On a free weekday the Church does not invent a new Mass. She takes up last Sunday’s again. So the priest goes back to the altar this Thursday with the same Epistle and the same Gospel he read on Tuesday: St. Paul’s letter about the body of our lowness, and the woman who touched the hem of Christ’s garment. Repeating a Mass is not a way of filling time. The Church reads the same page twice because one reading does not use it up.
On Tuesday we read these texts by the light of All Souls. They spoke to us of sleep, of graves, and of the hand that will raise the dead. Thursday asks us to read them another way. Since ancient times Thursday has been the day of the Most Blessed Sacrament, because it was on a Thursday that the Lord gave His Body to His Apostles. Among the votive Masses of the Roman Missal, the Mass of the Holy Eucharist is assigned to Thursday. Read on this day, today’s Gospel is a story about touching Christ’s Body, and about the power that goes out from it.
The calendar adds two more threads. Until Pope Pius XII simplified the rubrics in 1955, this week was the Octave of All Saints, and today would have been its fifth day. Even now November keeps something of that week of the saints. In many dioceses and religious houses the fifth of November has long been kept as the Feast of the Holy Relics, when the Church honours the bodies and remains of the saints she guards on her altars. The Roman Martyrology, for its part, commemorates today St. Zachary, priest and prophet, and St. Elizabeth, the parents of St. John the Baptist. St. Luke says of them that “they were both just before God, walking in all the commandments and justifications of the Lord without blame” (Luke 1:6). As we will see, that is exactly what St. Paul asks of us this morning.
I. Reformabit corpus humilitatis nostræ: the Epistle
“Brethren, be ye followers of me, and observe them who walk so as you have our model. For many walk, of whom I have told you often (and now tell you weeping), that they are enemies of the cross of Christ; whose end is destruction; whose God is their belly; and whose glory is in their shame; who mind earthly things. But our conversation is in heaven; from whence also we look for the Saviour, our Lord Jesus Christ, who will reform the body of our lowness, made like to the body of his glory, according to the operation whereby also he is able to subdue all things unto himself. Therefore, my dearly beloved brethren, and most desired, my joy and my crown; so stand fast in the Lord, my dearly beloved. I beg of Euodia, and I beseech Syntyche, to be of one mind in the Lord. And I entreat thee also, my sincere companion, help those women who have laboured with me in the gospel, with Clement and the rest of my fellow labourers, whose names are in the book of life.” (Phil. 3:17-21; 4:1-3)
Two ways of getting the body wrong. St. Paul’s warning is about people who make too much of the body. Their god is their belly. They “mind earthly things,” and their whole life is spent feeding appetites that will end in the grave. But Paul does not answer them by making too little of the body. He does not tell the Philippians that the flesh is worthless and that only the soul matters. He tells them the opposite: Christ is coming to reform this body, corpus humilitatis nostræ, and to make it like His own glorious Body.
The Church has always had to fight on both fronts. Against the sensualist she says that the body is not a god. Against the Gnostic and the Manichee she says that the body is not a prison or a mistake. It is God’s work, and it is meant for glory. St. Irenaeus spent the last book of his great work against the heresies (Adversus Hæreses V) defending this truth. The heretics of his day said that flesh could have no share in salvation. Irenaeus answered, in substance, that the God who made the flesh from the dust is able to raise it, and that the Word did not take a body only to throw it away.
The body of lowness. Humilitas, the word Paul uses, does not mean that the body is shameful. It means the body is low: weak, mortal, subject to sickness and decay. Paul knew that lowness well. He carried in his body the marks of the Lord Jesus (Gal. 6:17), and he wrote this letter from prison. But a low thing is not a contemptible thing. The Son of God took a body of exactly this lowness in the womb of His Mother. He hungered and was tired. He bled. If He did not despise it, we may not.
Members that are temples. This is why the Church honours the bodies of her saints. St. Paul tells the Corinthians: “Know you not, that your members are the temple of the Holy Ghost, who is in you?” (1 Cor. 6:19). A temple is still holy when the worshippers have gone home. The Council of Trent gives the reason for venerating relics in words that read almost like a commentary on today’s Epistle. The holy bodies of the martyrs and of the other saints, the Council teaches, were living members of Christ and temples of the Holy Ghost, and they are to be raised by Him to eternal life and glorified (Session XXV, De invocatione, veneratione et reliquiis Sanctorum). The relic in the altar stone is a body of lowness waiting to be made like the body of His glory.
St. Augustine makes the point with an image any family can understand (De civitate Dei I.13). If a father’s ring, or a garment he used to wear, is precious to his children after he has died, he says in substance, then how much more should we care for the bodies of those we love. The body is closer to a man than any clothing he wore. Augustine adds that the Lord Himself was buried with honour, and that the Gospel praises those who cared for His Body. Hold on to that image of the garment. The Gospel is about to give it back to us.
Be ye followers of me. St. Jerome had to defend the veneration of relics against a priest named Vigilantius, who called it superstition. Jerome’s answer is a good guard against misunderstanding. We do not worship relics, he wrote in substance to the priest Riparius (Epistula 109). We honour the relics of the martyrs so that we may adore Him whose martyrs they were. The honour passes through the saint to Christ.
Honouring the saints, though, means little without imitating them. Imitatores mei estote, Paul says, “be ye followers of me, and observe them who walk so.” Zachary and Elizabeth, whom the Martyrology remembers today, are named in Scripture for how they walked: “walking in all the commandments … without blame.” They were old, and childless, and they went on keeping God’s law in a long life that had not gone as they hoped. Then the angel came to Zachary in the Temple at the hour of incense. That is what Paul means by a forma, a model. The saints are not first of all wonder-workers. They are people who kept walking.
II. Virtutem quæ exierat de illo: the Gospel
“At that time, as Jesus was speaking these things unto the multitudes, behold a certain ruler came up, and adored him, saying: Lord, my daughter is even now dead; but come, lay thy hand upon her, and she shall live. And Jesus rising up followed him, with his disciples. And behold a woman who was troubled with an issue of blood twelve years, came behind him, and touched the hem of his garment. For she said within herself: If I shall touch only his garment, I shall be healed. But Jesus turning and seeing her, said: Be of good heart, daughter, thy faith hath made thee whole. And the woman was made whole from that hour. And when Jesus was come into the house of the ruler, and saw the minstrels and the multitude making a rout, he said: Give place, for the girl is not dead, but sleepeth. And they laughed him to scorn. And when the multitude was put forth, he went in, and took her by the hand. And the maid arose. And the fame hereof went abroad into all that country.” (Matt. 9:18-26)
Power through a garment. St. Matthew tells this story briefly. St. Mark adds a sentence that changes how we read it: “And immediately Jesus knowing in himself the virtue that had proceeded from him, turning to the multitude, said: Who hath touched my garments?” (Mark 5:30). Virtus, power, went out from Him. It went out through His Body and through the cloth that covered it. The woman did not touch His skin. She touched His clothing, the fringe that the Law commanded every Israelite to wear (Num. 15:38). And the power of the Word made flesh passed through that thread into her.
This is not the only time the Gospel tells us so. When the Lord came to the land of Genesareth, the sick “besought him that they might touch but the hem of his garment. And as many as touched, were made whole” (Matt. 14:36). After the Ascension the same power went on working through His members. The sick were laid in the streets so that even St. Peter’s shadow might fall on them (Acts 5:15). At Ephesus, St. Luke tells us, “even there were brought from his body to the sick, handkerchiefs and aprons, and the diseases departed from them” (Acts 19:12). Long before, a dead man thrown into the tomb of the prophet Eliseus “touched the bones of Eliseus” and “came to life, and stood upon his feet” (4 Kings 13:21).
St. Cyril of Jerusalem gathered these texts together when he taught his catechumens about the resurrection of the body (Catecheses XVIII.16). In substance, his argument runs like this. If the body of the prophet Eliseus could give life even after his death, then a power remains in the bodies of the just. If handkerchiefs and aprons that had only touched St. Paul’s body could heal, how much more will the body itself be raised? For Cyril, the veneration of relics and the hope of the resurrection are one faith. God does not give up on matter He has touched.
The hem and the humanity. The Fathers liked to read the hem of the garment as a figure of something greater. Several of them, and after them the Venerable Bede in his commentary on St. Mark, take the garment to signify the sacred humanity of Christ, the flesh in which the Word clothed Himself. The fringe is the lowest edge of that garment, the part nearest the dust. That is where the woman found Him. We cannot reach up to the Godhead by our own power. But the Son of God came down so far that the lowest thread of His humanity was within reach of a sick woman bent double in a crowd. Through the humanity she touched, the divinity healed her.
The crowd and the touch. St. Peter objected that everyone was touching Him: “the multitudes throng and press thee” (Luke 8:45). It was true. Many bodies pressed against Him and nothing happened. One woman touched Him with faith and was healed. Contact with the hem was not magic. The garment did not heal those who brushed against it by accident. It healed the one who reached for it believing. “If I shall touch only his garment, I shall be healed,” she said within herself, and the Lord told her afterward: “thy faith hath made thee whole.”
That is the Church’s whole doctrine of holy things in a single scene. Grace comes to us through matter: through water, oil, bread, wine, the laying on of hands. Grace comes to us also through the things made holy by contact with Christ and His saints. But we receive it as the woman did, by faith. Without faith, a man can stand at the altar rail, or kneel before a reliquary, and be just one more of the crowd pressing on Christ.
What was visible has passed into the sacraments. Today is Thursday, and the Church asks us to think of the altar. Pope St. Leo the Great, preaching on the Ascension, said in substance that what was visible in our Redeemer has passed over into the sacraments (Sermo 74.2). The woman of Capharnaum had to push through a crowd to reach the hem of His garment. We are given far more. At every Mass the same Body that she touched becomes present on the altar, and He gives it to us not to touch with the fingertips but to receive.
St. Ignatius of Antioch, writing on his way to martyrdom, called the Eucharist the medicine of immortality and the antidote against death (Ad Ephesios 20). St. Irenaeus argued that our bodies, fed with the Body and Blood of the Lord, are no longer simply corruptible. They carry within them the hope of the resurrection (Adversus Hæreses IV.18.5; V.2.3). That is the Gospel’s promise: “He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath everlasting life: and I will raise him up in the last day” (John 6:55). The woman was healed of a flow of blood. We are given His Blood, so that death itself will be healed in us.
He took her by the hand. The Gospel ends where Tuesday’s reflection lingered, in the ruler’s house. The Lord puts out the mourners and the flute-players, takes the girl by the hand, and she rises. On this Thursday it is worth noticing what He does not do. He does not heal her from a distance with a word, as He healed the centurion’s servant. He goes into the house and takes her hand. He touches the dead body, which the Law said would make Him unclean (Num. 19:11). Instead His touch makes it alive. The Body that gave power to its own garment gives life to the dead by contact. That is what He does at every Communion. He comes into the house, and He takes us by the hand.
III. The Mass as a whole: the power that goes out and the body that returns
St. Thomas built the Summa on the pattern of exitus and reditus, all things going out from God and returning to Him (Summa Theologiæ I, q. 2, prologue). St. Mark’s sentence about the healing puts that pattern in a single verb. Virtutem quæ exierat de illo: power went out from Him. That is the exitus. God’s power goes out from the Word into the world He made, and then, in the Incarnation, out from the Body He took.
It goes out through ever humbler channels. From the Godhead it flows into the sacred humanity. From the humanity it flows into the garment, the hem, the thread nearest the ground. After the Ascension it flows into the sacraments, into the members of His Body, even into the handkerchiefs of the Apostle and the bones of the saints. God’s power keeps stooping lower, until it reaches the body of our lowness.
And then it brings that body back. That is the reditus, and today’s Epistle names it: Christ “will reform the body of our lowness, made like to the body of his glory, according to the operation whereby also he is able to subdue all things unto himself.” The word operatio, energy or working, is the same power that went out through the hem. The same power that healed one woman in Galilee will on the last day raise every body that has received Him, and conform it to His glorified Body. The woman’s healing, the girl’s rising, the relics on our altars and the Host in our mouths are all one line, running from the Incarnation to the resurrection of the flesh.
That is why the Christian is neither a sensualist nor a despiser of the body. The man whose god is his belly has made matter his end. The Gnostic has made it his enemy. The Catholic receives it as a gift and an instrument, and waits for it to be glorified.
IV. The Collect and the Postcommunion
Absolve, quæsumus, Domine, tuorum delicta populorum: ut a peccatorum nexibus, quæ pro nostra fragilitate contraximus, tua benignitate liberemur.
“Absolve, we beseech Thee, O Lord, the offences of Thy people: that by Thy bountiful goodness we may be set free from the bonds of the sins which we have contracted through our frailty.”
The Collect names our fragilitas, our frailty. It is the same word in spirit as Paul’s humilitas. We have a low body and a weak will, and through that weakness we have tied ourselves in knots of sin. The Church does not ask God to pretend we are strong. She asks Him to loose the bonds by His kindness. The woman of the Gospel did not get well by her own effort. She had spent everything on physicians and grown worse (Mark 5:26). She was freed by goodness that came out to meet her.
The Postcommunion speaks directly of what we have received:
Quæsumus, omnipotens Deus: ut, quos divina tribuis participatione gaudere, humanis non sinas subiacere periculis.
“We beseech Thee, Almighty God, that Thou wouldst not suffer those to be exposed to human dangers whom Thou grantest to rejoice in partaking of things divine.”
Divina participatio, a share in divine things. The woman shared in His power by touching the edge of His clothing. We have shared in His Body itself. The Church asks that those who have touched so much may not be left to the dangers that wait for merely human things: sickness of soul, temptation, corruption, death. It is the prayer of people who have touched the hem and do not want to slip back into the crowd.
V. A word for practice
Examine. How do I treat my body: as a god, as an enemy, or as a temple? Do I feed it beyond need, or neglect what it needs to serve God? How do I treat holy things: the sacraments, blessed objects, the relics of the saints? Do I receive Holy Communion with faith, like the woman who reached for the hem, or carelessly, like the crowd that pressed on Him without touching Him? Do I walk, like Zachary and Elizabeth, in the commandments even when life has not gone as I hoped?
Do. Make a visit to the Blessed Sacrament today, for at least a quarter of an hour, and bring to Him whatever in you has been “flowing away” for years and has not been healed. If your parish or a nearby church keeps relics of the saints, go and pray before them, asking the saint to obtain for you what you most need. At your next Communion, prepare with the woman’s words in your heart: “If I shall touch only his garment, I shall be healed.” Keep a blessed object, a medal or a scapular, not as a charm but as a sign of the faith that reaches for Christ.
Pray. The Collect of the day, slowly. Then the Anima Christi, which asks the Body and Blood of Christ for exactly what this Gospel shows: Corpus Christi, salva me. Sanguis Christi, inebria me. “Body of Christ, save me. Blood of Christ, inebriate me.”
Aspiration. Si tetigero tantum vestimentum eius, salva ero. “If I shall touch only his garment, I shall be healed.”
Devote. On this Thursday, give thanks for the Holy Eucharist and make an act of spiritual communion at some point in the day. Ask St. Zachary and St. Elizabeth, who waited long and walked blamelessly, for perseverance in the ordinary keeping of God’s law. Ask all the saints whose relics rest in our altars to pray that we may one day share the glory their bodies await.
If you wish to go deeper: the Theology and Doctrine path treats the resurrection of the flesh and the qualities of the glorified body, the Church’s teaching against Gnostic and Manichean contempt for matter, and the doctrine of relics and the veneration of the saints as defined at Trent. The Sacred Liturgy path takes up the Thursday devotion to the Blessed Sacrament and the votive Mass of the Holy Eucharist, the place of relics in the consecrated altar, and the former Octave of All Saints. The Lives of the Saints path tells the story of St. Zachary and St. Elizabeth, and of the parents of the Forerunner. The Spiritual Practices path offers the practice of visits to the Blessed Sacrament, spiritual communion, and the right use of sacramentals.
Sources. Scripture is cited from the Douay-Rheims, with the Vulgate. The Fathers are given in paraphrase with their loci: St. Irenaeus, Adversus Hæreses IV.18.5 and V.2.3, and Book V generally; St. Ignatius of Antioch, Epistula ad Ephesios 20; St. Cyril of Jerusalem, Catecheses XVIII.16; St. Augustine, De civitate Dei I.13; St. Jerome, Epistula 109 (to Riparius); St. Leo the Great, Sermo 74.2; St. Bede the Venerable, In Marci Evangelium Expositio (on Mark 5:27). St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiæ I, q. 2, prologue. Magisterial text: Council of Trent, Session XXV, De invocatione, veneratione et reliquiis Sanctorum. Calendar: the Roman Martyrology for 5 November.
Si tetigero tantum vestimentum eius, salva ero.