God Deep in the Flesh

On Jesus’ uncontrollable discharge of power

This Sunday I will continue a long lectio continua series through the miracles of Jesus by preaching on the Gospel of Mark’s account of the unnamed woman with the twelve year old hemorrhage.

She is healed simply by touching the hem of Christ’s clothes.

As Matthew Thiessen puts it bluntly, the woman is healed by “Jesus’ uncontrollable discharge of power.”

The New Testament scholar Frederick Dale Bruner characterizes her faith as “naive” and her reach as “superstitious.” I think he fails to take seriously the divine humanity of Jesus.

As the church father Cyril of Alexandria writes:

“So Christ gave his own body for the life of all, and makes it the channel through which life flows once more into us. “

Mark tells us that in the press of the crowd, a woman slipped through, reached out her hand, and covertly touched the hem of Jesus’ cloak. She had been bleeding for twelve years. Twelve years of pain. Twelve years of isolation. Twelve years of being ritually unclean.

Twelve years without anyone touching her.

She had tried every physician, such as they were in the ancient world. Having been taken for all her money, she had find no relief. Until she touched the fabric of the clothes of the God made flesh. Mark says, “Immediately the bleeding stopped.”

Immediately.

Power went out from him.

And her body was made whole.

Simply by brushing up against the one who is God deep in the flesh.

The theologian Robert Jenson writes that the church’s Christology is an “assault” on the pagan ways of imagining God. What he meant is that if we want to know God, we don’t look first to philosophy or to abstractions about divinity. We look at Jesus. At his story, his body, his flesh.

This is precisely what the Gospel of Mark shows us. God is not a distant Being immune to time. God is in Jesus. God is in the crowd, sweating in the sun, pressed in by hands, tugged at by the desperate.

God is at the edge these garments.

God is vulnerable to a crowd’s press and a woman’s touch.

This is the church’s Christology.