One of the crowd

And [Jesus] came down with them and stood on a stretch of level ground. A great crowd of his disciples and a large number of the people from all Judea and Jerusalem and the coastal region of Tyre and Sidon came to hear him and to be healed of their diseases (Luke 6:17-18a)

You don’t really understand this scene until you imagine yourself amid the crowd, craving Jesus’ touch, knowing you have needs you cannot meet.

It is better to speak of need instead of needs, however. What niggles deeply within is the hunger to feel truly and wonderfully alive, to be lifted beyond the sadness of our mortality and be touched by something, by someone who fills our being with a life that transcends the life we are living.

This is why they clamored after Jesus. They craved the mysterious something that was in him, aching to feel and know it within themselves. Surely, they suffered diseases and maladies of all sorts, but beneath these was the gift and burden of their humanity crying out for food that satisfies the hunger they could not name.

Our humanity begins to die within us when this desire is lost to the despair of believing there is nothing more to life than getting the best we can out of the years we have.

They are my brothers and my sisters, these souls who crowded near Jesus, who hungered to touch him, who wanted him to hear their voices and turn and see them and reach out his hand.

When you feel this, when you see that hand reaching out and pulling you into an embrace, it is then you understand what words cannot convey. You know the heart of the One who is the heart of God for whom your heart hungers.

David L. Miller