Wednesday, July 4, 2012

The whole truth


2 Samuel 1:1, 17-27
Psalm 130
2 Corinthians 8:7-15
Mark 5:21-43


My body conforms pretty closely to the ideal norm of our society: fair-skinned and blue-eyed, male; above average height, on the lean side of average as far as weight is concerned; equipped with all the usual parts, and all of them is reasonably good working order; on the younger side of middle-age; heterosexual.  Much as I might wish to deny it, the fact that I, as a body, conform to this ideal type, makes my life easy.  In ways that I’m not even conscious of, and usually take for granted, my body grants me the social status of a complete person, someone who is entitled to participate, to have a voice, to be taken account of and respected. 
So it sounds almost ludicrous for me to say that even I have moments when I feel that my body has let me down.  An untimely and overly productive sneeze, a cut from my razor that won’t stop bleeding, the effects of illness, injury, or exhaustion, an uncontrolled outburst of anger or grief—there are so many ways that my body can suddenly turn vulnerable, so many ways that the untidiness and unpredictability of being a body can trip me up.  More than anything else in my life it is my body that puts me at risk of feeling like less than a complete person, like an “other”, like someone who doesn’t count and who doesn’t belong.
What I have no experience of at all is being in a body that makes me vulnerable in this way all the time.  I don’t know what it’s like to have “otherness” stamped on my physical body so that I am continually on the outside, always at risk of being ostracized and ashamed, never fully belonging.  But this is a common human experience.  How many of us struggle every day with the body that we have been given, or the body we have become, because it feels like an obstacle to living as the person we know ourselves truly to be?  

The gospel lesson today talks about just such a person, a woman whose body bleeds endlessly.  For twelve years she has endured this hemorrhage, which according to the law code of Leviticus, makes her ritually and socially impure.  For twelve years her body has been an object of disgust and a source of contamination for others.  She has squandered everything she has on doctors, on painful and humiliating treatments, in the hope that someone will be able to bring an end to this nightmare, and yet it has only gotten worse.  Still she hasn’t given up.  One hope remains—she has heard of a traveling man of God, one Jesus of Nazareth, who has the power of healing, and she goes looking for him.
Never mind that when she does find him, he is surrounded by a great crowd of other afflicted persons, each one clamoring for his attention.  Never mind that he is on an urgent errand of mercy on behalf of a rich and important man.  “If I could only touch just his clothes,” she says to herself, “I will be made well.”  She presses forward in the crowd, promiscuously touching other people with her unclean body, not asking permission, not waiting to be noticed, but taking matters quite literally into her own hands. 
What happens next illustrates the other side of the paradox of being in a body.  It is true that our bodies are what mark us off as different from others.  They are what leave us vulnerable to illness and old age, to stigma and violation, and to death.  And at the same time, it is only through our bodies that we can touch and be touched by others.  Our most profound experiences of belonging and connection—holding a newborn child, kissing a lover, eating, drinking, and laughing in the company of friends, stroking the hand of a dying parent, even those moments of solitary contemplation in which we connect with the depth of our own being—all are experiences of the body. 
In the gospel story Jesus doesn’t lay his hands upon the woman to heal her.  He doesn’t say a special prayer to his heavenly Father.  He doesn’t say or do anything.  Nothing happens that anyone else in the large, noisy, fast-moving crowd can see.  But she knows, by a feeling in her body, that the blood has stopped leaking out of her.  And he knows, by a feeling in his body, that healing power has gone out of him into an unknown stranger.  It is his body that heals her, of itself, body speaking to body, through the power of her faith and his wholeness. 
It is an experience that stops him in his tracks and he demands to know her.  He calls her out of the anonymity of the crowd that was her means of approach and her hiding place, and there is no question of not responding.  She prostrates herself before him and she tells him the whole truth.  She tells him the truth of her affliction and her isolation, of the long years of suffering and shame.  She tells him of her body’s desire to be healed, and the hope and determination that led her to him.  She tells him of her journey of salvation from being the object of other people’s loathing to becoming the free subject of her own healing.  And Jesus confirms the truth that she has spoken and sends her on her way in the peace of God.

The whole truth of the body is hard for people to accept.  Those who need things precise and correct don’t know what to do with it.  Many religious people, both in 1st-century Palestine and in 21st-century America, approach the mysteries of the body—and the female body in particular—with a mixture of desire and fear and contempt.  That is why they are so obsessed with sexual morality, with maintaining clear and defined separation between the sexes, with keeping women’s bodies under the control of the patriarchal family, religious authority, and the state.   
And yet the Gospels tell again and again these stories of Jesus enjoying social and even bodily intimacy with women, and not just any women, but exactly those women whose bodies are most threatening--foreigners, adulterers, prostitutes, the woman with the hemorrhage, the dead daughter of Jaïrus.  It is as if in Jesus God were fiercely and playful embracing the paradox of embodiment, the whole truth of it, that what opens us to wounding is also what heals us, that what sets us apart from others is also what makes it possible for us to connect. 
This chapter of Mark, with its two intertwined stories of female bodies, echoes the story of Jesus’ own body.  In the bleeding woman, we can see the bleeding Christ, his abandonment, his humiliation, his scourging, but also his invincible desire for healing and peace.  In the events at the house of Jaïrus, we can hear the voice of the angel at the tomb on Easter morning, “Do not be amazed; you seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified.  He has risen, he is not here.”   
These echoes of passion and resurrection remind us that the salvation that comes through Christ is the salvation of our bodies.  It is the freedom to be our true selves, fully expressing the unique individual subjectivity that God has given to every one of us, which includes the characteristics of our bodies.  It is the courage to choose a life connected with others, willing to touch and be touched, with respect and compassion for all beings that share this embodied life with us.  It is the discipline of giving ourselves to acts of concrete solidarity with those whose bodies’ just demands are denied.   It is life in the promise that even death does not negate the hope of the body, but is like the planting of a seed that bears the abundant fruit of new and fuller life , glorified life, life that is, in some fashion that we cannot conceive of with our human limitations, life in a body.

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About Me

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Petaluma, California, United States
I am a priest in the Episcopal Church, and have been (among other things) an organic farmer and gardener, and a Zen monk. I have a lifelong interest in social and spiritual renewal on the basis of contemplative discipline, creative nonviolence, and ecological practice. In recent years my work has focused intensely on the responsibility of pastoral ministry in the humanistic, evangelical, and catholic branch of Christianity known as Anglicanism. I'm married with a daughter, and have three brothers and two parents.