Monday in the Fourteenth Week of Ordinary Time, July 6, 2020

Matthew 9:18-26

While Jesus was speaking, an official came forward, knelt down before him, and said, “My daughter has just died. But come, lay your hand on her, and she will live.” Jesus rose and followed him, and so did his disciples. A woman suffering hemorrhages for twelve years came up behind him and touched the tassel on his cloak. She said to herself, “If only I can touch his cloak, I shall be cured.” Jesus turned around and saw her, and said, “Courage, daughter! Your faith has saved you.” And from that hour the woman was cured. When Jesus arrived at the official’s house and saw the flute players and the crowd who were making a commotion, he said, “Go away! The girl is not dead but sleeping.” And they ridiculed him. When the crowd was put out, he came and took her by the hand, and the little girl arose. And news of this spread throughout all that land.

Very many of the miracles St. Matthew describes involve Jesus contracting what is unclean and making it clean.  A little earlier, Matthew spoke of Jesus touching a leper, and then of his willingness to enter the house of a Gentile, and of various exorcisms he performed.  Jesus is even shown forgiving sin quite openly.  Matthew’s main focus is on the new law of Jesus, and he presents accounts of his miracles in order to underline the power of this law.  By recounting the Lord’s encounters with the unclean, Matthew also shows how the new law does what the old law could not do: make clean the unclean: to forgive sin.  

In this reading we have two interwoven accounts in which Jesus cleanses.  In these two miracles Matthew shows us something which Jesus has not done before: Jesus heals a woman suffering from an impurity having to do with blood, and he raises a dead person to life.  

To begin with, an official, whom St. Mark, in his more detailed account, tells us is a synagogue official, comes to Jesus and kneels before him.  The posture of kneeling in the Ancient Middle East was assumed only by slaves before their masters.  The official’s action is extreme, but so is his request: “My daughter has just died. But come, lay your hand on her, and she will live.”  Only once before in human history had a person been raised from the dead.  Centuries before, Elisha the Prophet had gone into the house of a Shunammite woman and raised her dead son to life again (2 Kings 4, 32-35).  The faith of this unnamed synagogue official was truly great.  Without a word, Jesus followed him to his house.

On his way, a woman with an infirmity marked by a flow of blood made her way through the crowd, thinking only to touch the Lord’s cloak.  Her estimation of his power was such that she had only to do this and she would be healed.  This scheme also saved her the embarrassment of coming before the Lord and the crowd openly.  Her infirmity had cost her twelve years of her life.  The uncleanness that resulted from her condition prevented her from becoming pregnant both because of its nature but also because of the law, which prohibited intercourse with a woman suffering from this.  The isolation that resulted must have seemed like a living death to her.  We can see a hint of it in her very desperate attempt to touch Jesus.  Surrounded by the crowd on the narrow streets of the town, she would have touched numerous people on her way to him, rendering them unclean as well.  If she were found out, the consequences would have been severe.  St. Mark gives a much more expanded account in which Jesus does expose her infirmity to the crowd.  Here, Matthew is content to summarize the event, simply telling us that Jesus turned around and told her, “Courage, daughter! Your faith has saved you.”  Jesus shows us here what faith is: to believe when there seems no point in believing.  And he shows us what it brings.

Similarly, Jesus rewards the faith of the official by raising up his daughter.  When he reaches the house, the hired mourners, including the flute-players, have assembled.  We see their utter lack of faith or even of the respect due to a man widely held as a prophet.  They represent the world, secular thinking, and a belief in death that is stronger than their belief in life.  They themselves are the servants of death.  Jesus wastes no time with them and sends them away abruptly.  He will do the same when he rises from the dead, casting the guards of his tomb aside like broken pottery.  The girl is not dead, the Lord says, “She is asleep.”  She does not belong to death and it has no claim on her, so long as the Lord is near. 

“He came and took her by the hand.”  The Lord enters into our uncleanness, into our mortality, and heals us from the inside.  He is not afraid, he makes no grand gestures.  He takes her by the hand as though to take her with him.  He does not need to touch her, but he does so in order to remind us that there is no uncleanness in our lives that he will not touch in order to rid us of it.  “The little girl arose.”  In the story of Elisha notes above, the Prophet lay on top of the boy and breathed into his mouth, and the boy’s body “began to warm”.  The implication is that the boy needed time to “recover” from death.  Here, the girl rises straightaway.  We can imagine how the breaths of those who witnessed this event must have caught in their throats at this moment.  But there is no noise, no fireworks, no music.  The little girl got up as though she had been asleep and had now awakened.  It could not have appeared more natural.

Jesus seems to have raised only three people from the dead during his public life.  Why did he not raise more?  He was asked to do this only three times.

Today is the Feast of St. Maria Goretti, a young Italian girl who was killed while defending her purity from a neighbor.  She repeatedly told him that what he wanted was a sin, and he stabbed her fourteen times.  She did not want to sin, and she was trying to keep the man from sinning, too.