Common Sense
The woman with the flow of blood knew that if she touched the fringes of Jesus’ garments she would be saved. She’d been fighting her disease for twelve years; it had become a battle. Her faith, the gift from heaven of “establishment,” that is, being rooted and grounded in knowledge of the Lord’s goodness, had shown her the truth: salvation clung even to Jesus’ ritual fringes. As we consider the way we live now, many wonder if the real disease is fear. When we are in the grips of it, good decision-making is impossible. When confronted by any threat, even one far more terrible than coronavirus, the first order of business is to confidence and calm. But panic has the nations of the earth, in its deadly, heady, delusional grip. But let us consider the woman with the flow of blood. She had common sense, or perhaps we should say, “communion” sense. With the Lord, in communion with him, all fear is cast out. But what of those times when we are felled by fear? The Bible tells of a man who had fallen among thieves but was saved by the Good Samaritan. So often, we are those fallen by the wayside, felled by the thief called Panic. The Good Samaritan sees us where we are, helpless, and has compassion and saves us. The Good Samaritan is the Holy Spirit who restores us to common sense, “communion sense,” communion with the Lord and with one another, partaking of the bread and the wine as the disciples do, as the seventy elders did at Sinai. The first order of business for us is to seek after communion with the Lord. Our constant prayer, should be that all fear would be completely driven from our land and destroyed from the face of the earth and that instead, the Holy Spirit would come in and restore us to common, “communion,” sense.
