“It’s called Touch-me-not,” my father said when he saw me curiously trying to identify a thorny weed. The plant had thickly carpeted green the borders of the path we were trekking on in one of our casual hikes through a gully near our house.
“Go ahead, stroke any leaf,” he told me. Dad saw I was a bit hesitant about the thorns. He knelt down and touched a leaf.
It was an amazing discovery! At the slightest touch, the plant’s leaves started to quiver and close upon itself. I was so intrigued by this natural wonder that I could not be removed from the spot as I experimented on the weed’s other possible reactions.
Some years later, I was reminded about this childhood experience during high school Filipino class when we studied Jose Rizal’s writings. Our teacher explained the title of Rizal’s famous book, the “Noli Me Tangere.” She said, that it was Latin for touch me not.
Many more years later, I again encountered the phrase, but this time in a class on Sacred Scripture. They were Jesus’ words to Mary Magdalene after His Resurrection. I was again reminded of the sprawling thorny weed of my childhood days.
This time, however, I wondered what may have prompted our Lord to have said such a thing when it was only natural for Mary Magdalene – a faithful and devoted disciple – not to only touch our Lord but also to embrace Him.
Our teacher in Scripture explained based on commentaries on the Gospel of John that this was a “negative imperative in Greek, indicating that our Lord was in fact telling Mary to release her hold on Him, to let Him go, since she will have another chance to see Him before His Ascension into Heaven (Commentary from the Navarre Bible).”
Despite this now clearer explanation about Jesus’ enigmatic expression, I believe that we are quite far from following Mary’s example of really touching Jesus. I’m referring to how our faith can sometimes be too formal, distant and dry.
Unlike Mary Magdalene, our faith has not yet engaged us to the point of bearing fruit to a distinctive expression and personal encounter with our Lord.
Speaking of the sense of touch, Jacques Philippe reflects that although it is the first sense we develop even while in our mother’s womb, it is not as powerful and rich as the senses of seeing and hearing. However, Philippe says, “touch is the most primordial sense and the one most essential to life and communication. And above all, it has one advantage that the other senses don’t have: reciprocity, meaning that we cannot touch an object without being touched by it (Thirsting for Prayer).”
This unique feature of the sense of touch commits the individual, because he must necessarily render himself vulnerable to the touch of the other. Unlike the other senses, Philippe observes, “we can see without being seen by something or hear without being heard” (Ibid.)
Thus, during our Lord’s time, there were countless men and women who saw and heard Him, but were never touched because they remained at a comfortable distance from Christ. Like them, we too could end up satisfied with a long-distance relationship with Jesus. We are cautious, calculating and afraid that by touching Jesus and truly meeting Him, He may ask more of us, complicate our lives and disrupt our comfort settings.
Because of this, we could be in fact the ones telling our Lord, “Noli me tangere, Lord.” This echoes what Peter impulsively exclaimed, “You [Lord] will not wash my feet!” But afterwards Simon was humbled and succumbed to the Master’s servile gesture when he realized he had to allow his feet to be washed if he wanted to ‘have greater intimacy with Jesus Christ.’
We therefore realize that our faith like all the saints before us, can grow more. “By faith we can ‘touch God’ and let ourselves be touched by Him, set up an inner communion with Him and allow ourselves to be transformed little by little by His grace. (Ibid.)”
On the contrary, when we do not allow God to touch us with His mercy and grace, we react like the thorny touch-me-not plant. We close our souls and shy away from God’s goodness. We prefer to be left where we are, how we are and as we are. We are momentary amusements of passersby whose childlike touches of curiosity fail to even draw us away from the midst of barren rocks and brambles that are choking us in this world.