were serious violations of the religious and secular laws of the time. First of all, since she was a woman with a menstrual hemorrhage, she was ritually unclean and should not be out in public at all, much less alone. No unescorted woman could possibly be respectable. She certainly should not touch anyone else as she must have in the crowd around Jesus, but heaven forbid that she should touch deliberately a man who is not her husband and in public at that. The fact that she touched the religious hem of his cloak was truly beyond the pale. And finally she snitched a healing from a man without his knowledge and permission. In her quest to touch, and be touched by, Jesus, this woman was a scofflaw of major proportions


At annual conference this year we got into a major brouhaha over the issue of amnesty for legal and illegal immigrants. Our bishop, you may remember, wrote a letter to the churches of Iowa encouraging them to provide amnesty for immigrants who need help and protection because of their citizenship status. Many people at Annual Conference insisted that this not be interpreted as a call to disobey the law. Churches should not be encouraging lawlessness, they insisted. As I listened, it occurred to me that had Jesus obeyed the law, we wouldn't be here today. Of course, Jesus, and the woman in our gospel reading, were merely obeying a higher law - the law of God. But if this meant they had to disobey the laws of the government or the laws of the church, then so be it. The irony of arguing as a Christian that we should not break the law was lost on most in the audience, but I found it stunning. Jesus calls us to follow a higher law, and to break the lower law if necessary to meet the needs of our neighbor or to remain faithful to our God. Most of the world's great religious leaders, Mahatma Ghandi for instance, and the true saints of the Christian faith like Martin Luther King have been more than willing to disobey the established law and customs in order to obey the will of God. Their time in jail was always a living testimony to their faithfulness. There are, of course, limits th this. Timothy McVeigh thought he was obeying a higher law, too. The difference between McVeigh and MLK is one of the great danger zones of our faith. In fact there were those, J. Edgar Hoover for instance, who thought MLK more like McVeigh than like Jesus.


Of course, the woman in our Gospel reading had no assurance that she was within the law of God when she violated all the laws of the church. She just took the risk. She thought she might get a cure, she didn't realize that she would get a relationship. She thought she would merely touch Jesus. She didn't realize that she would be changed. She hoped Jesus might not even notice her. She didn't realize that Jesus would claim her as his daughter. No where else in the Bible does Jesus call anyone "daughter" other than this unclean, illegal, outcast felon. The woman who has no name hoped to remain anonymous. Instead, of course, she gets called into a public, and intimate relationship with Jesus.


It makes you wonder at her audacity and stupidity to think that she could sneak up and be cured without Jesus knowing it and without what she no doubt believed would be appropriate anger at having his own purity and virtue compromised in public. She certainly wouldn't have wanted to be called on the carpet for her actions. She was completely helpless and defenseless. Imagine her horror when Jesus called her out of the crowd. She must have melted with humiliation as she blurted out the whole sordid story. "But the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came in fear and trembling (I guess!), fell down before him, and told him the whole truth." She no doubt knew what she deserved. Why did Jesus expose her if not to punish her according to what she deserved? Wouldn't it have been safer for himself and kinder to the woman for Jesus to have simply let her slip silently away? Why did he expose her to the attention of the crowd and make her tell her story? To the surprise of everyone, of course, Jesus turns this incident on its ear. My mother used to say that the Lord looks after the foolish and the dumb. Well, it's a good thing - as we can all testify!


Jesus accomplishes three things by not letting the women sneak annonymously away. First of all, if he had let her steal away, she would have carried wrong conceptions the rest of her life. She would have thought she had been healed by magic. Her faith was the strange and conquering factor, and Jesus made her aware of it. Now she wouldn't talk to her friends about the mesmerism from simply touching the Master's cloak; she would enjoy reciting a greater wonder - an encounter with someone whom one could claim as Lord. Her boast would not be, "I've found a mysterious cure," but rather she would testify, "I've found a Friend! I've found my family! I've found my home." If she had slinked away furtively into the crowd, she would never have had the relationship with Jesus which not only cured her disease, but more importantly annuled all her violations of the purity laws.


Secondly, if Jesus had allowed her to steal away, she would never have been sure of Jesus. She might have pondered over the possibility that what she had done may have been wrong. Note how when Jesus accosted her, she came in "fear and trembling." Afraid of the crowd? Not at all. She felt that maybe she had taken a cure deceptively and likely she would merit the Master's rebuke. But Jesus was not content with her being only healed. She must hear him say, "Daughter." The gospels, as I've said, record no other occasion of Jesus using this term. As those of us with daughters know, the father daughter relationship is something special. If Jesus had not called her back, she would never have known the specialness of such a relationship with him.


Third, if Jesus had let her steal away, she might not have become a vehicle for further witness. In the New Testament, healing was not merely for the purpose of making people happy by making them well; it had a further stage or step - they were saved in order to save others. The lepers, the sightless, the swindlers, the social outcasts, the moral derelicts - all of them were saved, not for their own sakes, although that was involved, but that they in their rejoicing might point others to Christ. If Jesus had not called attention to this woman and singled her out for a special relationship with him, she would not have become a public testimony to the power of faith. Imagine the power of her witness, for which Jesus freed her by making her outrageous behavior known to all.


We find our greatest healing power in our relationship with others. It is a lesson not unknown even to modern medicine. There was an article in the paper the other day about the fact that people who have more friends are less likely to get colds. I'd never seen a direct comparison to a specific disease before, but I have seen studies which indicate that a person's overall health status is related most directly to the social support system they have. That is to say, our relationships with others keep us both physically and spiritually well.


Todays epistle lesson illustrates a similar point. Paul asks the Corinthians to give to people whom they do not know. There was a famine in Jerusalem. Rivers had dried up. Crops had failed. People were starving. Paul said, "Listen,