Reaching for God's Cloak: The Reverse Polarity of Grace
A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Fifth Sunday After Pentecost by Holly Huff, Postulant for Holy Orders.
Today in the Gospel of Mark we meet Jesus at the shore, on his way to Jairus’s house. As Jesus gets out of the boat, Jairus, a leader of the synagogue, falls at Jesus’s feet and begs him to come heal his little daughter who is sick and “at the point of death. Come and lay your hands on her, so that she may be made well, and live,” he says. And so Jesus, the truly human human being, living in divine presence moment by moment, responds to what this moment demands of him. He hears what this fearful, faithful father asks and goes with him. The action is called out of him by full and loving attention to the present moment. Jesus sees Jairus as he is and loves him as he is and responds—How could he do otherwise?— “So he went with him.”
Meanwhile on that crowded shore there is another who has come looking for healing. “There was a woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years. She had endured much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had; and she was no better, but rather grew worse. She had heard about Jesus, and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, for she said, “If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well.” And so she stretches out her hand.
This moment when she reaches out to touch his cloak is searing. What is she thinking? Does she dare to hope? Do we? There have been so many before who could not help her. Her fingers brush the fabric, perhaps still damp from the boat, and it is as if time stops at this electric contact. The blessed chaos of the crowded beach, the smell of salt and fish in the air, settle into stillness for a second and then resume as an ordinary moment reveals itself to be an extraordinary sacramental window onto immediate divine love. In that moment it is done: she feels it and Jesus feels it. “Immediately she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease.” And “immediately he was aware that power had gone forth from him.”
Interesting that Jesus becomes “aware that power had gone forth from him”: this power flows through Jesus, apparently not sent forth by conscious effort but naturally exuding from him as he lives from an unceasing relentless connection to the well of life. “I am in my Father and my Father is in me”: This is God in human form. Jesus keeps the channel open as a willing conduit for love. His surrendered way of being allows this power to flow through him, even before he thinks to send it. And he promises that we too can come to live from this connection, and it will become a fountain springing up to eternal life.
So immediately the woman’s hemorrhage stops and she feels in her body that she is healed. And in the same moment Jesus is aware that power has gone forth from him. He turns. I see this almost in slow motion. She has come up in the crowd from behind and touched his cloak. And following this electric moment he turns, looking into the crowd. Picture a crowd, if you can, that pre-pandemic phenomenon, perhaps leaving a concert hall or exiting a soccer game at the end of the night, the human press of bodies in proximity, all elbows and the scent of sweat and the brush of coats. Jesus turns to look around the crowd. “Who touched my clothes?” he asks. The disciples laugh, of course, “You see all these people, right?” But their dismissal does not impinge on his presence. He continues to respond to the things that are most real. I imagine Jesus looking into the faces of this mass of humanity, seeing each person in their own radiance. You and you and you and you.
How does the woman feel, hearing Jesus ask, “Who touched my clothes?” She had reached out her hand in faith and trust, and perhaps also some fear. Why did she come up from behind? She didn’t try to draw Jesus’s gaze, just reached for the hem of his cloak as he walks past. Perhaps she doesn’t want to draw that kind of piercing attention. Perhaps the shame of her illness and poverty has made her guarded. She fears that to be known is to be rejected.
I’m reminded of the Israelites who sent Moses up the holy mountain for them because they were afraid to encounter the living God directly. I recognize this shrinking away in myself, too. Sometimes we prefer this sideways approach, lurking behind, brushing past, gently coming into contact but disappearing back into the crowd as soon as we can, hoping that God won’t really notice us. It’s fine if this is where we are. This woman’s faith is breathtaking, exactly as it is. Taking the initiative as we can, reaching out to God, putting ourselves into the place to receive what contact we think we can bear: this is good. But what we find is what she found, that Jesus turns toward us. Jesus has always been turning toward us, with profound loving attention. The encounter she thought was tangential and fleeting expands. The moment graciously unfolds. What was a crowd scene has become almost unbearably intimate. When we seek after God, we find that it is God who is seeking us, actually. The causality is different than we suppose.
God loves us first, always. This is the surprising, reverse polarity of grace. From the human point of view we live from our own effort, fail and succeed by our own initiative. If we don’t do it, it will never get done. Everything depends on us, it seems. But the slow motion of Jesus looking for and turning toward the woman among the crowd is more than a chronological happening in the story: it uncovers a fundamental truth. Before we even think to reach for his cloak, Jesus has always been turned toward us, arms stretched out, beholding us, loving us.
And so he turns and calls for her and she steps forward. “Knowing what had happened to her, she came in fear and trembling, fell down before him, and told him the whole truth.” She tells him the whole truth. The courage this takes! Of course there is a sense in which God already knows the whole truth—is the whole truth!—and knows us long before we ever reach out our hand. But healing comes as we approach God despite our fears. Healing comes as we fall down in worship and tell the whole truth about our lives and have it received in love and held by love.
Honesty before God is hard. We hardly know the whole truth about ourselves: self-deception is part of the human predicament. But as much as we do know, we can bring before God, even if we tremble as we do so. It matters that she’s telling the whole truth to Jesus. The stories we tell are deeply shaped by the ones to whom we tell them, which is why truly listening is one of the most powerful gifts you can give another person. To fully listen with your whole self without agenda, gently sidelining your own reactions to make space for the other person with whom you converse, a person who is after all made in the image of God and contains great mystery—In that space, held open by loving attention, the truth is possible. Being held in love frees us to respond even through our fear, and makes the truth bearable, even when it is sharp-edged and painful.
Jesus listens to the women telling the whole truth in this way, and it heals her and sends her on her way. And this love is open to each of us. God beholds us as we are, loves us as we are, right now, in this moment, warts and all. God can handle the whole truth of who we are, because God called us into being and will never let us go. As the reading from Wisdom says, God created all things so that they might exist. This seems sort of obvious, until you consider how often we betray our suspicions that we are the exception to that rule: surely I’m not meant to exist like this? Yet God created us so we might exist, so that we might really be alive. Yes, even you. And as Paul puts it, “The gift is acceptable according to what one has, not according to what one does not have.” You are a gift: accepted, beloved, and cherished, just as you are—according to what you are, not according to what you’re not. And it is God’s good pleasure that you exist and move through the world and tell the truth and flourish, offering the gift that you are back to God and to the world.
“Go in peace, and be healed of your disease,” Jesus says to the woman. She has already been healed, and they both felt it in that moment, but he reiterates it now, as she kneels before him and offers up the truth of her life just as it is. In this moment of grace, she experiences in her body the healing knowledge on offer to all of us: that God beholds us with a loving gaze aware of our needs our doubts and faith—and responds. God wants us to be well. “Go in peace, and be healed of your disease.” Or perhaps, “Go in peace and be,—healed of your disease.” Live now as one who has been made whole, held always in the unshaking gaze of divine love. Exposing ourselves to that gaze is the work of a lifetime, and fundamentally God’s work in us. Before we stretch out our hand to touch his cloak, God is always reaching out to us, just as Jesus reached out to Jairus's daughter. God reaches out to raise us up from our sickbed, and we are called back to ourselves, called back to relationships, freed to live from unselfconscious welcoming love, and given something to eat.