In the Gospel there is a remarkable account of a "healing inside a resurrection." It is about the raising of the daughter of a synagogue ruler ("the ruler of the synagogue") and, as it were along the way, the healing of a woman who for many years had suffered from an unnamed illness involving bleeding. At first glance these events have nothing in common except that they happened at the same time. In reality, however, they are united by one common feature that is not immediately obvious.

Here is a woman who is afraid to admit that she touched Jesus. Today such fear may seem hard for us to understand, but in those days it was fully justified: the issue is bleeding, and according to the norms of the Torah a person suffering from bleeding is considered unclean; touching such a person defiles. Meanwhile the woman touches the Teacher, risking defiling Him if... if only she is not healed. Here it is either healing, or a very serious offense bordering on a crime. Something similar is true with the ruler's daughter: while a person is alive, he can and should be treated, if that is possible, but if he has died, touching his body defiles.

Traditional Yahwist ideas, briefly stated, come down to the understanding that a person is defiled by any contact with anything that diminishes the fullness of his life. Whenever, in modern language, entropy is visibly triumphant, a person is defiled because participation, whether voluntary or involuntary, in such a process is incompatible with another process that is always unfolding in God's presence: the process of sanctification.

Jesus, however, is able each time to turn entropy back, to force it to retreat, even where it seems to triumph irreversibly, as in the case of physical death. For the Kingdom there is no defilement at all: the very presence of its power, its breath, destroys defilement, making the process of becoming defiled impossible in principle. Such is the surpassing life of the Kingdom that Jesus bears in Himself. The only way to be defiled before Christ and the Kingdom is to remain within the space of one's own deliberate sin, but that is another story.

The question of the meaning of life has troubled people probably since the fall itself. Before, before the catastrophe, this meaning was defined by God, and the person accepted God's definition as his own. If questions arose, the One who could give the fullest, clearest, and truest answer was always near. The problem, as can be seen, appeared when fallen humanity forgot how to listen to God and hear Him. Then this fallen person began asking himself and others questions that are strange for someone living a normal and full spiritual life: Who am I? Why am I in this world? What awaits me next? What should I do, and how should I live? And is there any meaning at all in all of this?

Why these questions arose is, in general, understandable: one of the main illusions that grips fallen humanity is the illusion that the part of creation seen in its fallen state, often without noticing anything else, is the only thing that exists. Nature is real; spirit is a chimera or at least something secondary in relation to nature. In principle, of course, there is nothing surprising in such an aberration of perception: the fallen person himself is nature first of all, and spirit only secondarily, at best. And this anomaly is perceived as the norm, as the only possible norm.

But the sacred writer reminds us that a person is by no means intended merely to be part of nature. In the natural world, a person is a guest, though not an accidental one. But he is at home only in the Kingdom of God. Of course, one can forget the Kingdom and live as though it did not exist, as though natural, physical life were the only and final reality. But then there is a great chance that nature, with its cycle of births and deaths that empties human life of meaning, will truly become for us the only and final reality. And we will never notice the Kingdom.

The story of the healing of the woman who suffered from bleeding shows us the Kingdom, and the relationships that bind its inhabitants to one another, from a somewhat unexpected angle. In principle, of course, there is nothing surprising in the fact that a person who comes into contact with the Kingdom is healed: in the Kingdom there can be no place for sickness or death. Something else is interesting: exactly how it happens. Of course, no sharing in the Kingdom is possible without real, living relationship with the One who brought the Kingdom into the world, without trust in Him. But in the story of the woman healed of her bleeding, that relationship was still somewhat one-sided.

That the woman who was healed trusted Jesus completely is obvious: otherwise she would never have dared to touch Him, since people suffering from such illnesses were considered unclean from the Torah's point of view, and their touch defiled those whom they touched. It took very great faith in healing to dare to do what the woman mentioned in the story did. And, of course, it took boundless trust in the One to whom she was turning for healing.

Jesus heals the woman who touched Him without even noticing her. He only senses that someone has touched Him, not the way people accidentally brush against one another in a dense crowd, but seeking healing, touching Him in order to share in that power of God whose fullness He bears in Himself. At the moment of healing, Jesus not only does not pay attention to the woman healed by touching Him, He does not even see her.

As we can see, it also happens that a person takes the first step toward the Kingdom on his own, by his own will, taking the initiative into his own hands, so to speak. It happens, then, that the Kingdom is "taken by force" in this way too. But, of course, in this case the first step is always accompanied by a responsive step toward the person by the One who brought the Kingdom into the world. It cannot be otherwise: relationships are always mutual; they are never one-sided. And Jesus, as we can see, accepts the woman who dared to do what far from everyone would dare to do. And He tells her that her faith has saved her, her resolve and trust in Him. The very things without which one cannot enter the Kingdom.