In a sea of hands

Homily for June 28 (13th Sunday in Ordinary Time)
Wisdom 1:13-15, 2:23-24; Psalm 30 (vv.); 2 Corinthians 8:7, 9, 13-15; Mark 5:21-43

They are fairly ubiquitous, those seas of hands.  You see them waving and reaching up at a Taylor Swift or Beyonce concert, and—perhaps with the assistance of Extra Strength Tylenol—they could be found as the Rolling Stones helped to kick off Summerfest in Milwaukee.  You see them holding pens, paper, caps, gloves or other objects in Major League ballparks as players walk to and from batting practice.  You see them straining for bread, rice, plastic sheeting and other items distributed from the backs of trucks at refugee camps in many parts of the world.  They’re all seeking something:  an emotional connection with an entertainer; an autograph from an all-star; something to feed a family and protect them from the elements.

In our gospel passage, Jesus finds himself in a sea of people.  Yet there is one set of hands that get his attention.  They belong to a woman, suffering and driven by desperation, who reaches out and touches his cloak.  Her urgency and faith are so great that they demand a response.  He feels healing power drain out of him and is stopped in his tracks.  A short while later, Jesus finds himself in a room with only a few people.  He extends his hand to a girl everyone else believes is dead and urges her to get up.  To the astonishment of everyone but Jesus, she does.

It’s very clear why the unnamed woman and Jairus reached out to Jesus:  they needed his healing power.  We often reach out to Jesus—in prayer, in resolutions to live as better disciples, or in various offerings—because we want or need something. These gestures are a natural part of any relationship and quite healthy…when they’re not the only times we reach out to Jesus!

What’s more important, however, is for us to remember that Jesus is ever-available to us.  Indeed, he is reaching out to us, regardless of what others may think of us or we think of ourselves.  He isn’t afraid to get his hands dirty.  In being touched by a woman who is suffering from a flow of blood and in touching the hand of an apparently dead girl, Jesus makes himself ritually unclean.  He is willing to stand outside the community of faith in this way in order to bring back into it two daughters who have been separated from it.  In the words of our responsorial psalm, he brings them “up from the netherworld”—the world of alienation, darkness and death—to a world of reconciliation, light and life.

God, as our first reading reminds us, is all about life:  “he fashioned all things that they might have being; and the creatures of the world are wholesome.”  We want to experience life, joy and sense of wholeness in greater abundance; and we spend much of our lives reaching out to whomever or whatever we think will give it to us.  Jesus, however, teaches us a different way—extending our hands and ourselves not to get but rather to give.  St. Paul encouraged the young church at Corinth to reach out to the poor and persecuted mother church of Jerusalem by calling to mind “the gracious act of our Lord Jesus Christ,” who through his incarnation, passion and death became poor in order to give us the richness of eternal life.

In a sea of hands the disciple’s stand out because they are the extension of those of the Master. +