“If I just touch his clothes….”
If I can just touch his clothes, I will be made well.
Are those words of hope, or of superstition?
Is it firm confidence that drives this bleeding woman into the crowd to get a fistful of Jesus’ power? Or is it desperation? Everything else has failed, nothing works, so there is nothing to lose by trying something ridiculous. Might as well rub the rabbit’s foot or cross your fingers because there’s no actual cure.
The story offers us a possible answer: when her secret reach is revealed, Jesus tells her – and everyone listening – that “Your faith has made you well.”
Which might sound as if she must have known this would work.
As if she was confident all along that Jesus was the answer, the only answer she needed.
But I rather suspect that that’s not it.
I suspect that Jesus might not be praising her confidence – the thing I want my faith to give me in a risky world – but rather revealing to her a faith she didn’t even know she had.
I wonder if this woman actually felt faithful, in that moment when she reached for a handful of Jesus’ clothes.
After all, the culture she lived in had been telling her she couldn’t be faithful for twelve long years.
I hope she didn’t have the experience of Job, where “friends” come along and tell her that the only possible reason she could be ill was because she was sinful, or did something wrong.
But even with the most supportive friends around her, the ritual impurity caused by her continual bleeding would have kept her out of all religious ceremonies – of the household, of the Temple, of the nation.
In symbol, if not in intent, her culture is telling her she can’t be faithful. Can’t be righteous, and right with God.
So I suspect she doesn’t actually feel all that faith-full when she tells herself: “I just have to touch him” and plunges into the crowd and stretches out her hand.
She might have felt more like I feel when I bring an umbrella to church because rain threatens a planned outdoor service. My one umbrella won’t change the weather, but it makes me feel like I’m trying, in the face of forces I can’t control.
(Though she’s probably a lot more desperate about it than I am.)
And, well. It works for her.
She feels the change in her body, the disappearance of this burden, the restoration of health.
Jesus feels it too. God feels it.
She might have been “faking it” – telling herself whatever she needed to hear to get through another day, telling herself what she needed to hear in order to take a risk, to act as if things could change when she had twelve long years of evidence that they wouldn’t.
But it works.
Her faith has made her well.
Even if she didn’t really feel faithful.
Even if she didn’t know it was faith.
And that gives me hope.
More even than knowing that Jesus can heal the unhealable.
Because there are a lot of times when my faith doesn’t feel up to the task at hand; to the healing I need, for myself or someone else, or the world.
Plenty of times when my faith doesn’t feel up to resolving a family dispute, or expecting the kingdom of God to come now. Or to explaining to some of my school friends that believing in God doesn’t make me dangerous to human rights.
Maybe you’ve also experienced times when you don’t know how to pray, or how to believe prayer makes a difference.
Or times when faith just feels far away from you, unreal in this complicated, concrete, daily world of tasks and moments and needs.
So maybe you fake it.
Maybe you go to church when it doesn’t feel important, when you don’t know what you get from going.
Maybe you speak the words of prayer, silently or aloud, when your mind and heart aren’t convinced anyone is listening, or it will make any difference.
Maybe you offer to pray for someone in particular, even though you just don’t know how to do that.
Maybe you tell someone else a story about Jesus you want to believe, but still seems unreal.
And something changes.
The rote words of prayer start to sound real, true, powerful. For a moment, or forever.
Your friend tells you they could feel your prayer surrounding them, strengthening them – that prayer you didn’t know how to pray, but wished you could.
The fantastic story you tell to a child kindles hope in your own heart, and you start to feel a storm being calmed in your own soul, or a dead relationship being renewed and reborn.
It doesn’t always happen the way we expect or want – we often don’t get the rush of physical healing, or snatch life out of death, when we pray.
And when loss comes anyway, it doesn’t mean we did faith wrong.
But what this story does tell us, I believe, is that we can actually grow our own faith, make it powerful, so powerful that God feels it – simply by acting on our desire for faith, our need for faith.
Faith isn’t made, or measured, by what we feel, or what we believe we believe.
Faith is made, and grown, and powerful, by what we do when we’re not sure we believe.
When we reach for that robe, put ourselves into places where only faith can work.
I find that so hopeful. So essential.
Because mostly when I really need faith – when I really need to be able to trust that God can heal, transform, renew, give life – is when it is hardest to feel it.
When someone I love dearly has a painful, lingering illness and there is nothing I can do to make it better.
When the overwhelming weight of the world insists we’re never going to get justice, or unity, or peace, or safety.
When the next step in my journey involves trusting someone else – a pilot or a doctor or a guide or a stranger – for something I really need and cannot do for myself.
I wonder if that’s what Jairus felt, as his daughter lay dying.
When he – a man who could usually get what he wanted, a man respected by the community – could do nothing.
Was he confident when he begged Jesus, “if you’ll just lay your hands on her….”? Or was he desperate? Nothing he can do, nothing anyone can do. May as well grasp at straws, knock wood, call the miracle man.
Death was obviously going to win. Had already won by the time Jairus brought Jesus home.
How hard must it have been, then, to feel like life could return? How hard it must have been to feel faithful, hopeful, trusting when Jesus says “Do not be afraid, only believe.”
And yet, Jairus and his wife allow Jesus to interrupt the funeral rites, watch their neighbors laugh, and bring him to their daughter.
Who lives.
Because they acted as if their faith were real, whether they felt it or not.
It’s not just in times of crisis that it can be hard to feel our faith. For many of us, it can be difficult to feel a deep, guiding connection to the presence and power of God in those times when we are coasting along: when plans are working, when it feels easy to manage the needs and comforts of daily life.
In those times, particularly, the surrender and self-sacrifice that Christian faith requires of us – placing of God’s will ahead of our own, longing to give our whole selves to God and others – those kinds of faith can be hard to feel in the ordinary days.
All we’ve got, on those days, is the acting-as-if, the practice of behaving like our trust in God, our commitment to Christ, is more important than anything else.
Kneeling to confess sins we don’t quite feel are ours, and putting sincerity into the words.
Saying thanks to God over a meal we chose and prepared and worked for ourselves, and listening to the truth that all we have comes from God.
Taking a small risk in conversation, or in action, because Jesus told us to love our enemies, to give all that we have, to refuse fear and choose belief.
And it works.
We act as if, and feel a power not our own stirring in our hearts, bodies, souls.
The faith we may not feel is still felt by God. Still works to release God’s healing, God’s forgiveness, God’s power, God’s presence into the world.
So how can we not act on it?
