Jeremy L. Berg

Sixth Sunday after Pentecost: Mark 5:25-34

“Physical touch can buoy well-being and lessen pain, depression and anxiety,” writes Joanne Silberner citing a recent study in the journal of Nature Human Behaviour. She continues

One study showed that daily 20-minute gentle massages for six weeks in older people with dementia decreased aggressiveness and reduced the levels of a stress marker in the blood. Another found that massages boosted the mood of breast cancer patients. One study even showed that healthy young adults who caressed a robotic baby seal were happier, and felt less pain from a mild heat stimulus, than those who read an article about an astronomer” (Silberner, The New York Times, April 8, 2024). 

Likewise, Dacher Keltner, professor of psychology highlights how “basic warm touch calms cardiovascular stress” and “activates the body’s vagus nerve, which is intimately involved with our compassionate response, and a simple touch can trigger release of oxytocin, aka “the love hormone” (Keltner, “Hands On Research: The Science of Touch,” Sept. 29, 2010: https://greatergood.berkeley.edu). 

Despite the scientific data, are we are becoming a society that is out of touch with our need for physical touch?  “Nine out of ten people around the world feel that human touch is key to leading a happy, fulfilled life,” another report finds, but sadly “64 percent of respondents indicated that touch is not a daily occurrence in their lives, and another 72 percent expressed a wish for more hugs” (NIVEA, “Global Report on Human Touch,” 2020, www.nivea.ca).

People aged 50–69 are often the most deprived of human touch as they are more likely to live alone or in smaller households. Younger people, on the other hand, are exchanging embodied face to face connection for more distant, disembodied digital connections. “More than 80 percent of respondents to the NIVEA survey feel that more and more virtual connections diminish the skill of empathy, which leads to less touch. Altogether 53 percent of respondents said that time spent on social media was a barrier to physical touch.” In sum, we all could benefit from the healing touch of others in our day to day lives. 

All of this leads to the Gospel text for this week of the sixth Sunday after Pentecost. In Mark 5:25-34, we meet a woman who is also suffering from a physical condition, which probably has her feeling a bit isolated if not altogether ostracized for her bleeding that has left her ritually unclean for twelve years. Here’s the scene:

Now there was a woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years. She had endured much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had; and she was no better, but rather grew worse. She had heard about Jesus, and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, for she said, “If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well.” Immediately her hemorrhage stopped; and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease. Immediately aware that power had gone forth from him, Jesus turned about in the crowd and said, “Who touched my clothes?” And his disciples said to him, “You see the crowd pressing in on you; how can you say, ‘Who touched me?’” He looked all around to see who had done it. But the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came in fear and trembling, fell down before him, and told him the whole truth.He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.” (Mark 5:25-34)

Many of us simply read this as another miraculous healing story and move on, but I want to linger a bit on the emphasis of physical touch in this story. The woman stresses the need to touch Jesus in order to be healed, and Jesus draws attention to the dynamic moment of being touched—“immediately aware that power had gone forth from him” (v. 30). This is a striking, in-the-flesh healing encounter. 

Yet, physical touch and close proximity isn’t required for Jesus’s supernatural power to be unleashed. While Jesus is often found laying his hands on his subject, such as spreading mud over the eyes of the blind man, in one case the centurion insists that he is not worthy to have Jesus come under his roof to heal his servant in-person. “Just say the word, and my servant will be healed,” the centurion says with great faith, and “his servant was healed at that moment” (Matt 8:8, 13). There we have it: a long distance ministry and a virtual healing story in the New Testament.

This disembodied, “touch-free” ministry moment has landed us in the 21st century church, where hungry souls and aching bodies attend services “virtually” online, many alone in their apartment, clicking a button for prayer, sending in your offering via credit card, feasting on an entertaining message while going another week without the flesh-and-blood eucharist. 

The healing of this woman teaches us more than just fact that God sometimes heals people supernaturally. The story invites us into her isolated and hopeless life where she has likely felt pushed away from religious fellowship for years, and bounced around from physicians to physicians who have taken her money but given little help in return.

She needs healing, yes, but more than that she needs a good and prolonged hug from a loving friend or father figure. So, “…in fear and trembling, [she] fell down before him”… He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well” (v. 34). Did he embrace her as he said those healing words of belonging—“daughter”? We don’t know. But her posture of faith and desperate longing to reach out and grab onto Jesus’ cloak is an enduring example for us all. 

I am concerned about the trend toward more and more disembodied, disincarnate forms of religious worship and community. Dragging our bleeding hearts and bodies together each week for worship and fellowship with other messy sinners is uncomfortable and often inconvenient. But we need to smell each others’ perfume, listen to each others’ children fight and babies cry, and greet one another with a hug or handshake or fist pump. We need to feel God’s touch through the touch of others. 

Certainly, God can move and heal and minister to people through a screen and from a distance. But there’s a unique, hard to describe and scientifically verifiable kind of “power” that goes out from one and into another through physical touch. We’re not just emotionally comforted by a hopeful message or our mood lifted by an encouraging thought; we long to be ministered to holistically like the woman who immediately “felt in her body that she was healed” (v. 29). Let us not limit this story’s application to only prayers for supernatural physical healing. 

We are living in a world that is out of touch with our need for physical touch. Our ailments are many and we need to grasp after God with the tenacity of this woman. Religious art shows her crawling on her knees, head down in humility, hands reaching up in desperation.

We also need to reach out and grab hold of one another—pulling others out of their isolation, out of their ceaseless activity, away from their digital connections and into real, face to face relationships.

We also need to slow down, look behind us and learn to feel the little tugs on our shirt from those in our circle who are turning to us in need of our healing embrace. When we make ourselves available to others in this embodied way, it will take something out of us for sure, just like Jesus felt himself being depleted. But we will also experience the thrill being God’s vessel through whom His own healing power goes out to touch others in healing ways. 

Do you get as much physical touch as you need or desire? Is your church and worship experience more embodied or disembodied? Who in your life  might be tugging on your cloak, in need of a hug or healing embrace?