NOTES for Luk 8:45

A strange reaction at first glance: on the one hand, a multitude of people pressing from every side, yet this crowding is, as it were, not noticed; on the other hand, the touch of one woman longing for healing becomes noticeable at once... Meanwhile, if one thinks about it, there is nothing strange here. It has long been observed that a person is nowhere so lonely as in a large crowd. Even when that crowd is quite dense. One would think that everyone is pressed against one another, the closeness is complete, but it turns out that the closeness is only physical, and there is no other kind. Apparently Jesus experiences the same thing in a tightly packed crowd.

Only, unlike us, He is completely unconcerned with accidental touches caused by the density of the crowd. It is as if He does not feel them at all; for Him they are, as it were, not there. This is understandable: what matters to Him above all is personal relationship with those who are nearby, and where there is no such relationship, there is nothing to speak of and nothing to feel, even if a crowd is pressing all around. Jesus apparently perceived it as an impersonal mass in which one cannot make out an individual person, because the person in a crowd usually does not see himself either, unless he makes a special effort to do so. And although outwardly the crowd's interest was connected precisely with Him, with Jesus, in essence there was no one in that crowd truly interested in Him. An excited expectation of a miracle does not count: by itself it does not yet make a person a self-aware personality. The woman longing for help and healing, and therefore for personal communion, is different. She does not merge with the crowd. She remembers herself and, at least in part, is aware of herself. Through the negative, through a problem, through a sickness that until then had been incurable, but she is aware.

Sadly, in the fallen world it is often precisely through the negative that a person begins to become aware of himself; many cannot be awakened in any other way. And when someone touches Jesus consciously, striving for a personal and completely concrete relationship with Him, understanding what he wants from Him, He perceives the one who touches Him precisely as a person and not as part of the crowd. Then healing is possible, then that power of God, which Jesus constantly senses within Himself, begins to act, and He feels this power acting through Him. And the one seeking healing receives what he sought: he has found the One who can heal him.