June 28, 2009
The 13th Sunday in Ordinary Time

THE HUMAN TOUCH
Mark 5:21-43

What must that woman have felt? All she was looking for was a cure. For years, she had been shunned by her society, unable to have normal relationships with other people, religiously unclean and unable to participate in worship. Her desperate, even superstitious faith was that just touching the hem of Jesus' garment would heal her. AND IT DID! But the power of her touch was so fraught with need, Mark tells us, that Jesus knew she had touched him. He called her to him and, lifting her up from the ground, affirmed to her that even her superstitious faith had made her whole, brought her shalom.

And what of the twelve-year old girl? She was the daughter of a powerful religious leader, one of the “clean,” so unlike the woman with the hemorrhage. The girl had been on the verge of young womanhood, but now she was on the brink of death. In fact, the report came to Jesus and to Jairus, her father, after the woman’s interruption and before they arrived at the house that the girl had already died. But Jesus reached out his big, rough, carpenter's hands to her, touched her, and she got up out of her death-bed.

These acts are characteristic of Jesus. What he did was a natural response to the compassion that welled up in his heart whenever he was confronted with misery or loneliness. He entered readily and quickly into people's joys and sorrows, never standing aloof or keeping others at arm's length, never worrying about someone’s social status. He had a warm, outgoing nature. What he felt was communicated by his whole being, by the words of his lips, the look in his eyes, the touch of his hands.

Touch is the sense that true love most employs. It can communicate feelings and convey affection in a way words alone cannot. A woman in a moment of self-revelation tells a close friend about the situation she is battling, and while she is speaking, her friend lays her hand on the woman's arm, and by that simple gesture conveys affection, sympathy, and understanding. What endears the father of the prodigal son to us is that while that ne'er-do-well son was still a long way off, the old man saw him, and his heart went out to him, and he ran to meet him, flung his arms around him, and kissed him.

One of the problems of our day is the problem of communication. We have conquered distance and spanned whole continents, but in personal relationships we are sadly out of touch. We have probed the edges of the known universe and the thresholds of sub-atomic mystery with our technology, but we are estranged and alienated from each other. "We are like islands," wrote Rudyard Kipling, "and we shout to one another across seas of misunderstanding."

Especially in our urban American culture where the pace is fast and feverish, the pressure and competition unrelenting, we are liable to lose the human touch. Surrounded by things, we become less and less aware of people. Though we may not intend it, we develop an impersonal attitude, an air of detachment, and assume that the communication of our own wants and needs is enough, without consideration for the wants and needs of others. Shifting for ourselves, busy with our own problems, impatient with interruptions, we may not even notice human need and pain. Though it is staring us in the face, we may not take it in with our eyes. Opportunities for showing courtesies, performing acts of kindness, offering a reconciling word, may get away from us.

Family life, too, sometimes has an impersonal character. In many homes, husbands and wives, parents and children, are out of touch with each other. There is proximity, but no community.

A minister writes how she sits in her study day after day and hears people say, "But Pastor, I just can't reach him." Or, "I can't get through to her." Or, "I talk my head off, and that child just doesn't listen!"

She writes, "Very often, my questions must puzzle those troubled souls. 'Tell me,' I ask, 'how long has it been since you have taken a walk with your arm around your wife?' 'Do you ever get down on the living room floor and roughhouse with your children?' 'Has your family ever tried holding hands around the table when they say grace?' Such questions may sound superficial, but they aren't. They are designed to crack the shell of isolation surrounding a troubled person or a troubled family by using one of the greatest of all channels of communication: the mysterious and universal, but sadly neglected language of touch."

How can we develop the human touch? Well, it takes self-knowledge. Only insofar as we understand ourselves can we make headway in understanding others. And it takes imagination, the ability to put ourselves in the place of other people, to sit where they sit, see with their eyes, feel with their nerves. It also takes compassion, a nature that is warm, affectionate, and outgoing, such as we see in Jesus.

This is important food for thought for busy people near the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century: to professionals pressured by specialization and overwork, to parents harried by the demands of child-rearing, to teachers distracted by students with problems, to preachers interrupted in the middle of sermon preparation. The late Henri Nouwen once remarked, “You know, . . . my whole life I have been complaining that my work was constantly interrupted, until I discovered that my interruptions were my work.”

The fellowship of St. Philip Presbyterian Church has been blessed with much of this compassionate, welcoming spirit. The thing we officers hear most often when new people join our church is that they have found it to be warm, friendly, caring, and close -- a church family. That doesn't mean that we never hurt each other's feelings, or make each other angry. We're like a family in that way, too. But because the love and forgiveness of God in Jesus Christ is active in our life together, we can strive to treat those times in the light of that love and forgiveness.

In the age in which we live, with distances annihilated and continents bridged, the world never seemed so full of strangers, nor the strangers so full of antagonisms. These are days when Christians especially have to prove that belief in God is more than a sentiment -- that it inspires concern for people and expresses itself in respecting and serving the needs of people. Jesus taught us that our relationships with each other are inextricably intertwined with our relationship with God, so we cannot have mercy from God and refuse mercy to others. If we turn our back on them, we turn our back on God.

In his picture of the final judgment, when the truth of things is laid bare, Jesus says that it all turns on one thing -- the human touch, exercised with understanding, imagination, and compassion; and the most insidious and most dangerous sin is to be in a world of need and not to see it.