For most of the last week, I’ve been fighting
a summer cold,
armed with hot tea and honey.
So, perhaps that’s why, as I listened to this week’s gospel, what caught my attention was how the crowds chased after Jesus and the disciples, reaching the shores ahead of them to be in their presence, clamoring to be heard and scrambling to touch even the fringe of Jesus’ cloak, so that they would be healed.
And I remembered that in Greek, the word translated here as “healed”, as in “all who touched it were healed” is the same word as “saved”. All those who touched the fringe of his cloak were saved.
I thought about all the different reasons we search for healing. Just within the gospel text, we see different examples.
Many of the people coming to Jesus were physically ailing, but some may have also been suffering mental illness. And the disciples themselves were trying to retreat for renewal after their ministry work had left them with no time for rest, or even a meal.
Sometimes we look for healing because like the crowds chasing Jesus and the disciples, we’re physically hurt or we’re sick: with cancer, with chronic pain, with addiction.
Sometimes we seek healing because we’ve experienced trauma, abuse or neglect, or, like the disciples, we are exhausted or burnt-out.
And sometimes we seek healing because we are grieving broken or difficult relationships.
And as I thought about all the reasons why we seek healing, I thought about all the places where we look for healing.
Maybe, we’re lucky and we find our way to a twelve-step meeting in a church basement, or maybe we find peace in the sanctuary of a professional therapist’s office. Unfortunately, too often, when people are desperate to find healing, they try to find a faster way or a shortcut and fall victim to schemes.
When Luther went to Rome he was disgusted by priests like Johann Tetzel, who reportedly “preached to the faithful that the purchase of a letter of indulgence entailed the forgiveness of sins.”[i] People who were afraid of being cast out of God’s love and mercy would pay money to buy a so-called assurance of their salvation.
And the practice didn’t end with the Reformation.
There are modern accounts by the Lutheran World Federation of “people pay[ing] the pastor for praying for them to be cured from illness” in India, and just a few years ago, “People apparently paid 100,000 Namibian dollars to sit next to [a preacher called “the prophet of Namibia”], because they hoped to be healed.[ii]
Certainly, as with any scam, education
reduces the risk that vulnerable people will be harmed by people who would
exploit them. But why are they so desperate that they are compelled to look for
healing there in the first place?
There’s an old saying, sometimes attributed to Bishop Desmond Tutu, that says,
There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.
The hope we have from today’s gospel is
that hurting people will find Christ’s healing presence in our congregations
and faith communities ̶
that God’s people will communicate the
good news of God’s healing grace to everyone who walks through our doors;
that we would see their pain or
sadness,
and we would have compassion for them.
But the conviction I have from
today’s gospel is that too often,
they don’t.
And too often, we don’t.
Ouch. Believe me, I’m right there, wanting to say, “not my church.” “not my congregation.” But I know I need to check myself when I get defensive, because I also know I can name times when my first response wasn’t compassion, it wasn’t what Jesus models.
Too often, the vulnerable show up in our churches and find judgment and suspicion, and even rejection and hostility. And instead of being told they are children of God who are loved and saved by God’s grace, they hear that they don’t belong or aren’t welcome.
That’s not Jesus.
Jesus sees the crowd and has compassion
for them.
He is moved, by their presence, by
their suffering and by their need, to be with them where they are.
He stretches out his hands to them and
gathers them in, teaching and healing them.
He offers them belonging first.
God loves us, and God’s mercy is new every day, so today we can repent for the times when we have failed to show compassion, and the times when we have not welcomed the stranger or loved our neighbor as God loves them. It is never too late to start.
May we stretch ourselves to reach for those who are reaching for Jesus’ healing grace and gather them into God’s family.
Amen.
[i] https://www.britannica.com/biography/Martin-Luther/The-indulgences-controversy , accessed 7/20/2024
[ii] https://2017.lwfassembly.org/en/news/regional-stories/false-promises-salvation, accessed 7/20/24.
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