Until She Was Wrong

Twelve years of looking for what she had done - 30 Days of Silence Part Five

My favorite spot in the morning

I woke up a tiny bit earlier and wanted to watch the sunrise from my bench again. I brought my tiny Amplified New Testament, coffee, my towel (finally got smart about the morning dew) and hiked up to the top. I just sat for the longest time.

The assignments had been about sin all week. That is what the opening stretch of the Exercises is for, and I had been living in it. And then, on the last morning of it, Father Randolph handed me a woman who had spent twelve years looking for her sin and never found it.

So I entered into my prayer period on the passage from Luke about the woman with the hemorrhage. I thought of her cut off from her people, living on the outside because she was unclean. About how that probably hurt worse than the wound itself.

To understand what her life was, you have to know what the law did to every woman. Under the purity code, a woman was unclean during her cycle. Set apart. Sent out of the shared life of the village for about a week, every month, until it passed. So there was a rhythm to it. You left, and then you came back. Everyone left, and everyone came back.

Except her. She had been bleeding for twelve years, so she never came back. The other women rotated through that separation alongside her, and for a few days at a time she would have company, and then their week would end and they would go home. Home to the well, and the gossip, and the babies, and the primordial need to belong. If she had a best friend, she saw her once a month. She did not get the communal living, the going to the water well with the other women, the knowing of the goings-on in real time, the having of her own family. She got visitors in her exile, and then she watched them leave.

Maybe, when the women had been coming lately, they had been bringing news of Jesus of Nazareth and the miracles he had been doing. I imagine she thought she had nothing to lose, and very literally, she didn’t. What could they do to her? Excommunicate her? She was already out. Stone her? That might have come as a mercy. What is the point of living if you cannot connect with anyone or be connected to?

What it cost her to touch him

But here is what she was actually risking, and it wasn’t only her own skin. Under the law, her uncleanness was contagious. Anything she sat on became unclean. Anyone who touched her became unclean, and had to wash and wait and stay out of the shared life until evening, and if it went further than that, go to the priest and make an offering to get clean again. So people did not simply avoid her. She was seen as a walking cost to everybody, and I have no doubt some of them told her so, and used that word, “Unclean! Unclean!”

Which means the walk to Jesus was not a brave little errand. It was an act of radical rebellion, and it took twelve years of nothing left to lose to make it possible. I imagine her telling the other women in the tent exactly what she intended to do, and then slipping out and keeping to the shadows. Close enough to the crowd to move with it. Far enough not to be recognized and sent back. And with every person she brushed against on the way, she was ruining somebody’s week, and she knew it, and she kept going.

As she approached the crowd surrounding Jesus, she had no choice but to touch them as she made her way to him. I imagine she felt guilty about it. Not only for the bleeding itself, but for what she had been taught the bleeding meant. She would have grown up hearing that a body like hers was evidence. That God did not do this to a woman for no reason, and that somewhere behind it there had to be a sin she was being punished for, even if she could not name it. She would have gone looking for it. Twelve years is a long time to search yourself for a crime you cannot find. And on top of all that, there was now the sin she was actually committing, right that minute, touching people she had no right to touch.

I imagine her apologizing to God with every person she brushed against. Forgive me. Forgive me. Forgive me. But she had to do it. He was her only hope. Yes, it may have been terribly selfish to make so many others unclean while she pursued her own healing, but she couldn’t help it. Maybe it was wrong. Of course it was wrong. She was breaking rules handed down from her fathers and from God himself through the Levitical law. But maybe this was the Messiah. Maybe he would heal her and be merciful about the law at the same time.

She reached for the hem of his prayer shawl. I read a commentary once that said the corner of the shawl was the part that carried the promise, that to take hold of it was to lay hold of the covenant, God’s word that he would turn his curses back into blessings and heal his people. She wasn’t grabbing at fabric. She was grabbing at the promise. And she did it from behind, and low, and without asking, because she had no standing to ask.

And she made him unclean.

That is the part nobody ever said to me in Sunday school. She did not just get healed. She contaminated a rabbi in front of a crowd, in public, on purpose. By every rule she had been raised on, she had just done to him what everyone had spent twelve years making sure she did not do to them.

And he stopped walking.

He turned around and asked who touched him, and the disciples said, look at this crowd, everybody is touching you. But he kept looking. And she came out of the shadows, shaking, and fell down in front of him and told him everything. All of it. In front of all those people. Twelve years of it.

Here is what he did not do. He did not step back. He did not go wash. He did not send for the priest, and he did not scold her, and he did not tell her she had cost him anything. He called her daughter. Daughter! The word for someone who belongs to you.

Nobody had called her anything for twelve years except unclean.

He told her that her faith had healed her, and to go in peace, and she walked back into the world she had been shut out of, and nothing about him had to be cleansed. The uncleanness did not travel. It went the other way. Whatever she had, he took, and it did not stain him, and she left it with him and walked away without it.

The same errand

As I entered into this scene as this woman, I thought of all the ways I feel disconnected from people. Somewhere deep down, a part of me believes I am too unclean to be let close. And I saw something I did not want to see. Twelve years she spent looking for what she had done. She never found it, because it was not there. But she kept looking. If she had done something wrong, she could find it, and fix it, and get back in. If she had not, there was no meaning in it, no redemption, and no way back.

I know that search. I have been on it my whole life. When I was young it had a name, and the name was salvation, and the arrangement was simple. I was told that I was born unclean, and there was a cleansing, and I gratefully took it. Then I left all of that behind and thought I had put the arrangement down. But look where I am. I am on a hilltop in California, thirty days of silence, digging through the interior of myself for whatever is buried down there, so that I can finally get at it and heal it and be free.

Better tools. Kinder language. Same errand. Find the thing that is wrong with you, and fix it, and then you will be allowed back in the room.

She did not get healed because she found her sin. She got healed with the blood still on her.

So as I reached out to Jesus for healing, I did not ask him for the thing I usually ask for. I asked for the grace to be able to receive. Forgiveness. Acceptance. Imperfection. I asked him to heal me of my inability to reach out and connect with others. To let me step into community in spite of my shame and my fear and my sense of uncleanness. To go after the root of it and stop the cycle.

I have spent my life certain that if people saw the whole of me, they would move away. She was certain of it too. She was right about it, for twelve years, until she was wrong.

Next week, heaven turns out to be at the left breast of his mother.

Has anyone ever stayed when you were sure they were going to go? And whatever else came up while you were reading, the comments are yours. I read every one, and Thursday is where I pull up a chair and really answer.