by Nancy Linenkugel
Contributor
As I was leaving a store recently, an older man who had been out in the cold for a while approached and held in front of me this green pen with a paper attached.
It took me a minute to read the paper and to grasp the situation. I looked at the man’s face and he was smiling, nodding a hopeful, "Yes?," and focused on me despite other shoppers swirling around us. The man had a rugged, leathery look to his skin, as though he was used to being outdoors in all types of weather, sun, rain or snow.
I quickly opened my wallet and gave him a donation. He nodded his head courteously and then held out a handful of pens, gesturing that I could take whichever one I liked. I selected the one he had originally offered me. He gave me the green pen with the sign, nodded his head again, and then held up his fist for a fist-bump gesture. I lightly bumped fists with him.
As I walked out to the car, I wondered if there were fist-bumps in Jesus' time. After all, Jesus did a fair amount of healing deaf people as well as healing people with all kinds of maladies, like blindness, muteness, and demon possession. What if the famous scripture word, "Ephphatha" meaning "be opened" really has an accompanying gesture of a fist-bump?
We read in Mark 9:25-28 "When Jesus noticed that a crowd was rapidly gathering, he spoke sharply to the evil spirit with the words, 'I command you, deaf and dumb spirit, come out of this boy, and never go into him again!' The spirit gave a loud scream and after a dreadful convulsion left him. The boy lay there like a corpse, so that most of the bystanders said, 'He is dead.' But Jesus grasped his hands and lifted him up, and then he stood on his own feet." (The New Testament in Modern English, translated by J.B.Phillips, New York: The Macmillan Company, 1968)
And this is where the fist-bump occurred. That triumphant and visible sign of victory came spontaneously from two souls meeting on the deepest interior and personal level. Even though that was omitted by the evangelist, I know from first-hand that it occurred.
[Nancy Linenkugel is a Sylvania Franciscan sister and chair of the department of Health Services Administration at Xavier University, Cincinnati Ohio.]