Jesus said, “Someone touched me; I know that power has gone out from me.”

Then the woman, seeing that she could not go unnoticed, came trembling and fell at his feet. In the presence of all the people, she told why she had touched him and how she had been instantly healed. Then he said to her, “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace.” – Luke 8

I think what I enjoy the most about being around the good folk at our church is how much that I am learning, constantly, as I interact with the following: God’s word, inspirational messages, thoughtful teaching, honest conversation around good questions and the promptings of the Holy Spirit.

There is more, of course, but those five elements are key.

So Sunday morning I was attending a class where the leader – Jim – is really good when it comes to posing thoughtful questions. We are using an Adam Hamilton book to steer us, and the conversation turned to Jesus healing people. People who are blind, diseased, paralyzed, lame…

It was then that an idea popped into my mind; I shared it with the class so I wouldn’t lose the thought.

“In the Jewish religious culture of the time,” I said, “what was it that kept people away from worship? Specifically, what cut them off from approaching God?”

“Sin?” someone suggested.

“Being considered unclean,” another person added.

“That’s right,” I said. “Certain things disqualified people from worship. Being ceremonially unclean; contact with blood; disease; deformity; leprosy; any perceived defect such as being blind or deaf or lame or paralyzed or mentally ill.”

It was as if the people who need God’s grace and mercy the most were – and often are – the ones most profoundly cut off (including folk like the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8 whose unclear gender identity meant that he was not even allowed to enter the Court of the Gentiles).

“So,” I said, “when Jesus heals people he is essentially removing a barrier that stands between them and access to the holy. As if he is foreshadowing what his death and resurrection will achieve.”

I have honestly never thought of it this way before! That Jesus’ acts of healing not only emerge from a heart of compassion and of love, they are symbolic of what he offers all of humankind, regardless of the petty discriminatory practices of Jewish law – and that is a way to be reconciled with God. (Philip made this abundantly clear to the Eunuch, who found out that the Good News of Jesus eradicates any barrier erected by ignorance and prejudice)

The Good News of Jesus eradicates any barrier erected by ignorance and prejudice

There is nothing better to share with people, Rebekah suggested in her sermon this week, than our own story of reconciliation. Not deep theology, not spot-on doctrine, but how we ourselves have seen the evidence of God’s grace and mercy in our lives.

Jesus has removed every barrier that separates people from God. “For I am convinced,” Paul writes in Romans 8, “that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Certainly not the religious rules that people invent; not the judgements we so happily pronounce; not the boxes we try to force people into; not the fences we build to protect our kingdoms and powers; not our tendency to be fearful of anything we do not easily understand.

“None of that,” Paul suggests, no way no how. “In all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loves us.“