A Woman and a Robe
Reaching for that Robe
The year 2020 has been a lot of things for a lot of people. It has been a year of great loss, grief, pain, turmoil, and heartache. It has also been a year of division, lost friendships, broken faith, disappeared norms, and confusion. Others have actually benefited and seen some economic growth, closer bonds, and even healthier bodies. If I had to summarize what the past year has been like, going from March 2020 to March 2021, and pick only one way to describe it all, I’d have to say that it’s been a year of discovering the faith that Jesus Authored and Perfected some 2,000 years ago.
Like so many others who have gone by the identity “Christian” I have borne witness to the increasingly divisive political climate in the secular United States of America and it’s seepage into what I always believed was a separate entity called the Church. I grew up in a tradition (the Plymouth Brethren) in which the message regarding politics was largely apolitical, so during my voting years (ages 18 and onward) I never took voting seriously. One year I actually wrote in Roseanne Barr (which admittedly wasn’t the best joke) and another time I simply wrote down Jesus as my choice. Why? Because I was taught that the world is the world and the Church is the Church and never should the two mix.
But after the turn of the calendar in 2020 I started to see a shift amongst those I used to associate within the Plymouth Brethren tradition (all on social media since I stopped attending that particular tradition for reasons I’ll explain in Episode 0 of the I am Barabbas Podcast) where it was no longer enough to be apolitical but instead it was important to be stridently in support of a particular political party. I found the shift to be unsettling because the tradition I was raised in was always so focused on Jesus that it was never even permissible to call Him simply Jesus. He always has to be The Lord Jesus. Lord had to precede the name Jesus because He is the Head, and the Preeminent One, and no one was ever supposed to disrespect the name of Jesus by leaving out His Lordship.
Politics wasn’t just showing up on social media either. It was starting to display itself in sermons and in Bible studies at the Presbyterian-based church we were attending as well. It was getting so painfully obvious that eventually my wife and I decided that we wanted Jesus (Lord Jesus, Jesus Christ, Lord Jesus Christ, whatever one is supposed to call Him) more than the covert messaging we were receiving about why one political party was the “Christian” party and why another wasn’t. (Yes I know I used obvious and covert in the same sentence but sometimes things work that way). Eventually we found ourselves gathering as three (with our 5 year old daughter) on Sundays and continuing our small groups over Zoom while increasing the reading of the Bible, independent of church agendas. We eventually found a group of believers that did focus on Jesus and then I decided at the turn of the new year to pray and meditate (for at least 10 mins a day) in order to bring down my blood pressure and to also try to discern the Voice of God over the voices of the past.
It was during this time when I began to really discover the faith that Jesus had Authored and Perfected and how truly different it was from the one I was given from the time I was a child up until now. I suppose the crux of Thayil Thoughts will be the sharing of these discoveries over time but this particular writing will start with a story about a woman and a robe.
In Matthew chapter 9, there’s an account shared with the reader about a woman who had been bleeding for 12 years who was miraculously healed by touching the outer fringes of Jesus’ robe. Mark’s gospel tells the reader that this woman had suffered a lot at the hands of physicians and both Mark and Luke inform the reader that the woman spent every single penny that she had trying to have this medical problem fixed. Now the modern reader may not understand some of the cultural implications here so please allow me to explain.
The Torah, or the first five books of the Old Testament, contained Laws that were meant to help the people of Israel have an understanding of the kinds of medical issues that could result in widespread illness. One of the common causes of widespread illness is bodily discharge. As a safety precaution, God had put into a place a system that ensured that anyone who had a discharge of any kind from their bodies (males or females) would be separated from certain household activities for a certain time period until those discharges were cleared up. In the case of menstruation, it was a time frame of 7 days. All of this information can be read in Leviticus 15. Now remember that at the time when God gave these instructions, there were no sanitary ways of controlling blood flow. So His laws were meant to protect people from the possibility of infection. I want to also reiterate that these laws applied to men as well. The same chapter outlines rules for the kinds of fluids that would discharge from a man’s penis.
The same chapter also speaks on the kind of bleeding that a woman might have that is not normal and continues without stopping which is what this woman in Matthew 9 is suffering from. The verses are found in Leviticus 15:25-27. A woman with this kind of bleeding is really caught in the worst of places because now everything she might bleed on is considered to be a potential source of infection. Now we are still going through this Covid-19 pandemic and we all know what it’s like to be thought of as the source of an infection. Every cough or sneeze in public is met with a sideways look and a few steps back. In 1st century Israel, I promise you it’s much worse. The religious leaders had such a grip on people through fear that they treated any source of potential infection or cause for impurity as a pariah. This woman went to doctors and spent everything she had to be cured for 12 years and nothing worked. In the meantime, anything she sat on had to be ritually cleaned. Any person she came in close contact with and might have bled on had to be ritually cleaned. She wouldn’t have even been allowed to prepare a meal or really hold a child or sleep with her husband (assuming she had any of that). She must have been the most lonely and isolated person in her community.
Then news came to her about a man who had the power to heal. He lived in Capernaum and although he traveled often he was currently there and so she figured she could try his hands for healing. She had no more money but she did have some faith and a tiny bit of hope. She finally caught up with him but he was surrounded by a crowd of people and so she figured that if she could just touch the little tassel hanging from his robe then she would be healed and she could get away unnoticed. Then maybe the Healer wouldn’t be bothered by her and if he didn’t know that she touched him, he wouldn’t have to go and wash his robe since he would have been touched by an impure and unclean bleeding woman.
So she makes her approach, she makes the touch, and efforts to walk away, but then her heart stops because her ears are filled with the sound of a voice that asks this terrifying question: “who touched me?” The disciples, Peter specifically, wonders and asks Jesus “what do you mean, this whole crowd is pressing against you.” But Jesus had felt power go from his body and so he clarifies and indicates someone was healed and so the woman comes forward and both Mark and Luke inform the reader that she was terrified and falls before Jesus and confesses because she honestly did sin against him by touching him and making him unclean. But Jesus then calls her daughter and declares that her faith healed her and then he continues on to raise a little girl from the dead.
Now fast forward to Matthew 14:34-36. Here is where I learned something new, something about the faith that Jesus Authored and Perfected. Something that was contrary to what someone taught me in the past. In this passage Jesus goes to a place called Gennesaret. I was taught a long time ago that this was the same region where Jesus had healed two demon possessed men that resulted in a herd of 2,000 pigs running into the sea and drowning. When Jesus performed that miracle the men there begged Jesus to leave because they were afraid. I was taught that when Jesus returns in Matthew 14 they had a change of heart and there we see them finally receive Him and miracles begin to happen. Well I was taught wrong.
The text does say the men in Gennesaret recognized Jesus. But why? I was leading a Bible study and I was studying some maps looking to confirm my previous notions of this pig story but I saw that the two regions were on opposite sides of the Sea of Galilee. In fact, Gennesaret is not far from Capernaum which is Jesus’ adult hometown and the home base of his Galilean ministry. As far as I could tell, he had never been there though. So how did they recognize him? I ran out of time to prepare so we started the study and as it was going on and as some discussion was happening I started to look ahead and the Spirit of God spoke to me. He said to look at Matthew 9 and the woman and the robe. Why? Well, because the people in Gennesaret begged to be healed, but they wanted to be healed by touching the fringes on his robe. Now who else had been healed this way? Only one other person: the beloved daughter of Jesus who had bled for 12 years. Then it made sense. This Gennesaret had to be her home. She must had gone home and told everyone what had happened. Everyone had to have known her story. Bleeding for 12 years, doctors doing who-knows-what to stop it, maybe asking people for some money to help pay for the next treatment. Then all of a sudden she’s back home and she’s healed! “How did it happen, girl? Well, all I did was touch his robe…well, the fringes of his robe and then it was gone!”
The most wondrous thing about the whole event (to me anyway) is that Jesus doesn’t tell the people to forget touching His robe. He doesn’t correct her testimony. He doesn’t sit the crowds down and say “Listen here. The power is in me, not the robe. The robe is nothing. She got that part wrong… oh and by the way it’s Lord Jesus, not Jesus”. He doesn’t silence her voice. He honors it and gives power to it. Matthew tells us that as many as touched his robe were then healed.
There are a lot of implications for this truth, too much to write about here. For that reason I’ll be recording Episode 0 of the I am Barabbas podcast with greater detail. But this is where I am starting. With a woman and a robe. Why? Because here is where the faith that Jesus Authored and Perfected separates itself from the one that Christendom has been writing and here is where Healing begins.
