The appeal of the Midas Touch

A Reflection for Monday of the Fifth Week in Ordinary Time

Find today’s readings here.

Probably the Greek myth that most captivates the childhood imagination is that of King Midas, the monarch with the golden touch—literally. I was fascinated by it as a kid, anyway: What would it be like to be able to turn anything you touch to gold? 

The moral of that story, of course, is that it would be absolutely awful, and in Aristotle’s telling of the tale, King Midas eventually starves to death because everything he eats turns 24 carats the second it touches his mouth. In the 19th-century American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne’s version of the tale, Midas’s curse even affects his family: Reaching out to touch his daughter, he turns even her into a solid gold statue.

Shel Silverstein included a more lighthearted version of the fable in his collection A Light in the Attic. Called “Squishy Touch,” his poem starts thus:

Everything King Midas touched
Turned to gold, the lucky fellow.
Every single thing I touch
Turns to raspberry Jell-O.

Also a terrible curse—though you’d be slightly better fed than King Midas, at least.

What the Greek fable and its modern adaptations communicate, of course, is the ambivalent power of touch: It can heal and it can hurt. A child knows this better than anyone, but all of us recognize the strength of a physical gesture. How many people in our world do we know who are bereft of touch, due to illness, isolation, incarceration, you name it; or how often do we ourselves feel the need for physical connection? You can recognize how much importance the early church put on physical touch by the way it is so embedded in our sacraments.

In today’s Gospel, it is the sick who want Jesus’ healing touch, but they can’t get to him themselves—they have to be brought forth on mats, laid in the marketplace. The passage attributes to Jesus a healing power that makes some theologians nervous, because Jesus can seem more like a magical charm than a miracle worker—we see this hinted at elsewhere in Lk 8:46 and Mk 5:30, where Jesus doesn’t even know he’s healing someone until they touch him and he feels power go out of him. That is its own version of Midas’s curse: People just robbing you of your healing power at their whim and without your consent.

But it’s possible to turn that theological puzzle into an assertion of deep faith, too: The sick in Gennesaret don’t need Jesus to touch them, they want to touch him, because “even touching the tassel of your cloak would be enough to heal me.” The passage immediately before this is of Jesus walking on water and calming the sea, actions that for obvious reasons would make his disciples believe in his power. The sick and the homebound don’t know that yet—and yet they still believe that even the simplest contact with Jesus has the power to heal.

The King James Bible’s translation of this passage is a bit more poetic than the translation above, which is from the New American Bible, Revised Edition that we use for the readings at Mass. And one nice touch of the KJV is that it makes that point about what is happening between Jesus and those who seek his healing touch; it does not describe the sick as “healed.”

Rather, “as many as touched him were made whole.” There’s a Midas Touch we all want.

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