From the locum
Our Gospel reading for the 6th Sunday after Pentecost contains a story within a story, and both of them are powerful. What strikes me most about this story is not the healings, but who was healed.
In the hierarchy of first century Jewish life, a child was much less important than an adult, and a girl child even less so. The story has Jesus going out of his way to heal this girl, which tells us again that he was constantly working against the social system which classified some people as more important than others.
That idea is underlined in the story within the story. The woman broke all the rules by being out in public when she was haemorrhaging. She was considered ritually unclean and therefore should have kept to herself to avoid contaminating others. But she forces her way through the crowd, making everyone she brushes against unclean. And she touches Jesus.
Instead of yelling at her for making him ritually unclean, he says it was her faith that made her well. Not his action but her faith. Nor does Jesus go through the necessary ablutions to ritually cleanse himself, but proceeds right on to the house of an official of the synagogue who would have been very conscious of such rules.
Jesus kept colouring outside the lines.
Fr Michael