Twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost, Tone 7; The Holy Priest-Martyr Josaphat, Archbishop of Polotsk (1623); John the Merciful, Patriarch of Alexandria (619); Nil the Faster (430); Passing into Eternal Life (1950) of Blessed Hryhoriy (Gregory) Lakota, Auxiliary Bishop of Peremyshl and Confessor.
Ephesians 2:14-22; Hebrews 4:14-5:10; Luke 8:41-56; John 10:9-16.
Read Luke 8:41-56
Glory to Jesus Christ! Glory forever!
We live in an age that respects spirituality but sometimes does not put holiness in that category. It is sometimes characterized as an external preoccupation in contradiction to the cultivation of a spiritual heart.
Leviticus 15:19 commands that a person who touches a woman with “a flow of blood” becomes ritually impure. This is why the woman in today’s gospel reading admitted to touching Jesus only when she could no longer hide it. Numbers 19:11 commands that touching a dead body makes one “unclean.” Yet Jesus touched the dead girl and reassured the woman instead of rebuking her.
Jesus’ actions do not mean that he ended proper approach to God in his holiness. In Matthew 23:23 Jesus criticizes the Pharisees for emphasizing some aspects of the law while neglecting “the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy and faith; these you ought to have done, without neglecting the others.”
Jesus engaged in actions that rendered a person in need of cleansing before again approaching God in worship, not because he disregarded God’s law and holiness, but because he is the source of life and healing, the enemy of those forces of sickness and death.
The requirements of a sacramental spirituality are the way that Holy God has made for sinful people to have an intimate relationship with him and so become like him.
Hebrews 10:19-22 says, “Since we have confidence to enter the sanctuary by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way which he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.”
Bible References