The Ministry of Touch

The Ministry of Touch

John 20, verses 1-2, 11-18.

“Do not hold on to me; do not keep clinging to me; do not touch me.”  Later, in the upper room, Jesus said to Thomas: “Put your finger here and see my hands.  Reach out your hand and put it in my side.”  Thomas needed to touch him; Mary needed not to touch him.  The Lord deals with different people in different ways – with us in different ways at the different stages of our life.

We read in Mark’s gospel (6, verse 56): “Wherever he went, to farmsteads, villages, or towns, they laid out the sick people and begged him to let them simply touch the edge of his cloak; and all who touched him were cured,”  Among them was a woman suffering from haemorrhages for twelve years; ritually unclean, she was barred from the worship of the synagogue, an outcast from society (like a leprosy sufferer); despite long treatment from doctors, on which she had spent all her money, there was no improvement; on the contrary, she had grown worse; almost as a last resort, she came up behind Jesus in the crowd and touched his cloak; she said to herself, “If I touch even his clothes, I shall be cured.”

At the entrance of a side chapel in St George’s, Windsor, the burial place of George VI and the Queen Mother, is a plaque with the words used by the King in a wartime Christmas Day broadcast: “I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year, ‘Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown’.  And he replied, ‘Go out into the darkness and put thine hand into the hand of God.  That shall be better than a light and safer than a known way’.”  Put thine hand into the hand of God; touch him.  Our grasp is not very strong, because our faith is not very deep; but with our faith, our faltering faith, we reach out to touch the hem of his cloak; he says to us, as he said to the woman with the haemorrhages, “Your faith has cured you, your faith has made you whole.  Go in peace.”

Eddie Askew:  “I reach out feeling in the darkness for reassurance.  And we meet, Lord.  Your hand held out, too.  First.  I hold on, warming my fearful fingers in the glow of your presence.”

We need to underline the difference between a physical cure and real healing.  I served for a number of years on the chaplaincy team of a hospice.  Most of the patients were suffering from terminal cancer; they were sometimes healed, healed though not cured, because they died at peace, knowing that they were held in the loving hands of God.

 Your hand shall lead me (wrote the psalmist); and your right hand shall hold me.  That Eddie Askew meditation continues: “When I look a little further, deeper, I see your hands, Lord, not white and manicured, but scarred and scratched and competent.”  Yes, scarred – and bearing the mark of the nails.  Hands that flung stars into space to cruel nails surrendered.  As Henri Nouwen wrote: “The risen Lord always shows us his wounds.”  Life is stronger than death, light is stronger than darkness, goodness is stronger than evil.  The laying on of hands in this service is a declaration and demonstration of God’s loving victory over suffering and death.  The risen Lord always shows us his wounds – and by his wounds we are healed.  We touch him and he touches us.  Again and again he touches us in the events and experiences of the everyday, in the example and need of other people, in the worship and prayer of the church, in the laying on of hands.