Parables In Action: Being "In Touch"

SCRIPTURE REFLECTION FOR THE THIRTEENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (June 28, 2015)

Scripture Readings:
Wisdom 1:13-15; 2:23-24
Psalm 30:2, 4, 5-16, 11, 12, 13
2 Corinthians 8:7, 9, 13-15
Matthew 5:21-43

Our gospel reading today focuses on people in desperate situations. There is first of all the synagogue official and his family who desperately sought Jesus’ help for the cure on their dying daughter and sister. And then there is the woman afflicted for years with frequent hemorrhages. She had tried everything but to no avail.

As Jesus responds to these desperate people, he touches and was touched. He heals the little daughter of Jairus by taking her hand and telling her to arise. He heals the desperate woman when she touches him in faith. He was touched by the pain of a desperate family and healed the little girl by touch. He was touched by the desperate woman with the frequent hemorrhages and, when he found out who she was, he was touched by her pain as well.

I often tell my students that Jesus’ healings are parables in action, and this is what we see here in these two stories of desperation and relief. As always, the stories tell us about what God is doing in our world—bringing healing and peace to a world that was originally, as our first reading says, meant for life and wholeness. “God did not make death,” our reading says, and does not “rejoice in the destruction of the living.” The good news that Jesus is announcing is that the world is being restored to that wholeness, that salvation is not about a spiritual escape from the world, but a restoration of it to the way God intended it to be. This is what he means when he says that “the Reign of God is at hand” (Mk 1:15).

In addition, these parables-in-action tell us about who God is, the kind of “person” God is. In Jesus we see that God touches and is touched. God is involved in our world, “in touch” with it, so to speak. In Jesus we see that God recognizes and understands our desperation and wants to soothe it with healing. After all, our first reading says, women and men and, really, all creatures are made in the image of God’s own nature. And so God cares about them--desperately. Jesus is “God’s body language,” British theologian Mark Oakley writes. “Jesus is like God,” Latin American theologian Juan Luis Segundo powerfully suggests.

If these stories are parables in action, they also call for action on our part. In baptism we have been made sharers in Jesus’s life. Our nature of being made in God’s image—obscured by “the envy of the devil” as our first reading puts it—has been healed and restored, and so our calling is to be like Jesus, and to act like Jesus. If we are to be true to our Christian calling, in other words, we need both to touch and to be touched, to be “in touch” with the world.

We see Paul calling the Corinthians to this in our second reading, which is written in the context of an appeal to their financial generosity for the desperate and poor Jerusalem community. He calls them to be touched by others’ suffering and to touch them by sharing their wealth. Today we might be touched by Pope Francis’s description of our suffering creation, and be moved to touch it by working in any way we can for its salvation and restoration. We might be touched by the suffering of the families in Charleston, South Carolina and touch them by committing ourselves in our own lives to anti-racist thoughts and actions, and perhaps even getting behind movements like taking down Confederate flags and support of gun control. We might be touched by the magnitude of suffering of victims of human trafficking—29 million desperate people!—and do all we can to touch them in prayer and any kind of action we can manage in their support.

Our “one wild and precious life” (Mary Oliver) will only have meaning if we, like Jesus, like God, can be touched by others and reach out to touch them in return. As we are touched by the world’s “deep need,” we will surely find our “deep joy” (Frederick Buechner). Like today’s stories, like Jesus, we are being called to become parables in action, being touched and touching our desperate world, showing it how God is working, and who God is.

Image: the power of touch by Jessica Lucia. Found on Flickr under a Creative Commons License.