Take Heart

“Take heart,” Jesus said to the woman who had the desperate but forbidden courage to risk a hidden touch of his cloak. Could there have been sweeter words to this woman’s ears?

For her birthday in April, I gave my daughter—and me—matching bracelets, with feathers. We’d been through a hard year, as some of you know. I also gave her Emily Dickinson’s poem “‘Hope’ Is a Thing with Feathers.” The first stanza reads,

“Hope” is the thing with feathers –

That perches in the soul –

And sings the tune without the words –

And never stops – at all –

The two stories in Matthew 9:18–26 are examples of hope as good as any I’ve ever known: first, the father who comes to ask Jesus to make his daughter live again, and the second this woman who had suffered for a dozen years with bleeding that would make her unclean in Jewish circles so that she was not only sick but ostracized. 

Let’s think about that father. Can’t you just see his friends and religious leaders shaking their heads at his denial of his daughter’s death? “She has died, my friend, and you must let her go. You know she has died, so there is no more hope to have her well again”—even saying, perhaps, “You blaspheme God who has chosen for her to die.” But I guess hope is the last thing to die in a parent’s heart, and he’d heard of this man Jesus who some said was the Messiah, and maybe, just maybe, what they said of him was true and there was a chance, just a chance… So, ignoring the voices that would have stopped him, imagine this man running to find Jesus and kneeling and saying that if Jesus would only come and lay a hand on her, his daughter would live. Maybe his friends have followed him and are trying to pull him away, muttering that he’s gone mad with grief, or, “Come, my friend, she is gone. It is over, and you must accept it.”

John says that Jesus “got up and with his disciples followed the man,” no questions asked. No, “Let me think about it. Now, how long did you say she has been dead?” No hesitation, though Jesus knew the man was a leader of the Jews and that he was no favorite of theirs. A cynic might say that this was an opportunity for Jesus to win a convert from among the Jewish leaders, so of course he went, not to miss such an opportunity. Surely such cynics were in the crowd, then and now.

But Jesus and his disciples, and the bereaved but determined father, headed to where the girl lay.

Before they could get there, a woman, also in great despair and need, managed to sneak a touch of the fringe of Jesus’s garment, believing that just that would be enough to heal her. Jesus was in a crowd, remember, so lots of people must have touched him in passing. But her touch was different, something Jesus felt. What made it different? What did he feel?

Had she touched his garment on the off chance that it might have some magic in it that could help her, would that have stopped Jesus right where he was? And remember the significance of the errand he was on. Even on such an urgent task—and we might be reminded that Jesus also did not hurry toward Lazarus as he lay dying—he stopped and said to her, “Take heart,” two words that echo down through the centuries all the way to us. “Your faith has made you whole.”

Jesus went on to the man’s house, where they found people gathered and other signs of mourning in progress. Jesus told them to go away, that the girl was only sleeping. Again the voices of derision and mocking rolling through the crowd. Jesus went in and simply “took the girl by the hand, and she got up,” John says.

If he had said anything to her, it might well have been, “Take heart, daughter,” or to her father, “Take heart, brother. Your faith has made your daughter whole.”

Think for a moment and recall the time of greatest need for healing in your own life….

Was it something long ago when you cried out in despair wanting God—wanting someone—to respond? Or was it last year when you found out that your bright, artistic, generous 11-year-old son will never fully recover from long Covid? That his brain won’t?

Was it five years ago in that car accident that left your daughter crippled? Was it when the doctor’s diagnosis painted right over your plans for your life? When the love of your life walked out on you in such a way as to close all doors? When you realized that the child you’d dreamed of all your life would never show up? When your own despair called you to the very edge of living and almost over.

I can’t imagine that there is one of us at all conscious or honest who won’t admit having experienced such a moment. When we’d have done anything to change it.

But would we? It’s easy for us to sit here 2,000 years after the fact and say that of course the father in today’s gospel believed Jesus could bring his daughter back to life. Of course that woman believed he could heal her long-term illness.

But take yourself, in your own moment—or moments—of crisis to that street that day, in that particular crowd of people, without all that we know now, and ask yourself whether you’d have both the hope and the faith, the deep trust, to risk asking for healing, to ask for the impossible. No, not even to ask but just to be there and know that a touch could be enough. Like this father, like this woman, what do you have to lose? Even so, even so… Few, if any, of us would have had such hope, much less faith, that touching the Holy would make much difference, that the Holy might extend a hand and restore life where there had been none.

For me, there was such a moment—others, too, but not so defining—in my early 20s, when I felt I simply could not go on. I was sitting in the backyard outside my apartment in Mrs. Pearson’s house in Jackson, MS, on soft spring grass, but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. Not enough. The colors of spring. The fragrant breeze. Every sound of a car passing, of children getting home from school—ordinary signs of life—all were irrelevant to me, sitting there, unreachable.

As I sat there and let myself give in to the depth of what I felt, the depth of my pain—no more pretending, no more going along with things—something came to me that I see now was like a hand taking mine and standing me back on my feet. For all my legitimate complaints about true harm the church had done to me as a young person, the thought of Jesus came to me. And that if Jesus was about anything, he was about hope. That even if all the Jesus stories were just that—stories—they still told of hope, that the human heart had believed in hope enough to create the stories because if the world would need anything to keep on turning it would need hope. In that way if no other, Jesus was real. And if Jesus was real, hope was real, and if there was such a real thing in the world as hope, there could be no excuse for not standing up and going on, if clinging desperately to the hope that hope was a real thing under heaven.

Excuse the words tumbling over each other right there, but that’s how it was, a quiet but sudden rolling away of the stone at the mouth of the tomb, the edge of light around it. Jesus saying as he did to Lazarus, “Come forth.” If I were to give Jesus words in that moment, they would be, “Take Heart,” as he took my hand and helped me to stand and go back to my life where nothing had changed, but everything had. Hope was an option I could live with, even if I could only believe in it abstractly at the moment. Hope was a real thing, if a thing with feathers, so I could not in integrity turn my back on it, as hard as everything was.

I imagine that’s how the suffering woman felt, her illness being one that would have made her an outcast, her suffering both physical and emotional, and here was one last chance for something to make a difference. She took the risk of breaking all kinds of rules in reaching out to touch Jesus as he passed, and Jesus said to her—feel him looking into your eyes as he says it—“Take heart.”

Take heart, my daughter. My son. My grandfather. My mother. Take heart. Your faith that you may not have even recognized as faith, in the darkness you slogged through, but just a fading flame of hope—your faith has made you whole. Do you think that woman ever forgot the sound of those words, of Jesus’s voice? Do you think that girl whose hand Jesus took and raised her to health and life ever forgot the feel of that hand on hers?

But we do forget, or almost. We experience such grief we think we’ll die. Or such pain that we can’t stand it another minute. Or such shock that we forget everything we know. Or even perhaps such reckless joy in someone or something that distracts us from everything else and stops us in our tracks for one brief moment? But something keeps us alive and carrying on, some—albeit dim—hope that we can survive, if only another minute or two, and then another one or two, and isn’t it hope that keeps urging us on? One more step. One more. You can do it. “Take heart.”

If we did truly believe such healing is possible—and remember our own healing—wouldn’t we be the first to extend a hand to someone else in need and help them rise to their feet? Wouldn’t we be the first to look past their uncleanness, perhaps to their thirst or hunger? To look past the teenager’s rudeness and insolence to loneliness and pain in his eyes? To offer a hand to that old woman fumbling with her change in the long checkout line at Safeway or Rite Aid, realizing what she already knows—that she is you in twenty years, or ten, or five?

Wouldn’t we say to that teenager, that homeless person, that old woman, that part of ourselves that has not yet risked stepping up for healing—wouldn’t we say the words that have kept us alive this far but may be words they’ve never heard, “Take heart?”