As Jesus was on his way, the crowds almost crushed him … [A woman] came up behind him and touched the edge of his cloak … (Luke 8:42, 44).

In our current Won’t You Be a Neighbor? series, we’re looking at the ways God “neighbors” us, and how that needs to shape us in our relations with our neighbors.  This week, another Jesus-story about being a neighbor to folks you weren’t supposed to be a neighbor to.

This week’s passage (Luke 8:4-56) opens with Jesus in the midst of a crowd.  An important man of the community, “a ruler of the synagogue” named Jairus, begs Jesus to come and heal his dying daughter.  Off they go – but slowly, because of the crowd of Jairus’s neighbors.

Our story focuses on Jesus’s encounters with two women: Jairus’s dying twelve-year-old daughter and a twelve-years-sick woman.  Unlike Jairus, neither woman is named (but do sneak a peek at verses 48 and 54).  

As crowd-hampered Jesus slowly makes his way towards Jairus’s home, suddenly, he stops: “Who touched me?”  Well, obviously, all kinds of people have been jockeying and jostling, as crowds do and as Peter is quick to inform Jesus.  But this wasn’t a random bump or a jostle; this was a touch, a significant touch.  Both Jesus and the woman immediately recognize that something important just happened.  

It was highly socially inappropriate for a rabbi to touch or be touched by a woman to whom he was not directly related, and certainly not in public.  Further, the woman’s bleeding disorder would have made her ceremonially or ritually “unclean,” unable to participate in the life of the local synagogue.  Further still, that social world understood “uncleanness” to be transmissible, “catching,” contagious.  This is why the woman wanted to remain anonymous, and was frightened to come forward.  She desperately longed for healing, but she knew she would be risking getting herself and her Healer into a lot of social hot water were her “close contact” with Jesus made known.

Later, at Jairus’s home, Jesus again violates “purity boundaries”: the daughter has died (see verses 49 and 53), death is the ultimate form of “uncleanness,” so his touching the girl (Jesus “took her by the hand”), would have made him “unclean.”

Except that it didn’t.  In either case.  “Uncleanness” didn’t get transmitted to Jesus, but healing was transmitted by him to these two neighbors!

Neighbor – one who is near to you.  Jesus deliberately put himself within “touching distance” of these two neighbor women.  One brought near to him by a desperate father, one brought near by a desperate desire for life.  Jesus was more than willing to be a neighbor to them both!

How is Jesus inviting you to get within “touching distance” of some specific neighbor/s? How could you be praying about that … and what is a first step in their direction you might take?