Tabitha’s Clothing
Fourth Sunday of Easter Year C
Art: "Raising Tabitha" By Mary Jane Miller
I have a drawer in my office where I keep every letter, card, and note written to me over the course of my pastoral ministry. I am not great at giving gifts, but I enjoy writing letters and cards to people, hoping that my handwriting and intention is received as a kind of gift. I find that people are often grateful, not only for the thought, but for the personal nature of such a thing.
Handwriting, as one of my better teachers once told us, is a kind of witness to incarnation, that we really are here in this world together. It is a unique mark of our existence. Teachers begin to know students by their handwriting, and I can easily recognize my grandmother’s script moving across a recipe card. It is personal, tied to our bodies, and it allows us to tailor our words to one another to fit specific moments in our lives and gratitude for one another.
Tabitha, or Dorcas, engages in a similar kind of thoughtful gift-giving that requires personal creativity and knowledge of the recipient. I considered this kind of gift when I read Matt Skinner’s description of Dorcas in his commentary on Acts:
“Making clothes for someone else requires you to know that person—what size she wears, what she likes, what you think is appropriate for her needs and personality. The tenderness of the brief encounter between Peter and the grieving widows is about more than infusing the scene with pathos. It’s to make us aware of the substantial ministry that Tabitha/Dorcas performed among the believers in Joppa.”¹
The story spends an uncharacteristic amount of time on Tabitha and her contribution to the community when compared to other healing/resurrection narratives. Though some have worried that this presents the miracle as a kind of reward for her good works, this ultimately misses the point of the narrative focus on Tabitha herself and the mutual care and affection her ministry cultivated in her community. They wash her body, carry her to the upper room, weep over her, and ultimately want to show Peter the kind of person she was to them because of the things she had made for them. Her death means far more than a loss of charity for these mourners.
As Skinner notes, the relationship communicated by the gifts of clothing is an intimate one. Tabitha knew these women, their measurements, and their preferences. We might also imagine that she endured quite a bit of frustration and pain that comes with such delicate nimble work with her hands. And in these gifts, these women had a piece of Tabitha with them - her labor offered in love and care woven into the fabric. It is a eucharistic image. The gift of God in her skill and the work of her own hands joined those things together into clothing, just as the fruit of the earth and work of human hands makes the bread and wine for the table.
Her ministry in Lydda shows us what it means to offer gifts to those in our care, rather than simply filling a need. To be sure, there is plenty of need to be filled, and there are essential ministries offered by churches and charities alike that seek to faithfully fulfill those needs. But there is something about the response of these widows - what I might almost describe as pride in the gifts they received from Tabitha - that shows us they received far more than necessity demanded.
Care is an affirmation of personhood because it requires knowing another enough to tailor an offering to that person. I can give you what you need in a general sense to make ends meet, but it takes care to know how a gift might make you feel and believe you are truly human, worthy of my knowing and memory.
I am reminded of a poem by Leanne O’Sullivan I first heard on a podcast called Poetry Unbound. The poem is entitled, “Leaving Early.”²
My Love,
Tonight Fionnuala is your nurse.
You’ll hear her voice sing-song around the ward
lifting a wing at the shore of your darkness.
I heard that, in another life, she too journeyed
through a storm, a kind of curse, with the ocean
rising darkly around her, fierce with cold,
and no resting place, only the frozen
rocks that tore her feet, the light on her shoulders.
And no cure there but to wait it out.
If, while I am gone, your fever comes down -
if the small, salt-laden shapes of her song
appear to you as a first glimmer of earth-light,
follow the sweet, hopeful voice of that landing.
She will keep you safe beneath her wing.
The poet is leaving her beloved in the care of a nurse as she leaves. The majority of the poem is spent describing the nurse and those things that make her worthy of his care: her own experience, her song, her “wing at the shore of your darkness.” Perhaps the poet is reassuring her beloved. Perhaps she is reassuring herself. Either way, there is clear need to ensure that care - real care - is given while she is away.
Tabitha’s care for these widows is evident, and these widows who have now twice lost their own beloved are no less beloved of God. We might read this poem as the raising of Tabitha, the voice of God speaking to the beloved and ensuring them that the care they have felt will not abandon them. They will “hear her voice sing-song behind the loom/lifting a garment at the shore of their darkness.” Perhaps Tabitha is raised, not because she has earned it through good work, but rather because she has so thoroughly known the ones for whom she cares, that God refuses to inflict on them yet another loss of intimacy. Their life is a testimony of her life, so death does not befit her now.
1 Matthew L. Skinner, Acts: Catching up with the Spirit (Abingdon Press, 2020), 88.
2 Leanne O’Sullivan, A Quarter of an Hour, 2018. 25. Padraig O’Tuama has a beautiful exposition of this poem on the podcast I mentionedabove.