The centerpiece of today’s Gospel is Jesus healing the hemorrhaging woman. Having a flow of blood for twelve years meant that anyone with whom she came in contact would be considered unclean. She couldn’t, in any meaningful sense, participate in the ordinary life of her society. The afflicted woman in this episode is a model for approaching Jesus. While crowds of people were bumping into him as he walked along, she touched him. The woman touches Jesus and how radical and dangerous an act this was since it should have rendered Jesus unclean. But so great is her faith that her touch, instead, renders her clean. Jesus effectively restores her to full participation in her community. Her faith brought her into living contact with Jesus, and as a result, she experienced a dramatic healing. The difference between the crowds and the woman prompts the question: How often do we merely bump up against Jesus—for instance, when we receive him in the Eucharist? Do we half-consciously jostle against him amid all the other preoccupations of the day, or do we come to him determined to touch him personally, with a lively awareness of the grace and power that can flow forth from him into our lives? Bishop Barron notes that what is perhaps most important is this: Jesus implicitly puts an end to the ritual code of the book of Leviticus. What he implies is that the identity of the new Israel, the Church, would not be through ritual behaviors but through imitation of him. Notice, please, how central this is in the New Testament. We hear elsewhere in the Gospels that Jesus declares all foods clean, and throughout the letters of Paul, we hear a steady polemic against the Law. All of this is meant to show that Jesus is at the center of the new community.