People believe in the power of touch. If you doubt it, just go here for a list of monuments around the world believed to bring good luck to those who touch them. There’s even greater significance in touching or being touched by people of fame or power. We experienced it firsthand here in Eugene as people crowded around Ashton Eaton at a local Safeway store after he set a world record for the decathlon in the Olympic trials here.
There’s a sense that some power or virtue is communicated when we come in touch with famous, powerful and successful people. That sense is certainly at work in our text this week, Mark 5:21-43, in which Mark sandwiches a story of a woman who reaches out to touch Jesus in the middle of the story of a man who desires Jesus to come and touch his sick daughter. In both cases, contact with Jesus is instantly healing.
Which all raises the question for us of how we might come in touch with Jesus in our own time and circumstances? That’s the sense which is at the heart of all real worship, the desire to touch and be touched by the Lord.
That’s why God was gracious enough to give us the tangible, touchable grace of Jesus’ continuing presence in the Sacrament of Holy Communion. We can’t reach out our hands to the hem of His garment, but we can take in our hands and put to our lips His Body and Blood through the bread the cup of His Table.
May our gatherings always we graced with that blessed sense of the presence of our Lord, especially as we come to the Table.