Canter Bridge

Even among a people less awkward about the unseen than we, the sick woman of Luke must have been shattered by the sudden strangeness of events. Grasping at Jesus as he passed by, she made meaningful contact and felt her long-standing illness reshaped into wholeness as she did so.

She came up behind him and touched the fringe of his clothes, and immediately her hemorrhage stopped. Then Jesus asked, ‘Who touched me?’ When all denied it, Peter said, ‘Master, the crowds surround you and press in on you.’ But Jesus said, ‘Someone touched me; for I noticed that power had gone out from me.’

For a disquieting moment, the narrative lurches in the direction of magic. Impersonal force seems to surge from Jesus into a person who makes the right mechanical move: ‘If only I could touch him …‘

Jesus himself is taken aback by the thing and wants to know—against the long odds that a shoving crowd presents—who it was that touched him in just this way. Against the gritty realism of his minders, he insists on finding out just who.

The personal shape of his interrogative pronoun (Who?, not What?) as much as the personalistic rather than mechanical explanation that Jesus eventually gives for this journey-halting episode nudge the story away from the magical cliff:

He said to her, ‘Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace.’

Irrepressible mercy seems manifest in the goings about of this Jesus. The release from healing, from domination, from despair that goes with him is palpable and not entirely occasioned by human volition. Remarkably, articulate awareness seems from time to time absent from the benefactor (Jesus is clearly surprised by the outflow of healing power) as from those whose lives are reconstructed by the mercy of it (one thinks of the wordlessness and perhaps passivity of the paralytic whose four friends lower him through a roof to get close to Jesus’ touch).

Divine generosity seems in this light to have grown quite large. Against this new backdrop, the exaggerated hopes of the biblical prophets seem suddenly more realistic in scope and scale. Before this recalibration of what is real and what is not, jaws drop and minders squirm. A woman leaves the scene whole, rejoicing.