Reach Out and Touch Someone

He blazed up the wide middle aisle of our repurposed Presbyterian sanctuary, passing the stained glass depictions of Biblical scenes on his way to the pulpit to speak at the open mic of our LDS fast and testimony meeting. He looked a bit like Samson, with his long hair and unkempt beard. He shouted at the children to “Shut up and listen!” We complied, giving our rapt and frightened attention to this unpredictable stranger. He commenced ranting. And then he exited the side door of the chapel and we never saw him again. (It was my first, but not last, experience with crazy at church.) I was shocked and at a loss to understand him. Thirty years later, I’m still not sure what he stood in need of.

In the Book of Mark, chapter 5, we meet another unstable, unkempt man, a poor tormented soul “[w]ho had his dwelling among the tombs; and no man could bind him, no, not with chains: Because that he had been often bound with fetters and chains, and the chains had been plucked asunder by him, and the fetters broken in pieces: neither could any man tame him.” Jesus’ ministrations in Gadara bring him to this man, an outreach effort that makes everyone else quite nervous, especially after the tomb dweller tells Jesus in a likely spooky voice, “My name is Legion: for we are many.” Unfit for normal life, he is a wreck, and in a scene that feels especially heartbreaking to me, we read that, “always, night and day, he was in the mountains, and in the tombs, crying, and cutting himself with stones.” But in the story, Jesus transfers the demons that have been possessing this man into a herd of swine. The self-cutter is restored to himself.

Although some Christians marvel at the more showstopping qualities of the miracle stories from the first handful of chapters in Mark – the Gadarene demons cast out, Jairus’ dead daughter raised, a leper cured – I marvel at Jesus’ interactions with those who were different. A miracle, to me, is that he reached out despite social prohibitions.

Jewish purification rituals required washing after contact with impurity: bodily fluids, dead people or animals, and skin conditions like leprosy, among other things. Pure/impure was not a good/bad dichotomy, as I understand it, but more of an assigning to particular human experiences a set of ritual behaviors to give them context, in the the way we keep our bathroom and kitchen facilities separate. We need both if we’re going to eat, but preferably not in the same space. Unfortunately, those unable to ritually purify were, in effect, exiled from normal life, as in the case of the woman with an issue of blood (a story also found in Mark 5). Such chronically impure people were locked in that figurative bathroom. A process meant to encourage a regular accounting of life’s stains marginalized them. In these stories, Jesus unlocks that door and welcomes the impure back to the meal table.

In the case of the hemorrhaging woman, who for twelve years had “suffered many things of many physicians, and had spent all that she had, and was nothing bettered, but rather grew worse,” she touched Jesus, and the act of touching brought healing. Perhaps in our day, such transformations, as in the case of “I am Legion” being clothed and in his right mind after the loud splash was heard, are wrought with pharmaceuticals and rehabilitative therapy. But Jesus, part case worker, part holy pharmacist, used his hands. For these people stuck in acceptance exile, he extended a hand. Literally. His touch was compassion, as we read in Mark.

I often fall into the habit of labeling those around me. The labels, not necessarily good nor bad, help me sort the people I encounter. But my labels can become a locked door, not unlike the purification rituals. I exile myself from others, in effect. This labeling shields me from strangeness, from unpredictability.

But also from spiritual and emotional growth.

Occasionally, in spite of myself and my built-in label maker, I manage to stumble into moments of genuine discipleship, moments when I follow in the compassionate footsteps of Jesus I’ve described above, and thus connect more fully with those around me. Like the woman I’ve been visiting teaching nearly eight years. Over the years, stiff conversations have been replaced with heart to heart talks. I have grown to love her. Still, this particular visit surprised me. We talked a bit about her grueling schedule and the necessity of her back to back jobs. Her aching feet were propped on a foot rest. “I wish I could afford a massage,” she laughed. It was just chit chat, not a request, but I managed swallow my shyness, then take a seat in front of her feet. “Hey, I give pretty good foot rubs,” I said.

And she let me prove it to her.

My visiting teaching companion couldn’t believe I’d actually rubbed our friend’s feet. I couldn’t quite believe it either. “I’m so glad you did,” said my companion later, still surprised. More than a lesson or a plate of cookies, this woman had needed touch.

When I willed myself to forget the awkwardness and move past my self-consciousness, I was, perhaps, channeling the master’s touch. That phrase often refers to a sort of supernatural power possessed only by God. But perhaps it can be simpler than that and more accessible. Perhaps the ‘master’s touch’ can be ours. In these stories of the disenfranchised and ailing, Jesus reached past labels with hands of compassion. We too can participate in these miracles. Not the miracle of apparently impossible healing, but the miracle of very possible loving.

Such touch changes lives.

Especially our own.