A large crowd followed and pressed around him. 25And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years. 26She had suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors and had spent all she had, yet instead of getting better she grew worse. 27When she heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, 28because she thought, "If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed." 29Immediately her bleeding stopped and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering.
30At once Jesus realized that power had gone out from him. He turned around in the crowd and asked, "Who touched my clothes?"
31"You see the people crowding against you," his disciples answered, "and yet you can ask, 'Who touched me?' "
32But Jesus kept looking around to see who had done it. 33Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell at his feet and, trembling with fear, told him the whole truth. 34He said to her, "Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering" (Mark 5.25-34).
This may be one of the most touching passages in the Gospel of Mark. Luke and Matthew also report this incident, although they devote a much shorter space to it in their respective accounts. In each gospel account, we read of a woman who suffers from a horrendous vaginal infection which has caused her to bleed ceaslessly for twelve long years. In each account, she is seen to creep up and touch Jesus’ cloak from behind and each gospel makes it clear that she is healed because of her faith. But only Mark includes the details alluded to in verse 26: “she had suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors and had spent all she had, yet instead of getting better she grew worse.” The anonymous woman had been to see many expensive specialists but their treatments had been futile and very expensive, draining her of all the money she had.
This anonymous woman was also a social outcast. She was ritually unclean. Her infection was abnormal. It was impure. Her impurity was contagious and transmissible to others until the problem was cured. Anyone who came into contact with her – whether they lay in her bed, sat in her chair, or even touched her – became unclean and immediately had to bathe and launder their clothing. Her discharge of blood causes her to be discharged from society. Like any leper, the anonymous woman is a castaway who is exluded from the normal social relations of first century Jewish society. Because of her constant menstrual bleeding she is a nidda – a Hebrew word designating those menstrual women who were seperated from Jewish community. For most women, they were nidda only for the duration of their period. This woman, however, is perpetually bleeding. Therefore, she is only ever nidda; she is always seperated. Indeed, she is effectively banished.
The Levitical laws that shaped the Jewish culture and religion of the first century focused on four phenomena: death, blood, semen and skin disease. Vaginal blood and semen symbolised life to every Jew of Jesus’ day; their loss symbolised death. The constant loss of blood that marked out the anonymous woman made her synonymous with death in the eyes of her countrymen and women. So she was excluded and villifed as being unclean. As a result, she daily suffers acute social embarrassment and psychological pain. If she was ever married, she would have been divorced as soon as the discharge of blood began. It was unlawful for a man to be with his wife during her menstrual period; it was therefore unlawful and unthinkable for a man to be with her. Menstrual women were looked on as being unclean and so a sexual relationship with her husband would have been impossible. Attending services in her local synagogue – the social, cultural and religious centre of her local village – would also have been out of the question.
In the small village societies of ancient Palestine, word would have leaked out and spread quickly. If the divorce proceedings with a former husband had not brought public humiliation, her many doctors, her friends or even her family would have spread the word about her infection and the attendant bleeding. As a result, the anonymous woman we encounter in Mark 5 has been utterly ostracized. She is walking pollution.
The passage prompts a a number of compelling questions. Why does Jesus insist on forcing the woman to come forward and publicly acknowledge her healing? Why not allow this poor woman to hide in the crowd and go on her way, no longer suffering the humiliation and pain of the blood discharge?
One reason Jesus forces the issue is to ensure that this anonymous woman will leave knowing that the one who cured her cares for her. She will leave the feet of Jeus knowing that she is a person worth taking time for and addressing. In a moment, Jesus overturns the internalised perceptions the woman has of herself. He explodes the personal perception ingrained in her over twelve long years (“I am vile”, “I am nothing”). But not only that; in one swift stroke he publicly challenges and overturns the purity laws every person within ear-shot has worked so hard to preserve and safe-guard. Before the eyes of the watching crowds, Jesus makes sure that the woman he addresses no longer remains anonymous, a despised unclean nobody. Instead, Jesus heals her and then publicly welcomes her back into the fold of the people of Israel.
The woman will leave Jesus a publicly vindicated meber of Jewish society. She is no longer an outcast. Jesus publicly restores her as a daughter of Israel. He releases her from the misery that has trapped her for so long. He tells her to go in peace (verse 34). Undergirding the word “peace” is the Hebrew word Shalom (which has connotations of wholeness, well-being, prosperity, security, friendship, salvation.) In an instant Jesus banishes the infection and the social stigma has brought so much misery and pain into the life of this woman. In their place, Jesus brings wholeness, restoration and salvation.
This is a feature that crops up all over Mark’s gospel; Jesus is not hampered by traditional purity laws in any way. In fact, he shows a blithe disregard for them. He touches a leper and cleanses him, he ventures into the tomb areas of the pagan Decapolis and drives a legion of demons into a herd of pigs, he is touched by a woman with a hemorrhage and she is made whole. Never in the gospel of Mark does Jesus’ connection with the unclean make him unclean. Jesus has the power to overcome ceremonial defilement and reverse it. The Jewish purity laws were concerned to prevent human, sinful uncleaness from defiling God’s holiness. Jesus’ ministry shows that God’s holiness is completely unaffected when it comes into contact with ceremonial uncleaness. Jesus does not need to cleanse himself when he comes into contact with anything unclean; instead, he overcomes it. His holiness swallows up everything that defiles.
It is important to read the above account of the anonymous woman in the context of the story of Jairus. Mark’s account above is sandwiched in the centre of Jesus’ dealings with Jairus, a ruler of the local synagogue. In the context of the story, Jairus is a man of destinction. He has a name. He is an honoured member of his community and can openly approach Jesus with a direct request. In contrast, the woman is nameless and has no honour. She slinks about and must approach Jesus from behind, for fear of drawing unwanted attention to herself. These two main chacters of the story occupy opposite ends of the social, economic and religious spectrum.
By arranging the material in this way, Mark is raising telling questions: should Jesus bother stopping for such a woman when he may endanger the life of another whom we regard as being more worthy? And can the love and power of Jesus really overcome anything, no matter how contemptible? Can he overcome religiously ingrained hatred? Can he overcome social ostracism? Can he overcome vaginal disease? Can he overcome even death?
In our passage, Mark depicts two very different people, each with a very different social standing. In the space of a few paragraphs, Jesus meets a synagogue ruler and a social outcast. Mark wants us to see that not for a moment does Jesus assess either person on the basis of their social standing; not for a moment does he respond to them because of their social or religious credentials. Jairus the synagogue ruler is made to wait in distress as Jesus carefully addresses a nobody; an anonymous woman in a crowd. Mark wants us to see the stark truth: Jesus responds to people on the basis of their faith and not their social standing. This is really a very radical thing; the social distinctions, positions and influence by which we define people does not matter to God in the least. In fact, in the eyes of God, such things are completely irrelevant.
Perhaps the anonymous woman was unable to verbalise precisely why she was drawn to Jesus. Undoubtedly she had heard the reports about him. Perhaps she thought Jesus was a charismatic Jewish holy man invested with strange powers. She may have known very little or nothing about the Messianic prophecies of the Hebrew Scriptures. Whether she identified Jesus as the Messiah or not, we cannot be sure. It is likely that she hadn’t worked out all her theology or grasped the scope of Biblical doctrine before she grabbed at the clothes of Jesus. All she knew was that she was utterly desperate. And Jesus was her last hope. So she reaches out to take hold of his cloak in absolute desperation.
Like the anonymous woman, we do not need sophisticated intellectual and theological clarity before we access the transforming power of Jesus. Jairus was so desperate, he lay aside all thoughts of public decency and fell before the feet of Jesus, pleading for the life of his child. The anonymous woman was compelled by utter desperation to reach for the clothes of Jesus as he passed her by. Just like the desparate, trusting faith of Jairus and the anonymous woman, genuine faith is often propelled by a deep conviction that Jesus alone is sufficient to meet the grave spiritual need deep within us. In the end, none of us can verbalise or understand our deep sense of spiritual weakness and our profound need. All we can do is plea with God and fall on the grace he has shown us in Christ his Son.
The anonymous woman, the panic-stricken Jairus and Mark’s depiction of Jesus’ loving response to both of them offers us a stark and moving picture of grace. In preparation for this sunday evening's sermon, as I looked through the various commentaries on Mark available to me, a footnote led me to Timothy George’s “Theology of the Reformers”. There I encountered a study on Luther which echoed the themes Mark touches on in this short segment of his gospel.
After Martin Luther's death, a tattered piece of paper was found lying beside his bed. On it was scrawled 6 words, half in German, half in Latin: “Wir sein Pettler, Hoc est Verum.” “We are beggars, that is true.”
Timothy George writes: “Luther’s whole approach to the Christian life is summed up in these last words. The posture of the human vis a vis God is one of utter receptivity. We have no legs of our own on which to stand. No mystical “ground of the soul” can serve as a basis for our union with the divine. We can earn no merits which will purchase for us a standing before God. We are beggars – needy, vulnerable, totally bereft of resources with which to save ourselves. For Luther the good news of the gospel was that in Jesus Christ God had become a beggar too. God identified with us in our neediness. Like the good Samaritan who exposed himself to the dangers of the road to attend to the dying man in the ditch, God “came where we were”…Luther once remarked that his insight into the gracious character of God had come to him while he was “auff diser cloaca,” literally, “on the toilet.” While some scholars have interpreted this saying in terms of Luther’s acute suffering from constipation, we know that the expression in cloaca was a common metaphor in medieval spiritual writings. It referred to a state of utter helplessness and dependence upon God. Where else are we more vulnerable, more easily embarrassed, and, in Luther’s mind, more open to demonic attacks, than when we are – in cloaca? Yet it is precisely in a state of such vulnerability – when we are reduced to humility, when like beggars we can only cast ourselves on the mercy of another – that the yearning for grace is answered in the assurance of God’s inescapable nearness….”
We are beggars, that is true. Like Jairus and the anonymous woman, we are beggars too.
Yours,
The Scribbling Apprentice.
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