The Company He Kept: The Physically Afflicted

Hilton Head Island, SC – February  21, 2021
The Chapel Without Walls
John 9:1-12; Luke 8: 42b-48
A Sermon by John M. Miller

Text – But Jesus said, “Someone touched me, for I perceived that power has gone forth from me.” – Luke 8:46 (RSV)

 

This is the first Sunday in Lent. Lent is that ecclesiastical season of the year that leads up to Palm Sunday, Good Friday, and Easter. It is the time of year when, annually, we review again the circumstances under which Jesus ended up executed on a Roman cross.

 

This Lent the Lenten sermon series is entitled The Company He Kept. Each sermon shall seek to address an unusual group of people with whom Jesus deliberately chose to associate in his brief three-year ministry. Most of these groups caused religious and political problems for him. The theological enemies of Jesus were strongly opposed to the attention he paid to these people. The scribes, Pharisees, Sadducees, and priests all thought that Jesus should have avoided these people rather than to spend a single minute in communication with them. Nonetheless, Jesus ignored their warnings, and he openly cultivated contacts with these types of people.

 

The only group of Judeans who did not cause any concern among Jesus’ enemies were the people we will consider in today’s sermon. They are those who had physical infirmities. The theological purity police had no quarrel with Jesus healing any of these people. Their only beef is that fairly frequently he healed some of them on the Sabbath. Somehow Jewish religious zealots got the notion in their heads that no one should be healed on a Sabbath day because they concluded that healing involved work, and the religious law declared that no work was to be done on Shabbat. Perhaps just to thumb his nose at them, Jesus performed many healings in the Gospels on the Sabbath. But to reiterate, the theological issue was not that Jesus healed anyone of a physical disability or malady, but rather that he did so on the Sabbath. Jesus’ adversaries were put off by his associations with tax collectors, prostitutes, political radicals, adulterers, and ordinary sinners in his “madding crowd” on Palm Sunday, and on succeeding Sundays we shall hear about them.

 

We must now address the question of whether anyone is able to heal anyone of an illness or medical abnormality just by touching them. For most modern people, this is a philosophical non-starter. Most of us either doubt or deny outright that such a thing could occur. In that I think we are far too intellectually inflexible.

 

Through the years I have read about many accounts of “miraculous healings.” Many of them are commentaries on healings recorded in the Bible, but many others are episodes from contemporary healers or healers from past decades or centuries. There are a sufficient number of these claims that I am convinced many of them actually happened.

 

Usually, but not always, the key to anyone being healed of a physical disability or deformity is that the person who is healed has a profound trust that the healer can perform “the miracle.” Those who think they can’t be healed probably won’t be healed. In other words, the person’s own positive convictions regarding healing are pivotal for being healed.

 

But it is not only for purposes of being healed that people reach out to touch or to be touched by a charismatic figure. Teenage girls love to reach out to rock stars. Crowds put out their hand to sports figures or politicians “to be given five.” It is a common human interaction.

 

In his long biography of Huey Long, historian T. Harry Williams talks about how people “would touch (Huey’s) sleeve, lightly, almost religiously.” An associate of the colorful and power-hungry Louisiana politician said of Huey, “It was weird to watch the people. They would reach out to touch him as he passed” (Huey Long, p. 418). The human touch often has a far greater effect than we might realize, if the toucher and the touched are in close spiritual synch.

 

Our first scripture passage was John 9:1-12. This is a narrative found only in John (which is true of nearly every other event described in John). It begins by stating that Jesus and his disciples walked by a man sitting at the roadside who was born blind. The disciples asked Jesus, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” (John 9:2)  That is a typical first-century question, and it is a thought so terrible that it never should occur to anyone, whether two thousand years ago or today. What kind of insensitive theological drivel is that? Without question the man born blind did not sin, and therefore he was blind at birth, because it was impossible for him to commit any sins in the womb! What kind of cockamamie thinking would even ask such a question? And if the man was born blind, what kind of God would cause their child to be born blind because of sins the parents had committed?

 

The Jews were and are one of the most gifted peoples ever to have lived, but sometimes in the biblical period some of them were complete schlemiels: intellectual simpletons. In my cherished Joys of Yiddish dictionary, Leo Rosten gives several definitions of the very versatile Yiddish word schlemiel. For our purposes the first definition is the best one: simpleton. We might be simpletons, but we don’t expect Jews to be like that. Nevertheless, the disciples far too frequently fell into that category.

 

However, Jesus did not condemn them for their obtuseness. Instead, he said, “It was not that this man sinned or his parents, but that the works of God might be made manifest in him” (9:3). Then Jesus used the occasion to grant sight to the man in a most unusual way, about which I will not take time to comment. You can read about it and think it out for yourself.

 

One of the many fascinating details in this story is that the blind man did not ask Jesus to give him his sight. After all, he couldn’t see Jesus walking along, and he probably wouldn’t have known who Jesus was even if he were able to see him. The man did not ask to have his eyes touched; it was Jesus who chose to touch his eyes in the peculiar way the story describes.

 

Contrast that to an earlier healing narrative in John’s Gospel, in the fifth chapter. Jesus was at the Pool of Bethesda in Jerusalem. The waters in the pool had healing properties. There was a crippled man who had been waiting there for thirty years for someone to carry him down the stairs to be placed into the spa, and no one did. If I were he, I would have given up in no more than thirty hours if nobody helped me. “I’ll give the passing public a day and a half, and if nothing happens, I’m outta here,” I would have told myself. However, I am I, and he was he. Jesus asked the man if he wanted to be healed, and he told Jesus his tale of woe. So Jesus simply said to him, “Rise, take up your pallet and walk” (5:8), and the man did. But this happened on a Sabbath, so once again Jesus was in hot water.

 

What we learn from these two miracle stories is that Jesus did not have to touch someone for healing to occur. He could speak the word, and healing would follow. I believe that could and did and does happen. If people have sufficient faith that Jesus or God can heal them, it can happen. “Art thou weak and heavy laden/ Cumbered with a load of care/ Precious Savior, still our refuge/ Take it to the Lord in prayer.”

 

And that brings us to our second healing scripture passage. Curiously, this is a healing within a healing, like a play within a play. There was a man named Jairus, whose young daughter was dying. He asked Jesus to come to his home to heal her. A crowd followed them as they hurried along. The narrative then says there was a woman in the crowd who had had “a flow of blood” for twelve years. The commentaries all agree this means she had a gynecological anomaly that caused blood slowly to flow constantly. I’m sure more than half of you in this congregation would agree that could be a fate worse than death. The monthly female curse is well described by that odious term, but imagine what it would be like if it never stopped. A footnote for this passage says that some ancient authorities say she “had spent all of her living upon physicians.” Not surprising. What woman wouldn’t? And the worst of it is that this poor soul would permanently have to seclude herself, because she would be considered “unclean” under the religious law.

 

Was it anxiety which propelled that unfortunate lady to come out of her religiously enforced incarceration into Jesus’ presence? Was it pain or shame or anemia? Whatever it was, she followed Jesus in the crowd, but she didn’t want him to know she was following him. That would be too humiliating for her.

 

The biblical law is very explicit about what needed to be done about the unique necessity of nature which manifests itself  in its monthly female cycle for half a lifetime, more or less. But for her it was permanent, and not cyclical. When that time of the month rolled around, a woman was to remain secluded until the discharge ended. Then she was to take a carefully prescribed ritual bath so that she was no longer “unclean,” to use the awful and sexist biblical expression. Thus this lady was always unclean. And thus she was too ashamed to try to get Jesus’ attention to tell him her horrible circumstances.

 

In Matthew’s account of this story, the woman said to herself, “If I only touch his garment, I shall be made well” (Mt. 9:21). In Luke’s Gospel, but not in Matthew’s, Jesus said, “Who was it who touched me?” (Lk. 8:45). Then it says, “When all denied it, Peter said, ‘Master, the multitude surround you and press upon you!’” But Jesus said, “Someone touched me, for I perceive that power has gone forth from me” (Mt. 8:46). When Jesus saw her, he knew it was she, and she knew he knew. Then it says, “Trembling, and falling down before him (she) declared in the presence of all the people why she had touched him, and how she had been immediately healed” (8:47). Now, instantly realizing what had been this poor woman’s dreaded burden for all those years, Jesus looked at her with infinite love and compassion, and said, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace” (8:48).

 

He had it, Christian people; Jesus had it! He had The Touch! There was power in The Touch! There is power in the touch! Here (the eyes), and here (the mouth), and here (the ears), and here (the head, where the mental “demons” take up residence), or here or here or here (in the joints or bones), or here (in a heart that stops beating), as it did for Jairus’s daughter. And his touch works in both directions. Whether he touches us or we touch him, we are touched! To be touched by Jesus of Nazareth is to be forever changed.

 

Remember Barbra Streisand’s magnificent  song? “He touched me, he put his hand near mine/ And then he touched me/ I felt a tingle when he touched me/ A sparkle, a glow.” And then, at the end, “’Cause he touched me, he touched me… And suddenly…nothing, nothing, nothing is the same.” Barbra is speaking of a romantic touch, but the man born blind and the man by the Pool of Bethesda and Jairus and his daughter and the woman with the constant flow of blood are speaking about a different and infinitely more life-transforming touch. There is power in the touch.

 

Why? Why are there so many stories about physical healings in the Gospels? Why did Jesus expend so much of his singular power on these folks? It is because so many of them knew who he was and what it was reported he could do, and so they came, and so he healed them. “Do No Harm” says the Hippocratic Oath. “Do whatever good you can do, and for whomever you can do it,” said Jesus of Nazareth. And he did.

 

Jesus healed people because he could. If he could, he did. It is as simple as that. His enemies had no problems with that - - - so long as he didn’t do it on Shabbat. Never on Shabbat! Without question, most of Jesus’ miracles are miracles of physical healing.

 

I want to say something about our final hymn. I keep an account of all the hymns we have ever sung. We have sung Immortal love, forever full, forever flowing free only once. It was my father’s favorite hymn. He never really said why, but whenever we sang it in church, which was not often, he always told us on the way home it was his favorite. I have never forgotten that. My love of obscure hymns may be a genetic defect; what can I say? Anyway, I chose it because there is a reference to our second Gospel reading in the fifth verse. It’s because of my dad that I remember such an obscure thing.

 

Next week we turn to a more dicey example of the company Jesus kept: tax collectors. Then we will turn to prostitutes, then political radicals, then adulterers. Finally, on Palm Sunday, we will address the whole madding crowd who followed Jesus into Jerusalem, whom the scribes and Pharisees saw as a motley mob of sinners. That was because it was Jesus they followed, and they considered Jesus to be the prince of sinners. And for that he would pay the ultimate price.