Worth Reaching For

Mark 5:25-34

Phrases that spoke to me today:
• If I but touch his clothes, I shall be cured
• Immediately her flow of blood dried up
• Jesus, aware at once that power had gone out from him
• Daughter, your faith has saved you

Applying the Word to My Life:
Sometime around the year 326, an elderly woman arrived in Jerusalem looking for a piece of wood that had been missing for almost three hundred years. Her name was Helena. She was the mother of the emperor Constantine and according to the ancient tradition of the Church, she'd come looking for the Cross of Christ.

The place where Jesus had been crucified and buried was underneath a pagan temple. Helena ordered the site excavated, and workers found three crosses.

Three made sense. Jesus hadn't been crucified alone.

The problem was figuring out which one had been His.

The bishop had the crosses brought to a woman who was gravely ill. The first did nothing. Neither did the second. When she touched the third, she recovered.

That's how they knew.

That story should sound familiar. A suffering woman reaches out to touch something that had touched Jesus, trusting that touch could change what medicine hadn't. It was never the fabric that healed her. Her faith was reaching for Jesus through the fabric.

And that gives us a way to understand the Cross.

Wood doesn't heal anyone. Rome crucified thousands of people, and the other two crosses uncovered beside Christ's were made of the same ordinary material. Christians don't exalt the Cross because there's something magical about wood.

We exalt it because of who touched it.

The Cross had been an instrument designed to humiliate and kill. Then Jesus was nailed to it, His blood ran down it, and the thing Rome used to announce defeat became the place where God defeated death.

That's why Helena wanted to find it. She had a church built in Rome to house it — Santa Croce in Gerusalemme still stands today, with fragments from the True Cross inside it. Other pieces can be found in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, Notre-Dame in Paris, and Santo Toribio de Liébana in northern Spain. People still travel to see them.

The wood never became God. It became precious because God had touched it.

That same instinct is still alive today — it just looks smaller.

There's a famous Catholic Worker story about Dorothy Day and a priest who once used an ordinary coffee cup as a chalice at Mass. Afterward, Dorothy took the cup, kissed it, and buried it rather than let something that had held the Blood of Christ go back to holding coffee. The story illustrates an unmistakably Catholic instinct: items associated with holiness are set aside — we don't pretend afterward that nothing happened.

A chalice that has held the Precious Blood isn't treated like an ordinary drinking glass afterward. If the Precious Blood is spilled, we don't simply wipe it up and throw the towel in the trash. The vessels are purified, the linens are washed carefully, and the things that have come into contact with the Eucharist are treated differently because of what they have touched.

Not because the cup became God, any more than the Cross did. Because contact matters.

And maybe that shouldn't surprise us. Yes, we hear words and think ideas. But we also see, touch, taste, smell, and carry things in our hands. The same God who created us with bodies and senses also gives us ways to encounter Him through them.

The Church understands that instinct and points it toward Christ. A crucifix, a relic, or a piece of the True Cross doesn't contain some independent power. It gives faith somewhere physical to reach, just as the edge of a cloak did for the woman in today's reading.

The Cross is worth reaching for because Jesus was there.

My Response for Today:
Today I'll stop when I see a cross and remember the sacrifice that made it holy.