05 - Touch

CHAPTER V

TOUCH

“Touch is the sense which love employs/’ It means the annihilation of distance between one who loves and that which he loves, so that mere nearness is replaced by contact. Our sense of the significance of touch finds expression in such phrases as “getting into touch/’ or “living in touch” with people. They stand for sympathetic contact, the sympathy which seeks contact, and does not keep others “at arm’s length.” Children learn it in their mothers’ laps, and are never content to be merely near those they love without actually touching them. The Old Testament uses the word “touch” mostly in an adverse sense. It stands for an aggression of an enemy rather than the approach of a friend. It occurs in the many prohibitions of contact with unclean things and persons. It is one of the forbidding terms of the Mosaic law. When the apostle rebukes those who would convert Christianity into a sort of Judaism, he charges them with setting up ordinances, “Handle not, nor taste, nor touch” (Colossians 2:21). The only favorable sense the word has in the Hebrew Scriptures is where one in authority touches an inferior to confer power. So in Isaiah’s vision in the temple, one of the seraphim flew to the prophet, and touched his mouth with a live coal from the altar. Similarly, Jeremiah tells us that ** Jehovah put forth his hand, and touched my mouth; and Jehovah said unto me. Behold, I have put my words in thy mouth.” So Daniel says of Gabriel, that “he touched me, and set me upright. And he said. Behold, I will make thee know what shall be in the latter time of the indignation.” The spirit of the new covenant is that of nearness, while that of the old was that of distance. The latter laid its emphasis upon the separateness of God and man, that it might guard the elect people from idolatry, and from the unseemly familiarity with God which leads to idolatry and even worse things.* Its lesson was the awfulness

* There is permanent need of both modes of the divine disclosure. Through our human frailty we are liable to lose sight of the greatness of God, in the sense of his nearness and his helpfulness. It has been remarked of the Japanese converts to Christianity that they are too apt to think of God simply in relation to their own needs, and with too little awe of his divine majesty. But, as Mr. Jowett of Birmingham says, it is only through communion with a great God that men become great Christians. Reverence lies at the foundation of a godly character, and the lack of it is one of the sins of our time. It is of reverence (theosebcia) that the apostle writes that it “is profitable for all things, having promise of the life which now is, and of that which is to come.” The word is not found in any of his earlier epistles, but it occurs nine times in the first to Timothy, and once in the second, and in that to Titus. Did this enrichment of his vocabulary grow out of experiences among his converts, such as are recorded about the new Christians of Japan? and the transcendence of God; and that truth must be learned before the world was prepared to enter the next stage of its education, and learn of his immanence and his nearness.

I. The Incarnation opens the new stage, and its symbol is the touch by which the Son of God expresses his love to men. He “lived in touch” with those he came to save. He got as near to them as possible, although this shocked many who cherished the spirit of separation, from which the Pharisees took their sectarian name. They murmured, saying, “This man receiveth sinners, and eateth with them.” They said in Jericho, “He is gone in to lodge with a man that is a sinner.” The Pharisee, in whose house the sinful woman washed his feet with her tears, said to himself, “This man, if he were a prophet, would have perceived who and what manner of woman this is that toucheth him, that she is a sinner.” They thought he was breaking down the distinction between good and bad among men, by failing to keep the bad “at arm’s length,” as they did. They even suspected his own holiness in seeing the company he kept, and applied to him such proverbs as “Touch pitch and be defiled;” “Birds of a feather flock together.” Nor is it clear that we have the right to cast stones at them, for what would we have felt when we saw him accepting invitations from men whose occupations we thought disgraceful and immoral, and sitting at meat with men and women whose characters were unquestionably bad? Would we not be afraid of compromising our reputations if we did so? Would we not talk of lowering the truth, or of effacing the line of distinction between us and the world? But he let nothing stand between himself and those he was seeking to save.

II. In the simplest and most literal way he ministered by his touch to human needs. When Simon’s wife’s mother lay sick of a great fever, “he came and took her by the hand, and raised her up; and the fever left her” (Mark 1:31). When he came to the house of Jairus, the ruler of the synagogue, he stopped the noisy lamentations over the dead girl, and “taking the child by the hand, he saith unto her, Talitha cumi... Damsel, I say unto thee. Arise. And Straightway the damsel rose up, and walked” (Mark 5:31-42). As he left the house of Jairus, two blind men besought him to heal them.

**Then touched he their eyes, saying. According to your faith be it done unto you. And their eyes were opened” (Matthew 9:29). When they brought him a deaf and dumb man in the coasts of Decapolis, *’he took him aside from the multitude privately, and put his fingers into his ears... and touched his tongue... and saith unto hnn, Ephphatha, that is. Be opened. And his ears were opened and the bound of his tongue was loosed, and he spake plain” (Mark 7:32-35). At Bethsaida, a blind man was brought to him, “and when he had spit on his eyes, he laid his hands upon him,” and gave him sight (Mark 8:23). As he came down from the Transfiguration, they brought him the demoniac boy, for whom his disciples could do nothing, and the evil spirit rent the boy until “the more part said. He is dead. And Jesus took him by the hand, and raised him up; and he arose” (Mark 9:26-27). When Peter smote off the ear of Malchus, servant to the high priest, Jesus “touched his ear, and healed him” (Luke 12:51). In none of these cases, so far as man can judge, was it necessary for him to touch those he healed.

He did fully as much in other cases, where he did not use his hands in this way, and in some cases he healed those who were at a distance (Matthew 8:13). It seems to have been as the expression of his sympathy with the sufferers that he touched them, just as we lay our hands on the shoulders of our friends when we want to speak to them out of our hearts.

Especially noteworthy are two cases, in which he incurred ceremonial defilement by this use of his hands. One is that of the son of the widow of Nain: “He came nigh and touched the bier” (Luke 7:14), although he thus insured legal defilement (Numbers 19:11), for having to do with a dead body. More striking is his healing of the leper, as he came down from the mountain of the great sermon: “He stretched forth his hand, and touched him’* (Matthew 8:13), although the law of Moses shut the leper out from all contact with other men (Leviticus 13:45), break this law was to incur uncleanness. Never shall I forget hearing Dr. Alexander Maclaren preach on this miracle: “Why did He touch him, even before he healed him? Because he saw that the first need of that poor soul, shut off for years from his kind, was sympathy — that, even before healing. He must have been a loathsome sight, and probably more so to our Lord’s senses than to those of other men. But he put forth his hand and touched him, as the expression of his pity and sympathy. And was not that what he did in the Incarnation itself, drawing near to us in our utter defilement, taking hold of us, as he did of that poor leper, putting forth that gracious and mighty hand to touch us?”

III. This view is confirmed by his use of his hands for other gracious purposes than healing. When the mothers brought the little children to him, ’’he took them in his arms, and blessed them, laying his hands upon them” (Mark 10:16). It was a visible expression of that interest in childhood, and love of children, which is notable in the gospel story. His every word about them, except perhaps his rebuking parable about the children who would not play at either wedding or funeral (Matthew 11:17), is one of joyful affection.

Along with this in spiritual beauty is the scene in the upper room, where he ate the passover with his disciples. When they came in, there were the ewer full of water, the towel, and the basin. It was some one’s work to wash the feet of the company from the dust of the highway, if they were to enjoy the feast without distraction; but none of them would. One looked up at the ceiling, and another out of the window, pretending they did not see the ewer and the basin. They made for their places at the table, each of them thinking it beneath his dignity to stoop to such a service, and finding the best reasons why some other of the Twelve should do it. Then the Master arose, poured the water into the basin, and girded himself with the towel, and stooped to serve them with the loving touch of a cleansing hand. It was the truest humility, which means getting down to the ground (humus) because God has something for one to do there that cannot be done anywhere else.

IV. As love evokes love in return, so our Lord’s touch encouraged others to touch him. In Galilee, “wheresoever he entered, into villages, or cities, or into the country, they laid the sick in the market-places, and besought him that they might touch if it were but the border of his garment: and as many as touched him were made whole” (Mark vi:56; Matthew xiv:36). An outstanding instance of this is the woman who came behind, him in the throng and touched the hem of his garment, and was healed of the disease which had been weakening and impoverishing her for twelve years. But it was out of himself, and not out of the garment, that the power had passed which wrought the cure. The hand got nothing, and the garment gave nothing, but her faith had brought her into contact with the Saviour, and thus made her whole.

Apart from demands upon his power to heal, his friends show their affection by touching him. The woman which was a sinner breaks through the bonds of pharisaic propriety and follows him into the house of Simon, the Pharisee, “and standing behind at his feet, weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears, and wiped them with the hair of her head, and kissed his feet” (Luke vii:38). Dr. Melanchthon W. Stryker suggests that there is as much of affection as of doubt in the demand of the apostle Thomas, “Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe” (John 20:25).

He thinks this was an expression of his sincere love for the Master, which asked for the touch that is more intimate than sight. May we not say that the substance of the speech shows doubt, but the form of it affection? “That disciple, whom Jesus loved” especially, is the evangelist who records for us the saying of Thomas, and it recalls his own language in the opening words of his great epistle: “That which was from the beginning, that which we have heard, that which we have seen with our eyes, that which we beheld, and our hands handled, concerning the Word of life... declare we unto you also, that ye also may have fellowship with us: yea, and our fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ.”

V. When our Lord is about to pass from the region of sense to that of faith, he assures his people that they are to lose nothing by the change.

He will still be “in touch with them.” The Comforter is not to take his place, but to take what is his and make it known to them. What otherwise might have been mere facts of history in their memories, are to become the present, living truths of their Christian experience, and not theirs only, but of all who believe on him to the end of time. For the Spirit’s work is to make Jesus Christ more real to us than he was to those who saw his works and heard him speak.

Through his ministry, those years of our Lord’s ministry, with his sacrificial death and triumphant resurrection, become a part of all true Christians’ lives. The gospel calls upon us to “live in touch” with the God whom Jesus reveals as his Father and ours. We are not called to submission to a distant and unlovable deity, like the Allah of the Moslem; nor to a chilly adoration of a philosophic absolute, who can be described only in negative terms; nor to the worship of an infinite rabbi, such as the later Jewish theology presents. We are brought to a living communion with a gracious Friend and Father, whose love to us is reflected in the affection of all who have been dearest and kindest to us among men. He is nearer to us than these could be, nearer than our very selves. As F. W. Faber says, ’*God never is so far off as only to be near.” No language that does not break the bounds of our finite personality is too strong to express our closeness to him “in him we live, and move, and have our being.”

It is the Incarnation which makes this intelligible to us. The Old Testament presents God and man in contrast and antithesis, as many Christians still speak of them, though not in Christian fashion. Such language was necessary in the lower classes of God’s great school, because any other would have led men to error and idolatry. It is not without its uses still, when the thought of the nearness of God obscures his awfulness to us. But God after speakuig ’’to the fathers in the prophets in many parts and in many manners, hath in the end of the day spoken unto us in his Son” (Hebrews 1:1-2) fully and clearly; and that not so much by what the Son said, as by what the Son is. In him our human nature is exhibited in its true character, that which was in the thought of God when he said, “Let us make man in our own image.” Our humanity stands up in Jesus Christ, a thing pure, spotless, and splendid; and it is in him that we are to see and estimate it, and to be changed to that image by the vision and the fellowship (2 Corinthians 3:18). We are to regard as inhuman all that falls below “the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.” It is not true that “to err is human;” nor should we speak of “the infirmities of human nature,” but with Paul, of the infirmity of our flesh; that is, of the perversion of our human nature by sin.

VI. Working “in touch” is the method of the kingdom of God. Jesus shrank from no contact with the men he sought to save, although he must have felt their degradation as we never can feel it. There was no “submerged tenth” too deeply sunk for him to follow it into the depths, that he might lift it up to goodness and forgiveness. Men have tried to do his work while standing afar from those they sought to benefit; but to little result. The greatest who have followed in his footsteps, have followed him in this as in other things. The Moravians who offered to become slaves, that they might be allowed to reach the negro slaves in the West Indies, and who made their abode among the lepers, knowing what that must end in, that they might reach that class, were illustrations of his method, and of his unresting pity for lost men. Our own generation has seen a notable amount of return to his method, even among those who are not working in his name. Social reformers are discovering that they can do little good for people of any sort, while they hold them at arm’s length. “I have learned,” says a worker in one of the University settlements, “that you can get access to the people who need you only by living with them. They will not come to you; but Jew and Gentile will make you welcome if you come to them. Our meetings for their benefit are a failure. Our personal intercourse with them, man to man, has been promising great good. It is of no use to come once or twice to see them; you must live with them, if you are to do anything for them.” So Thomas Chalmers gave up his wealthy parish in Glasgow, and took charge of one in the “wynds,” that he might get near to the poor, and find some way of relieving their wants without pauperizing them by either public and unloving assistance, or heedless giving! So Caroline Hill took charge of the wretched court in East London, which rarely had missed mention for a day in the police reports, and by living among its people was able to change it into a place of sobriety, thrift, and honesty. “Not alms but a friend,” is the motto of the new charity, which Chalmers began, and which Miss Hill revived. The man or woman who would help the poor must give himself to them. Anything short of that is cheap, and likely to be mischievous. The touch of a loving hand may be worth more than all the “gifts with which you may fill it.

We are learning to cease patronage of the poor, and to follow Jesus Christ in his ministry of touch and sympathy. The love which does not shrink from contact with what often must be repulsive, is that which follows in his footsteps, and interprets him to men. But the love must be there. The loveless gift, as Chalmers said, degrades the recipient. Nor is anything more repulsive to the poor than to be approached with insincere phrases, and shallow professions of interest in them and their needs. No eyes are keener than those which have been sharpened by want, and they have learned to meet insincerity with insincerity. None who approach them in the spirit of the divine Master need fear being misconstrued or repelled.