Touching Jesus with Faith, Thirteenth Sunday (B), June 27, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Shrine of Our Lady of Mercy, Auriesville, NY
Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
June 27, 2021
Wis 1:13-15.2:23-24, Ps 30, 2 Cor 8:7.9.13-15, Mk 5:21-43

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following text guided today’s homily: 

• The dramatic healing of the woman with the hemorrhage in today’s Gospel is one of the literally most touching of all Jesus’ miracles. Jesus was on his way with Jairus, the synagogue leader, to care for his daughter who at the time was on the point of death. St. Mark tells us that a large crowd was following Jesus and pressing in on him. As happens in almost any big crowd, people were no doubt bumping into him left and right. Yet in the midst of all of that commotion on the move, Jesus is touched in a different way by this anonymous woman — and Jesus immediately knew he was touched differently. The woman believed that if she could just touch the tassel of his garments, she would be cured. And she was not to be disappointed.
• Jesus, upon feeling his healing power go out in response to her faith, stopped and asked, somewhat remarkably, “Who touched my clothes?” It would be like if an ambulance driver speeding to attend to a 911 call all of a sudden heard a faint, friendly tap of the horn and then slammed on the brakes trying to find out who was trying to say hello. Jesus stopped, and doubtless to the confusion and concern of Jairus, began to ask who had come into contact with the hem of his tunic. It shows how big the crowd must have been banging into him that he didn’t even see the woman approach him to touch the edge of his garments. “Who touched my clothes?,” he kept asking. Jesus was never interested in merely working miracles of bodily healing. Those were always a prelude to the greater miracle of healing souls, and that healing happened and happens through a personal relationship with him. That’s why he never worked “mass miracles of healing,” but always cured people one-by-one, because he wanted to have that personal bond. So Jesus wanted to meet and enter into a relationship with the person he had just physically cured.
• After Jesus’ question, the woman approached with fear and trembling, fell down before him and told him everything, including how she had sought to pick-pocket a healing miracle from him without his knowledge. She was afraid not just because the stop she had caused Jesus to make was going to prove fatal for the daughter of the understandably impatient, powerful synagogue leader, but because by her touching Jesus with her effusion of blood, she was making him ritually impure according to the Jewish law and incapable without ablutions of entering the synagogue. That ritual impurity meant that she had been suffering not only physically for twelve years, but also socially and religiously: because of her bleeding, she couldn’t touch anyone and was basically cut off from human contact; she was even, in a sense, cut off from God by not being able to enter the synagogue. She probably thought that Jesus and everyone else with whom she would have come into contact trying to get to Jesus would have been furious with her. But Jesus would address all those problems. He spoke to her tenderly, called her “Daughter,” and said, “Your faith has made you well. Go in peace and be healed of your disease.” He made the miracle public so that she could be restored totally to the community, to the worship of God, and to a relationship with God-in-the-flesh.
• The miracle of the healing of Jairus’ daughter likewise began with a touch. Jairus, the leader of the Capernaum synagogue where Jesus was already becoming controversial, didn’t care if the rabbis and the members of the community would criticize him for reaching out to someone who was already highly suspect in their eyes and was no longer welcome in their synagogue. He loved his daughter too much to care about his career. With fatherly abandon, he ran up to Jesus, threw himself at his feet, and, as St. Mark says, begged Jesus repeatedly to come and lay his hands on his daughter that she might get well and live. Jairus knew that there was a power to Jesus’ hands, to his healing touch, and he wanted his daughter to feel it. And at the end of the scene, after she had died and everyone was mourning her death the way anyone would weep uncontrollably at the death of a child, Jairus would see that Jesus’ healing touch was even more powerful than he had imagined, even more miraculous than he had just witnessed with the hemorrhaging woman. “Do not fear,” Jesus told Jairus, “only believe,” and Jairus did both. When Jesus arrived at the house after the little girl had died, he took her by the hand, touched her, and said, “Little girl, Arise!” In Greek, the verb is the same word used to describe Jesus’ resurrection. Like in Michelangelo’s famous scene of the creation of Adam on the vault of the Sistine Chapel when God stretches out his hand and instills life into Adam, so Jesus’ touch brings life back into this little girl. “I am the resurrection and the life,” Jesus said elsewhere, and his touch contains within it that resurrection, that life, that total restorative power. The miracle of raising this little girl from death to life was meant to show what Jesus wants to do for all of us, in this world and forever. As the Book of Wisdom tells us in the first reading, “God did not make death, nor does he rejoice in the destruction of the living. … For God formed man to be imperishable; the image of his own nature he made him. But by the envy of the devil, death entered the world, and they who belong to [the devil’s] company experience it.” Jesus came to give us a triumph over the devil. As we prayed in the Psalm, he came to rescue us so that our infernal enemies wouldn’t rejoice over us and so that he could change our mourning into dancing. As we pondered in the epistle, even though he was rich, became poor, spending himself for us totally down to the last drop of his own effusion of blood, so that by his poverty we might become rich. Jesus came to bring to fulfillment in your life and mine what the miracles in the Gospel point to.
• The question for you and me is whether in our lives we humbly reach out to touch Jesus with the faith of Jairus and the woman with the 12 year hemorrhage — or do we just “bump into him,” like all those following in the crowd, who, even though they were coming into physical contact with him, were receiving none of his healing and transformative power. Today many in our society, including many Catholics, have lost touch with Jesus, his healing power in the sacraments and his saving teaching. Earlier this week, Archbishop Charles Chaput, emeritus of Philadelphia, said that many come to Mass almost as non-Catholics, without faith — without faith in the teaching of the real presence, without believing in Church teaching in controversial issues, without a commitment to live as Catholics, in the world but not of it. And so we all can ask: When we come to Mass and approach to receive him in Holy Communion do we do so with faith, knowing that we’re touching far more than the hem of his garment, but receiving his whole body, blood, soul and divinity within? Do we receive him with awe and reverence, clean hands and souls, or routinely or even in a state of sin? Do we approach Jesus knowing he likewise wants to reach out and touch us: that just like he did with Jairus’ little girl, so he wants to lay his hands on us, as he does on the day we’re baptized, as he does in silence in the Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick, as he does through the raised hands of the priest giving God’s forgiveness in the Sacrament of Penance, whereby he who is the resurrection and the life wants us to share in his triumph over sin and death. Do we allow him to transform us in such a way by our contact with him in prayer and in the Sacraments that we can in turn become the hands of his mystical body, burning with his desire to reach out and heal a wounded world in which so many are bleeding, in which so many, including kids, are dying physically and spiritually because they’re not in a life-changing relationship of faith with Him who is the Resurrection, the Way, the Truth and the Life?
• The North American Martyrs and St. Kateri Tekakwitha were all touched very deeply by the Lord and transformed and in turn not only continuously reached out to Him in faith but sought to help so many others come to know him and be raised up by him. It’s because of the power of their encounter with Jesus that Saints Isaac Jogues, Rene Goupil and Jean Lalande were willing to die for him who first died for them; they had faith that he could raise them just like he did Jairus’ daughter. St. Kateri was willing to take great risks to reach out for Jesus despite opposition from her clan, and when she touched him, she was similarly saved by faith. They are great intercessors for us of what God wishes to do in us like he did in them.
• Every Mass is meant to be a sacred encounter with God in which he touches us at the greatest depth of our body and soul and seeks to bring us into greater communion with him. But for this dramatic transformation to occur, we need to believe in him, in his teaching, in his love, in his power. He tells us, as he told Jairus, “Do not fear, just believe.” We prepare to do so as we proclaim with fervor our Profession of Faith, as we get ready to fall on our knees before him as he enters not Jairus’ house, but enters under the roof of each of us and makes us a true temple, as we prepare to take his message and touch out to others. Today we beg him for the grace to “arise!,” to be raised up to the fullness of life with him, and with us the whole Church, so that filled with a contagious amazement like all those in Jairus’ house after the miracle, others, in seeing our awe, might hunger to follow us here to where Jesus wants to touch and change them, too.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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