Somebody Touched Me: An Epiphany Message

Monreale Cathedral mosaic of Jesus
healing a leper.

This is a meditation I gave at the Strite Auditorium at the Virginia Mennonite Retirement Community yesterday, Epiphany Sunday:

Two of the three gifts the Maji brought to Jesus, frankincense and myrrh, are widely known for their healing qualities. One can’t read the gospels without noting how much of Jesus’ ministry is about healing the sick, and about offering hope to the sick of heart, and how often Jesus, as the Divine Healer and Great Physician, touches people as he heals them. 

In some of those miracle accounts Jesus touches those who were considered untouchable. For example, Jesus touched an unclean leper in healing him, and touched the shroud of a widow’s son whom he raised to life, which would have made him ceremonially unclean. He likewise took a woman’s hand who was sick with fever and raised her from her bed, not something a Jewish male would typically do. 

And Jesus took children in his arms and blessed them, little ones who were at the bottom of the social ladder, often overlooked and neglected. And he took on the role of servant/slave and washed his disciples’ feet, one by one, and dried them with a towel. 

Jesus also allowed himself to be touched by others, by a woman who was considered unclean both because she was bleeding and because she was a Syrophoenician, a Gentile outsider. And Jesus allowed a woman, in more than one instance, to anoint his feet with perfumed oil, perhaps frankincense or myrrh, and/or with her tears, and to wipe his feet with her hair. Jesus understood the power of touching and being touched in restoring people to wholeness.

Touch is one of the first of the senses that an infant is aware of, and the last to leave when a person is dying. God gave us only two eyes for seeing, two ears for hearing, two nostrils for smelling, one tongue for tasting (with multiple taste buds), but hundreds of receptors all over our body for experiencing touch. It's vital to what make us feel alive to the world around us. 

When it came to showing affection, we weren’t a very demonstrative family growing up. It felt awkward to hug, until later in life some of us started giving our parents a warm embrace whenever we met. It wasn't long before they looked forward to it, and hugged us back.

    

I remember once holding my mother’s hand when she was in bed and suffering from cancer, and when I got up to leave, I spontaneously leaned over and gave her a kiss on her forehead. It was a special moment for both of us, and later she exclaimed to one of my siblings, “Harvey gave me a kiss!” as though that were something very rare and special. It shouldn't have been, but for us it was. It still is.

     

Years ago I was at Wellspring Retreat Center just outside of Washington, for a week, and Gordon Cosby, a pastor of the Church of the Savior and a writer I always admired, came and spoke to us. And then he had to leave while we were to continue on in our session. And as he was leaving he came by the aisle where I was sitting, and he turned around to add to something he wanted to say to us, and he happened to be right where I was sitting and he put his hands on my shoulder as he spoke a few more words. He hadn’t picked me out and I don’t think he had any idea how powerful that felt, to have this man of God touch me, as if to bless me, even though he wasn’t really conscious of doing that. 

We all need that kind of blessing, of people touching us, giving us benediction, laying hands on us and praying for us, or giving us an affectionate greeting. 

Have you ever thought of how many of our Christian practices have to do with touch? In the Mennonite church we used to speak of seven ordinances, somewhat like the Catholic Seven Sacraments. One was about greeting one another warmly, with a holy kiss, a kind of holy embrace, a command given repeatedly in the NT.  And then there is a laying on of hands at ordination, or at a commissioning, or in praying for someone in special need. Washing one another’s feet and drying them with a towel has been commonly practiced in many of our churches, a beautiful form of tender touch, especially important in Jesus’ time when people walked for miles every day on dusty roads.     

And at baptism, of course, we touch the head of the person on whom we pour the baptismal water. Or if we baptize by immersion we assist the person in their symbolic burial and resurrection to new life. We then take them by the hand and warmly welcome them into the family of faith.

When we anoint with oil for healing, we touch the forehead of the person being prayed for, in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. In the marriage ceremony, the officiants lay their hand on the joined hands of the couple as they declare them husband and wife, until death do them part. At the Lord’s Supper, we touch as we break bread and share with each other with the words of Jesus, "This is my body." "This is my life-giving blood," the bread and the cup of communion. 

Years ago I was at another retreat where a woman there, in her 50’s, poured out her heart over all of the pain she was going through because her husband had left her for a younger woman after their children were grown. She described her pain as being like being “cut in two with a saw”. And what made it harder was it seemed the people in her church didn’t know how to respond. “My phone didn’t ring as much anymore. People didn’t know what to say. And hardly anyone touched me anymore. I began to feel my body wasn’t OK, that I had become untouchable, at a time when I especially needed the assurance that I was still an OK lovable person."

But in a time that there is so much publicity being given to inappropriate touching, how do show the right kind of Christ-like love in ways that are absolutely safe and healthy? 

Here’s where we need to think of touching in the family of faith in the same way as we do in a healthy biological family. We instinctively know the difference between incestuous touch and appropriate touch. In the context of a healthy family, we show our affection in ways that are always in public, never secretive or in private, and in ways we all agree are appropriate for sisters and brothers and parents and children, uncles and aunts. We never favor certain people over others on the basis of any physical attraction or their gender or their youthfulness, but regard everyone in our family and in the family of faith, as beautiful and special and wonderful—not as sexual objects, but as loved and respected fellow siblings in the family of God, where there is total transparency and accountability, where we always ask, “Who, when and how, would Jesus touch? 

And then to follow his good example.

Here's the benediction used every Sunday in the church in which I grew up:

“Finally, brothers and sisters, shalom. Maintain good order. Listen to my appeal, encourage one another, live in peace; and the God of love and peace will be with you. Greet one another affectionately. All the believers greet you. The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all.” Amen

- II Corinthians 13:11-4, paraphrased