Reflections from The Hill – Touch (Mark 1.40 – 45)

My oldies taught me that if something was too good to be true, it probably was. I became a sceptic overnight.

Then I started doing Church things because the best-looking girls went to the youth group and pretty soon I was in really deep, like getting ordained. I became a believer.

Then someone told me to read Mark’s Gospel and my world changed again: everything was ‘immediate’ or ‘now’ or ‘straight away’. I became insatiable.

It all sounds so simple: a sick guy says “If you want to, you can heal me”. Jesus says “’Course I want to. Be healed” and the once-sick guy walks away healed. It sounds too good to be true.

I’ve tried saying “Be healed” a few times in the privacy of my own home, on colds and man-flu and stuff like that. Never with leprosy. That’s high-level stuff, like cancer, but it wouldn’t matter if I had because, in the back of my head, a little voice keeps saying “If it’s too good to be true …”

Then I got crook myself, really crook. If you’d seen me, I wouldn’t have looked any different on the outside but I knew … I knew … I just knew, deep down, that the cancer cells were rushing through my veins and they were eating me away, gnawing at my vitals.

When someone gets cancer, one of the first things that happen is that people don’t come near them. By staying away, they will limit the chance of them catching whatever their friend has. Of course, they know it’s nonsense to think like that but they do it anyway, just in case.

So, it was a lonely experience lying in that post-surgical hospital bed, being visited by scores of people to the point that the staff had to physically keep them away but it wasn’t the numbers that was the problem.

Apart from the tender kisses of My Beloved and the regulatory jabs and constant poking by the staff, no one actually touched me. Talk about being a leper.

That’s why I get excited when I read that Jesus touched this bloke. Touched him. It would have to be one of the most profound yet so simple events ever recorded in Scripture. It’s up there with the greatest of them: the Resurrection, the Transfiguration, I reckon.

“Jesus touched him” stands alongside that extraordinary comment in the first chapter of John’s Gospel: “… and the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.” What is that, if it is not at least this: “Jesus touched him”?

Put up the finest words in Scripture and none of them can compare to “Jesus touched him”. There’s something about the touch of one person on another, skin on skin, that transcends worlds and ushers us into another realm altogether.

In that hospital, one day, someone did touch me. He’d heard that I was there but he could only stop a short while. He touched me. I might well have been touched by God. Don’t ask me about anything else.

I must admit, though, Trevor’s simple action that day raises many more questions that it answers, like ‘Why doesn’t God change things so that suffering is ended, violence is halted, war is outlawed, and justice is made to cover the earth as the waters cover the sea?’ I can’t answer these things easily.

What I do know is that, “Jesus touched him” is the hand of God placed on a world that He’s not about to give up and happens to be among the greatest motivators for service we’ll ever find.