To Touch His Hem

What a risky touch of Jesus teaches us about becoming approachable

By the time Jesus had done but just a few miracles, word was getting out. The crowds were descending on the man from Nazareth. It was clear: someone special was in their midst. On one occasion recorded in Luke 8, the swelling crowds who’d been hearing about this carpenter/miracle worker were clamoring to break through to Jesus as he traveled through an unnamed town near Capernaum. No longer could Jesus live in quiet obscurity as he had his first thirty years. The masses had put the pieces together.

Luke’s story in vss. 40-48 begins with a man named Jairus who had traveled to Jesus to beg for the life of his daughter who was nearing death back in nearby Capernaum. Joining the anxious father to where the girl lay, the rush of the crowds followed and swelled. “The crowds,” Luke records, “almost crushed him.” (v. 42) Interestingly, Luke here employs the same word “crushed” (Gr. sumpnigo) he had used earlier in the chapter. Jesus is being “crushed” just as the good seed had been “choked out” by the worries of life in the Parable of the Sower (Lk. 8:1-15). The crowd wasn’t annoying to Jesus. The crowd appears to have become physically dangerous to Jesus. The chaos was overwhelming.

Perhaps, in part, Luke is trying to evoke within his reader an appreciation for the pressures Jesus was facing at this moment in his life. Everyone wanted to be near Jesus. But, out of this crushing, choking crowd, there is but one whom Jesus notices and Luke selectively points out. A woman—described as having been bleeding for 12 years—has come with the crowd to Jesus. Yet, she does something different than the throngs of people swirling about Jesus. The woman touches the hem of Jesus’ robe, saying to herself, “If I can just touch his hem, then I will be healed.”¹ She immediately experiences such a transformative change in her body that she instantaneously knows she’s been healed. In a sea of people wanting to get close to Jesus and touch him physically, she appears to be the only one who has come to touch him with her faith.

Something was different about that kind of touch. Jesus notices, simply asking: “who touched me?” (v. 45)

At first, nobody claimed responsibility. After all, the whole crowd had been pushing up against him. Nor does the woman identify herself. But Jesus does not relent—insisting that the ones who have touched him identify themselves. Luke passingly comments, “Seeing that she could not go unnoticed, came trembling and fell at his feet.” (v. 47) She soon tells Jesus why she touched him. And his word to her is one of blessing. Not only had she touched him. It was her faith that led her to do so. “Your faith,” Jesus says, “has healed you.” (v. 48)

What are we to make of this story?

Image by Seth Doyle

I remember reading a story by a pastor named John Frye about a time he was in seminary in the 1970s. In the daytime, Frye studied at Dallas Theological Seminary. But he worked as an orderly at the local hospital during the night. Frye recounts how, one evening, a woman burst into the emergency room battered, bruised, and appearing disheveled. She explained to him that her husband had drunk too much, beaten her up, and thrown her on a cement floor. Soon, the doctor came in, attended to her cuts and bruises, and quickly departed. He never returned. No questions were asked about how she was doing inside. His profession allowed little more than that. Frye was overcome with an epiphany as she gathered her things to leave. A physician could doctor her body. But, he wondered: who will doctor her soul?”²

The miracle we see playing out in Luke’s gospel is not merely about a woman who desires (or experiences) merely physical healing. Her whole self was being healed as she got to look Jesus in the face and have him bless her, have him give the glory for the healing to her, and how faithful she was for reaching out, risking, and grasping. Had he kept moving through the crowds to get to Jairus' house, perhaps she would still have been healed—but we may never have known about it. She likely would have kept it to herself, afraid of reproach. But Jesus announces the healing and blesses her. This is one of the distinct characteristics of the ministry of Jesus. He cures bodies. But he also heals souls. He feeds mouths and touches hearts. Like the Great Physician that he is, he never has to pick one part of a person to restore. He wants all of us. He welcomes all of us. And he is the kind of God that we should want to approach and touch.

Jesus always saw the deeper things in a person. He saw what the crowds could not see. He doesn’t focus on the crowd—he sees a woman with faith. In part, this is what I think Luke is getting at. Everyone is coming to Jesus because Jesus has shown himself to be approachable. Their experience had taught them that this man desires people to go to him in their sheer state of vulnerability.

Jesus was approachable to people in their needs.

This is one of the brilliant aspects of the relational genius of Jesus Christ. As life teaches us, not everyone is approachable like Jesus was. Some, it seems, go out of their way to communicate their desire to be left alone. I feel that. Most introverts do. Jesus shows me that even a man who carved out much time for silence and prayer could still be approachable. Our experience with some people continues to reinforce that they are not the kind of people who should be entrusted with our presence. Nor is everyone approachable in a healthy way. There’s toxic approachability whereby individuals bend their very soul to the people around them—losing themselves in the midst. Rather than being true to their own true identity while making space for others, they lose themselves by bending their essence to others.

True, authentic, and godly approachability (the kind modeled by Jesus) is to continue to be your God-ordained self and yet go out of your way to hospitably make space for others who have come to you.

In fact, that Jesus was as approachable as appears to have been is in line about what we have learned about his compassion. Jesus felt pain on behalf of other people who were lost and hurting (Mt. 9:36). And it was that compassion that made room for others to approach and come near. I love how New Testament theologian Hans-Helmut Esser defined compassion: compassion “makes the unbounded mercy of God visible... [It] expresses the attitude of complete willingness to use all means, time, strength, and life, for saving at the crucial moment.”³ The essence of compassion is not just help. It goes further. Compassion, Esser is saying, is offering the path toward being “saved at the crucial moment.”

That is what being an approachable person, like Jesus, is. Being an approachable person is being a compassionate person in the right moment. It is mercy on the schedule. It is kindness with a sense of intentional rhythm. It is being open to others at the very moment that they need us to be approachable.

Even more beautiful is that Jesus does not weaponize the woman’s risk at approaching him. He knows who touched her. And he let her come near. He meets her desire with abundant, lavish generosity and grace. Sadly, for too many women in Christian culture, their approach to embrace their God-ordained glory is met with disdain and dismissal—even skepticism. How many women long to give to the body of Christ their gifts, their lives, their hopes to do works of ministry only to find in far too many spaces that such an attempt at “asking” is wrongly perceived by leaders (too often, men) as “grasping” for power. This woman wants to be found in the arms of Jesus. And Jesus lets her. Her sacred request is being met.

I struggle with being approachable the way Jesus was. But the Holy Spirit wants to do a work in my life to be able to see the divinely inspired moments where I can extend compassion “at the crucial moment” it is most needed. Perhaps you do too?

Jesus invites us to be approachable as he was. What is most amazing is that even with a crushing crowd that threatened to choke Jesus out, he still managed to cultivate a willingness to let people come near. He did not allow the difficulty of that environment to keep him from compassion. Learning approachability will likely entail asking ourselves some hard questions. Do people feel they can trust coming near to me? Are you approachable? Even, Lord have mercy, the moments in our lives when we are tired, hungry, thirsty, late, and behind schedule? None of us is Jesus Christ. But we have some learning to do—to cultivate being approachable just as he is approachable.

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Thanks again for being a reader of the Low-Level Theologian. As you can see, this post is a one-off. Next week, I will offer the final in the “Relational Genius of Jesus” series we have been walking through. You can always find me wasting as little time as possible on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Or, check out my podcast with Dr. Nijay Gupta at Slow Theology. Remember that I have a book being released on April 29th entitled A Teachable Spirit: The Virtue of Learning from Strangers, Enemies, and Absolutely Anyone with the fine folks at Zondervan Reflective. As announced, I will lead a reading group through this book beginning on May 5th through Substack. All you need is to pre-order the book, let me know you did so here, and be ready to join us for the journey.

1. As recorded in one of the other synoptic gospels, in Mt. 9:21.

2. Frye, John, Jesus the Pastor: Leading Others in the Character & Power of Christ (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2000), 84–85.

3. Esser, Hans-Helmut, “Compassion,” in The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology, ed. Brown, Colin, vol. 2 (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1978), 600. I’m thankful for this reference in Frye’s helpful book.