and read...shake the dust--a reflection on scripture by Andrew Watson http://andrewstevenwatson.blogspot.com/2011/01/shaking-dust.html
This is a story about a woman. In her time she had a condition that made her worse off than many of the marginalized in our culture today: the fat girls, the wimpy picked on boys, the addict. This woman had bled continuously for twelve years. Blood, most things bodily in fact, are deemed in her culture unclean and therefore pushed aside. So I imagine this woman’s life was one of deep loneliness, abandonment, and pain. Just like the poem we heard: the woman became subject to the many things, people, systems etc., that cast individuals, groups of people, whole nations even, into the abyss of darkness. Like the “school-yard wimps, and childhood bullies who tormented them…Like the former prom queen, and the gym class wall flowers and the twelve-year-olds afraid of taking public showers,” this woman is all to familiar with the dark and limiting identities we are given and take on in this world.
The woman lived in a world of dust, hazy, dark, the dust seems to fall around her as she lives; the dust traps her in her own internal apocalypse.
She was unworthy. She was cast away. No doctors could fix her; no one could shake off her dust. So it piled around her, it covered her in sooty bitterness, it clung to her body and she could not shake it.
And so after twelve years of misery, after twelve years of hopelessness, after twelve years of failed medicine, she heard about a man. She heard the town talking about what the neighbor town talked about and that town heard talked about: a man who performed miracles. Some said he raised people from the dead, some said he once transformed water into wine, some said he walked on water.
And from the talk about the talk about the talk, she found out he was coming to her very city. That day, crowds of people gathered in the streets. Like overbearing mothers dragging their leashed-children at Disneyland to get the best spot for the parade, the city gathered along the dirt streets.
The dust flew in ankle deep clouds from all of their commotion, from their pushing, from their desperation.
The man’s name was Yeshua. He was not beautiful; he was dirty, skinny even as if he ate little. Yet, regardless, he was followed by friends. Though his feet were crusted in dirt, the dust did not stop the crowd from gathering to see if the talk about the talk about the talk, was really true.
As Yeshua entered the town square, crowds pushed around him, mobbing him from every side, while his close friends tried to protect him.
The woman, the bleeder, the one who lost hope of a healer and gave up to darkness and mud, stood up. From her stasis under a store awning, she rose. She ran next: running— pushing—running. Parting the crowd aside as if she were an NFL linebacker. Yet they overcame her.
She fell to her knees.
The mob stomped her, stepped on her hands. She’s not more than one who bleeds: stompable—disposable—less than human.
Yet with a bruised eye and scratched up knees, she claws her way through the legs and past the feet of the layers and layers and layers, pushing through the crowd to reach the man she heard about.
With each hand forward she thought, desperately, “he is my only hope, my last hope….if a don’t make it to him then….”
After an adrenalin surge of clawing and crawling the woman looked up.
Though one row of people stood in front of her, she could see through their legs and arms and in between their morphing-wall-bodies, the man.
She reached her hand out through the legs of a spectator. Her middle finger brushed the heel of the man, Yeshua. He took more steps: step-stepping-step.
“I have failed she thinks, I failed.”
“Who touched me?” A voice cried out: Yeshua, the man. Everyone stopped; the mobbing, the stomping, the desperate glances to see a miracle, they halted.
“What do you mean? Everyone is touching you!” Said on of Yeshua’s friends.
Jesus took a step forward. Silence. The first layer of people cleared his path, stumbling backward as if a great light had blinded them.
There before him, before Yeshua, the woman kneeled. Our story’s woman, the bleeding woman: defeated, hopeless, in a dusty inner-apocalypse.
“Did you touch me?” He said, looking down at her.
She was terrified she could not speak. He kneels down.
“Master, I am sorry, I just thought if I could touch you then I- well you see…”
The scripture says Jesus stayed and listened to the woman’s story. I imagine that wasn’t a flash of time either; twelve years; twelve years of pain, darkness, and dust caking onto her soul like cement, yet Yeshua looked her in the eyes and heard it all.
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