The Hem Of His Garment
Matthew 14:34-36
The portion of the Pacific Northwest where we are right now is an idyllic place to live. Surrounded by lush green forests teeming with wildlife and bounded by snow-capped mountains, the valley we live in is suffused with some of the richest soil in the world for growing almost every kind of non-tropical fruit, vegetable and other foliage in the world.
Our climate and our weather are ideal for growing peaches as large as grapefruits and sweet as you can imagine, strawberries larger than walnuts and as sweet and juicy as you could want, as well as apples and pears and other fruits and berries that are desired the world over for their appearance, their flavor and their high nutritional value.
Within minutes from here, a person can be walking along a trail in the woods, hiking a mountain path, or standing on the bank of a lake or a river. A journey of just a little longer can put a person on the sandy beaches of the ocean or the pollution-free air of a high dessert.
It is a wonderful blessing to live right where we are and it is an even greater blessing to be able to call this “home”. Wherever we go to visit, wherever we travel to, we can return to this oasis of beauty and bounty and find comfort and rest and pleasure.
When the disciples landed early that morning after their long night on the storm-tossed sea and their shocking encounter with Jesus walking on the water, they were exhausted. Physically, mentally and spiritually, they were in need of finding rest and a break from all the activity. Jesus had brought them to a place very much like where we are right at this moment.
Matthew 14:34 says, “When they had crossed over, they came to land at Gennesaret [geh NESS ah ret].”
Gennesaret was in the region belonging to the tribe of Naphtali and was only about one mile deep and three miles long along the shore of the Sea of Galilee that was also sometimes called the Lake of Gennesaret. This region has been known for millennia as a land that was exceeding fruitful, full of gardens and orchards. The fruit, the figs and the olives were said to be the sweetest, the largest and the best in every way.
It was a fruitful, peaceful land, surrounded by mountains and lapped at on one side by the waves of the life-sustaining Sea of Galilee. The disciples must have felt a great deal of relief reaching the beach there, especially after the night they had just had. I can hear their sighs of relief as they beach the boat and plop down on the sand. I can see several of them lying back and laying an arm across their eyes as they allow their muscles to let go of the tension of the night and its activities.
I have felt that way myself on many occasions, coming home here to this place and looking forward to the ease and comfort that are so much a part of every day life here. Have you also experienced that feeling when arriving home?
Imagine that you’re sitting down along the river with a picnic spread out on a blanket on the grass. The sun is shining, the breeze is very light, and you’re spending some very peaceful time with the people whom you enjoy the most in your life. You can feel the tensions of life ebbing away as the day unfolds. You feel your heart uplifted as you realize that the stresses and strains of the recent past are fading into the distance and you are in a place of peace and comfort. Got the picture?
Okay, now imagine that all of a sudden, a group of dirty homeless guys comes walking toward you, talking loudly and excitedly and pointing at the food you have spread out around you. What goes through your mind? What feelings start to rise up? How do you react?
Is your sense of peace and well-being shattered? Is your calm interrupted and thrown off kilter? Are you resentful of the intrusion and the disruption these people of suddenly caused?
You now have a picture of what the disciples get hit with when they reach this delightful country, so full of the promise of rest and peace and enjoyment. Instead of a haven from their troubles and a place for enjoying delightful things, they get hit with, “when the men of that place recognized Him, they sent word into all that surrounding district and brought to Him all who were sick (verse 35).”
Let’s look at that word translated “sick” for a moment. The word here is a different word than is used in Matthew 14:14: “When He went ashore, He saw a large crowd, and felt compassion for them and healed their sick.” The word “sick” in that verse simply means “infirm”. The word used in our passage today is a very concise, terse word that is translated as sick (8 times), diseased (2 times – Mark 1:32; 14:45), evil (2 – John 18:23; Acts 23:5 ), wrong (1 – James 4:3), cruelly (1 – Matthew 15:22), wretched or miserable (1 Matthew 21:41) and very ill (1 – Matthew 17:15).
I point this out because what I believe Matthew is describing here is not run-of-the-mill people with minor illnesses or sicknesses, but people who are in desperate situations, suffering from extreme conditions and debilitating circumstances.
Matthew is using the same word he used when he described the people coming to Jesus in Matthew 4:24: “The news about Him spread throughout all Syria; and they brought to Him all who were ill, those suffering with various diseases and pains, demoniacs, epileptics, paralytics; and He healed them.”
The end of this portion of Scripture says, “and as many as touched it [the hem of His garment] were cured.” This is not describing what today passes for “miraculous healing”, those things that are hidden and secret and may or may not be healings for ailments that are invisible and evidenced only by the words of the people involved.
More on that in a moment. For now, I want to take a closer look at verse 35. Notice that it says, “And when the men of that place recognized Him, they sent word into all that surrounding district and brought to Him all who were sick.”
Once the men who were there knew that it was Jesus in their midst, they got the word out to everyone in the surrounding area. Think about this for a moment. They obviously had heard about Jesus. In fact, many of them had probably heard Him teach and seen Him perform His miracles of healing and deliverance. Luke 5:1 tells us that there were great crowds listening to Him teach on the shore of that very place on a different occasion.
So here they have Jesus show up again, and they recognize Him right away. What do they do? How about this—perhaps this is a better question: what did they not do?
What they did not do was keep the news to themselves. They didn’t sit down, enjoy Jesus’ company and keep His presence a secret. No, they got up, got the word out, and they let everybody know! How about you? Is your relationship with Jesus pretty much a secret? Do you rest on comfort and expediency so as “not to offend”?
When we do that, we are making ourselves and our comfort more important than the person and work of Jesus Christ and more important than the desperate need that others have for Him and more important than seeing all those who are interested come and meet Him and get to know Him and receive what He has for them.
Does this sound hard? Does this sound unreasonable? Then so be it! We the comfortable need to get uncomfortable and start getting excited about who Jesus is and what He has done and what He desires to do in the lives of everyone we come into contact with. Because, if we are truly His, then everywhere we go, Jesus goes.
It requires a faith and a boldness that are risky – maybe as risky for us as it was for the disciples to get out of the boat the night before. We have to decide – be like Peter or be like the other eleven. Get out of the boat, walk by faith through the storm to Jesus, or sit and struggle and let our friends struggle, trying to make it on their own.
We are supposed to be excited about Jesus Christ, excited about His coming to redeem us, excited about His love and mercy, excited about His desire and ability to give us life and that abundantly. We are supposed to have the same sense of urgency about getting people to Jesus as those people in Gennesaret had that day.
Why do we hesitate? Why do we waiver? Why do we remain silent? Is it because we doubt that we know and serve the same Jesus? Is it because we doubt that Jesus has the same care and concern as He did when He physically walked this earth?
Is it because we doubt that He will use us to impact people like He uses other people? Is it because we doubt that He is still in the business of really touching the lost and changing their lives in every way?
Sounds to me like we may have more faith in what we doubt than we have in Jesus Christ. You may not like what I am saying – I’m not comfortable with it, either. I am just as prone to sitting back, just as prone to keeping my mouth shut, just as unlikely to interject the name of Jesus Christ into a conversation as any of the rest of you sometimes.
That doesn’t mean that it is okay. We really have to ask ourselves: What is it that is really important to me? Is it my comfort, my security and my personal well-being? Am I not willing to “lose my head” for Jesus? If not, then how can I presume to accept Him losing His life for me? Am I not to give as I have been given?
The people who put the word out about Jesus that day were well aware of what Jesus was capable of, at least as far as healing goes. They were also well aware of who around them needed that kind of healing. We are supposed to know the even greater truth that Jesus can still provide miraculous physical and mental healing today, but even more important, that He can provide the spiritual healing that every one of us needs and that is the ultimate healing, after all.
Let’s talk about the hem of His garment for a moment, too, shall we?
We saw this kind of response to Jesus before when we studied Matthew 9:20-22. In that story, a woman who had been bleeding for twelve years and had spent everything that she had on doctors and medicines and who knows what all else in order to be well had all but given up. Her one last hope was Jesus, yet she knew that she was defiled and unclean and could not approach Him openly for help. Yet her faith in Him and in His power was such that she was convinced that if she could just touch the hem of His garment, she would be healed. She took the chance – she risked it.
It happened just as she believed it would. And, even beyond that, the attention she knew she was not worthy of was given to her any way – Jesus turned and spoke directly to her, commending her faith in front of all those who were within earshot. "Daughter, take courage; your faith has made you well (Matthew 9:22a)."
Much has been made about the tassels of the Hebrew garments as proscribed by God to the Children of Israel in Deuteronomy 22:12 and Numbers 15:37-41.They were to do this to remind them of God’s commandments in the Law. Every generation of them has had at least one small group of orthodox Jews who have maintained this tradition.
Jesus comments about how the Pharisees and the Scribes enlarged their hems and added additional tassels to show how pious and holy they were and to advertise for the masses just how adept they were at keeping the Law and the traditions. He condemns this practice and the reasons for it in Matthew 23:5.
What I am convinced the point is of this statement being included in this story is that the sick and the diseased were well aware that they were unclean and unworthy of receiving help or kindness or even any attention from someone with the obvious power and authority that Jesus had.
Yet there was something in each one of these people that caused their awareness of their need and their hope in the power that Jesus had to also have hope and enabled them to reach out in the simplest and most unobtrusive way for His help, even if indirectly. Much of that, I believe, stemmed from the excitement of those who “put the word out”.
Jesus Christ is still in the business of miracles. But those miracles are not the flash and show that some would have us believe. Much of what passes for miraculous healing today is not real healing. When was the last time a deformed limb was suddenly made whole in clear and plain sight of witnesses? When was that last time that a person who had been blind from birth could suddenly see with clear and unobstructed vision?
Granted, there are places in the world where these types of miracles do take place in conjunction with the spreading of the Gospel. But these occur where all of the attention is on God, not on some self-proclaimed miracle worker on television. When it is truly to God’s glory and His alone, then legitimate healing miracles take place.
When people touched the hem of His garment that day, they were diasōzō (dee-as-odze’-o), which means “to save thoroughly, that is, (by implication or analogy) to cure, preserve, rescue, etc.: - bring safe, escape (safe), heal, make perfectly whole, save.”
The greatest miracle of all is a life that is transformed by the miraculous healing power of Jesus Christ as personal Lord and Savior. For that kind of miracle to take place in the lives of the lost around us and that God brings into our path, it needs to take place in our lives first, or we miss the opportunity to be a part of the life that He has called each of us to.
God has recently impressed on my heart that I need to change directions and return to the call that He originally placed on my life. I have been nibbling away at the edges of it for a quite a while, but I have always done so with a certain level of my own comfort and my own perspective on it held tightly in my grasp. I have not yet abandoned myself to it.
That has to change immediately. I am doing that today – right now.
I am at the place where I now must turn loose of all of that, and I have to do it now and without further delay. I must let that go and really delve into His call or I am guilty of living in disobedience.
God cannot and will not bless disobedience, especially when we become aware of it ourselves. We will be discussing this in greater detail in the weeks to come, but for now, let me share with you how God used the message of this passage of Scripture today to recall to me what He called every one of us to, and what He has called me to in a more specific way.
A gentleman by the name of Bill Hull has been a great help to me over the years and has challenged me many times in my walk and ministry. Recently, something he said challenged me again. Ironically, it came at a time when I was preparing to teach this particular passage. I’m going to summarize what he said and then share what God has been saying to me since then.
We have been taught, and many of us believe, that you can become and can call yourself a Christian without being a disciple. The word “disciple” occurs 269 times in the New Testament, while the word “Christian” occurs only three times, twice in Acts and once in 2 Peter. It is not a term that believers used in reference to themselves or each other.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it this way, “Christianity without discipleship is always Christianity without Christ.”
To be a true believer in Jesus Christ is to be a disciple of Jesus Christ. Every aspect of our lives is to make it obvious that we are an authentic follower of Jesus Christ. What that means is that we have fully arranged our lives around the practices of Jesus Christ. If we have not done so or are nor in the active process of doing so, then we are not and cannot claim to be a disciple of Jesus Christ. That means that we cannot honestly claim to believe in Jesus Christ.
Jesus says clearly in John 3:36, "He who believes in the Son has eternal life; but he who does not obey the Son will not see life, but the wrath of God abides on him." Faith and obey are used interchangeably by Jesus – one is equal to the other, they are not separate ideas or elements of being His.
To say we have faith in Jesus Christ means that we do what Jesus has said we are to do, that we do what He in fact did Himself (John 13:15), not just that we accept the doctrines of the Christian faith in our minds. True followers of Jesus Christ live as He lived, think as He thought, pray as He prayed, give as He gave, love as He loved, teach as He taught. True believers in Jesus Christ are students of His life and His teachings and obey what He has said and done and duplicate it out into their own lives and the lives of others. “Go and make disciples,” He said.
Faith without action is not faith at all. Faith in Jesus Christ is not checking off a list of what we agree with in our minds but what we are obedient to. Are we persistent in pursuing holiness and separateness in our lives? Are we persistent in pursuing God’s blessing for those who are not like us, those who crash our picnic, those who smell bad and act badly and those who have done evil to us?
Jesus’ brother James asks a penetrating question that is relevant for us today: “What use is it, my brethren, if someone says he has faith but he has no works? Can that faith save him? (James 2:14)” Our actions tell us, tell others and, most importantly, tell Jesus whether or not we having true saving faith.
We cannot do any works that earn us salvation. However, if we are truly saved, then our life will naturally overflow with the words, the actions, the works of Jesus Christ as a natural by-product of our faith.
In Luke 9:23-24, Jesus says this to everyone listening to Him that day, "If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross daily and follow Me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake, he is the one who will save it.” He says a great deal more and it would be a great benefit for you to invest some time reading and rereading that entire section.
The gist of what Jesus is saying there is that if anyone wants to be able to honestly claim that they are one of His followers, then they must be willing to surrender everything they hold dear, everything they love, everything that makes them comfortable for the cause and sake of Jesus Christ. Anything less is not faith; anything less is not discipleship; anything less is not authentic Christianity.
We are to be willing to not only welcome but to invite those who are in need of Him with open, loving arms no matter how disgusting their appearance or their behavior may be to us. We are to look upon them with compassion, not condemnation or contempt.
We are to be willing to suffer loss – in our families, in our places of employment, in our social circles and in the places where we have fun and enjoy life in order to speak the plain and simple truth that Jesus Christ is real, that everyone needs Him as Savior, and that we are proud to bear His name.
When we say, “Yeh, but…” we are attempting to negotiate with Jesus, we are not submitting; we are compromising, not surrendering; we are holding onto our own comfort instead of taking up our cross. That means we are being disobedient and faithless, not obedient and faithful.
As we saw in our passage today, the appearance of Jesus on the scene transformed lives. The appearance of Jesus on the scene impacted a community. The appearance of Jesus ministered to the needs of people in a real and personal way. The appearance of Jesus is supposed to occur wherever we go, wherever we live, wherever we happen to be and no matter what we are doing or who is around.
Every one of us sitting here today knows this deep in our hearts. Some of us are struggling to make it real in our lives. Some of us are struggling not to so much. Why do we struggle? Because it isn’t comfortable and we are still trying to hold on to our comfort levels, we are still afraid of what being a transforming presence in our world might cost us.
I have to ask the questions: What has Jesus done for me? How has He touched my life? Do people around me know that? Do even the handful of people with whom I have the most contact with outside of my immediate household know that I know Jesus and what He has done for me? If so, then I am like His disciples, I am like the people of Gennesaret who put the word out that Jesus was there and could meet their need.
If not, then you need to examine your loyalties. You need to examine your faith. Why are you not bringing people to Jesus that they might at least touch the hem of His garment? Why is that not the most important thing in your life?
Who of us is immune? Who of us is guiltless? Who of us is willing to right now – today – give up what we have been holding onto and really believe what Jesus has said and what he has commanded?
I have areas in my own life that I am laying at Jesus’ feet today. I have things that I need to let go of, to get my hands off of so that I can lay hold of the cross that Jesus wants me to pick up and carry. I have to empty my hands of what I am holding in order to lay hold of what He has for me.
I have pockets of selfishness and pride in my heart and mind that I need to confess and receive forgiveness for and be redeemed from so that I can live in obedience and faith like I never have before.
Jesus radically transformed the lives of the people He came into contact with. He still wants to be in that business today. He cannot do it, however, unless the members of His Body are radically transformed and we carry Him into every arena of our lives.
I am embarking on a dedicated, devoted path of being transformed and renewed in the call the Jesus Christ has placed on my life, my heart, my mind, my resources, my likes, my hopes, my dreams, my love, my agenda, my purposes, my plans and every nook and cranny of who I am and what I have.
Will you join me? Will you begin today to take steps along the journey of discipleship that Jesus Christ died to give us and that He has called us to?
As we go to prayer, open your heart to the Holy Spirit and listen to His voice. Ask His enabling to live by true faith and not by the fears that you suppose to be real. Then obey what you hear Him say; even ask Him for the courage to take the first step along the journey He wants you to make. Jesus has already walked this path; He will show you the way.
Touch the hem of His garment and be made well; be made diasōzō.
Let’s pray.
