The Kingdom Movement

A Literary & Pastoral Study Guide to the Gospel of Matthew

The Inspiration of Matthew,

by Caravaggio

On the King's Errand

Devotional Reflections on Matthew's Gospel

Jesus Heals the Outcast Woman:  Mt.9:20 – 22  

^9:20 And a woman who had been suffering from a hemorrhage for twelve years, came up behind him and touched the fringe of his cloak; ²¹ for she was saying to herself, ‘If I only touch his garment, I will get well.’ ²² But Jesus turning and seeing her said, ‘Daughter, take courage; your faith has made you well.’ At once the woman was made well.

          At times it amazes me how Jesus reaches out to those who I would think are very far away from him.  The hemorrhaging woman was ‘unclean’ by the standards of Jewish custom, and had to stay away from the rest of her community.  She was an outcast.   Author Anne Lamott would have certainly been regarded by religious people as an outcast.  Yet Jesus reached out to her.  Here is her story:

“I didn’t go to the flea market the week of my abortion.  I stayed home, smoked dope and got drunk, and tried to write a little, and went for slow walks along the salt marsh with Pammy.  On the seventh night, though, very drunk and just about to take a sleeping pill, I discovered that I was bleeding heavily.  It did not stop over the next hour.  I was going through a pad every fifteen minutes, and I thought I should call a doctor or Pammy, but I was so disgusted that I had gotten so drunk one week after an abortion that I just couldn’t wake someone up and ask for help.  I kept on changing Kotex, and I got very sober very quickly.  Several hours later, the blood stopped flowing, and I got in bed, shaky and sad and too wild to have another drink or take a sleeping pill.  I had a cigarette and turned off the light.  After a while, as I lay there, I became aware of someone with me, hunkered down in the corner, and I just assumed it was my father, whose presence I had left over the years when I was frightened and alone.  The feeling was so strong that I actually turned on the light for a moment to make sure no one was there – of course, there wasn’t.  But after a while, in the dark again, I knew beyond any doubt that it was Jesus.  I felt him as surely as I feel my dog lying nearby as I write this.

“And I was appalled.  I thought about my life and my brilliant hilarious progressive friends, I thought about what everyone would think of me if I became a Christian, and it seemed an utterly impossible thing that simply could not be allowed to happen.  I turned to the wall and said out loud, “I would rather die.”

“I felt him just sitting there on his haunches in the corner of my sleeping loft, watching me with patience and love, and I squinched my eyes shut, but that didn’t help because that’s not what I was seeing him with.

“Finally I fell asleep, and in the morning, he was gone. 

“This experience spooked me badly, but I thought it was just an apparition, born of fear and self-loathing and booze and loss of blood.  But then everywhere I went, I had the feeling that a little cat was following me, wanting me to reach down and pick it up, wanting me to open the door and let it in.  But I knew what would happen:  you let a cat in one time, give it a little milk, and then it stays forever.  So I tried to keep one step ahead of it, slamming my houseboat door when I entered or left.

“And one week later, when I went back to church, I was so hungover that I couldn’t stand up for the songs, and this time I stayed for the sermon, which I just thought was ridiculous, like someone trying to convince me of the existence of extraterrestrials, but the last song was so deep and raw and pure that I could not escape.  It was as if the people were singing in between the notes, weeping and joyful at the same time, and I felt like their voices or something was rocking me in its bosom, holding me like a scared kid, and I opened up to that feeling – and it washed over me.

“I began to cry and left before the benediction, and I raced home and felt the little cat running along at my heels, and I walked down the dock past dozens of potted flowers, under a sky as blue as one of God’s own dreams, and I opened the door to my houseboat, and I stood there a minute, and then I hung my head and said, “F--- it:  I quit.”  I took a long deep breath and said out loud, “All right.  You can come in.”

“So this was my beautiful moment of conversion.”[1]

          Jesus called this fairly irreverent, rather immoral, ‘unclean’ woman to himself, just as he once called the symbolically ‘unclean’ hemorrhaging woman to himself.  We may have value judgments that we place on the people Jesus loves.  Let’s submit those judgments to him, and let him replace it with his love for them.  We don’t know to whom he will make an appearance.