Mark Chapter 5 –
The plague-afflicted woman said, If I may touch but his clothes, I shall be whole. And straightway … she felt in her body that she was healed of that plague. And Jesus, immediately knowing in himself that virtue had gone out of him, turned him about in the press, and said, Who touched my clothes?
The superhuman determination of the woman with the hemorrhage was the result of her superhuman decision to separate herself from everything and everyone separating her from her objective. Nothing could stop her, even the strict religious code demanding that any woman so afflicted should quarantine herself or face death.
Jesus was even more determined in his desire to be separate from sense: to achieve and remain in total Spirit-consciousness continually, “who in the days of his flesh, when he had offered up prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears unto Him that was able to save him from death, and was heard in that he feared.” (Hebrews 5)
Thus, Jesus was unaware of the press of the vast human swarms about him, yet he instantly perceived the touch that made virtue flow from him. Similarly today, among millions of professed followers, Christ is only aware of those whose craving for Spirit transcends “the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God.”
“The healing of his seamless dress
Is by our beds of pain;
We touch him in life’s throng and press,
And we are whole again.”
(Mrs. Eddy quoting Whittier’s poem, “The Master”, in Pulpit and Press, 54)
“Christian Scientists must live under the constant pressure of the apostolic command to come out from the material world and be separate.”
(Science & Health, 451)