Day 5 – Healing touch
Luke 8:42-48 – As Jesus went, the people pressed around him. And there was a woman who had had a discharge of blood for twelve years, and though she had spent all her living on physicians,f she could not be healed by anyone. She came up behind him and touched the fringe of his garment, and immediately her discharge of blood ceased. And Jesus said, “Who was it that touched me?” When all denied it, Peter said, “Master, the crowds surround you and are pressing in on you!” But Jesus said, “Someone touched me, for I perceive that power has gone out from me.” And when the woman saw that she was not hidden, she came trembling, and falling down before him declared in the presence of all the people why she had touched him, and how she had been immediately healed. And he said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace.”
Today, we see another woman whose burden seems almost unbearable. She has not chosen this place, this illness, which has brutishly forced her into a life of physical pain and social isolation.
Imagine spending all of your cash, then your savings, and then all of your retirement account on a cure for your debilitating illness – and still you are no better.
The first few years were spent moving from legitimate doctors to specialists. Then she likely started to pursue “alternative” treatments, of which there were countless options (including wearing a bag of crushed ostrich eggs around your neck according to one historian) and practitioners who were all too happy to take her money.
This twelve-year-long burden has ultimately led her to a desperate search for Jesus.
INWARD: Father, what do you want me to know?
As I think of a burden in my life, am I somehow pursuing fruitless alternatives instead of coming to you?
OUTWARD: Father, what do you want me to do?
She came up behind him and touched the fringe of his garment,
Her “do”, her action was to make her way to Jesus and to reach out and touch him – in faith.
What would this look like for me and my burden?
Note Jesus’s response to her pursuit. She is healed in her body, and he very tenderly and lovingly calls this lonely, isolated outcast, “Daughter”. (This is the only place in scripture that he calls anyone by this endearing name.)
What name would I want Jesus to call me?
