Spiritual Hiccups - Moving the Boundaries

This morning's gospel reading offers a stark contrast.  Jesus is asked by the leader of the synagogue to come and save his daughter who has just died.  Though the request seems impossible, likely no one was surprised that Jesus would try to help this important, religious leader. 

But on the way, a woman who was not allowed inside the synagogue approaches Jesus on the sly, wanting only to touch him in hopes of being healed.  Her 12 year hemorrhage meant that she had been religiously unclean all that time.  Perhaps she hopes that she can receive healing from Jesus without embarrassing him, without letting anyone know that by her touch she has just made him unclean as well.

But Jesus does not permit her healing to be a private one.  He turns and says to her, “Take heart, daughter; your faith has made you well.”  He heals her, but he also calls her daughter, a clear statement that she is one of the family, part of the community even though her illness has caused her to be ostracized.  And the phrase "made you well" translates a word often rendered "saved."  It can mean either, but perhaps more happens here than simply being made well.

Reading this story, I can't help wondering about who the people are in our day who have felt ostracized by the church, but whom Jesus embraces.  Sometimes I hear Christians speak disparagingly of outsiders, confident that their outsider status is their own fault.  No doubt people in Jesus day thought the same of this woman Jesus calls "daughter." 

In today's gospel, Jesus grace and healing are extended to the religious leader and the woman deemed unfit by the theology and practice of that leader.  I wonder who it is we in the church have written off or labeled "unclean" that Jesus would have us embrace and say to them, "Brother, sister, child of God."

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