Introduction
There was a series of commercials that featured particularly embarrassing moments for individuals, followed by an announcer saying, “Need to get out of town fast?”, and a camera shot of an airplane flying overhead. The main character in our passage this morning (at least for a moment) would have loved to have caught a quick flight.
Text
A large crowd followed and pressed around him. Our story is sandwiched in another story. Jesus is accompanying a father to his house in order to heal the father’s daughter who is dying. The crowd knows this. The father had pushed his way through them, fallen at Jesus’ feet and begged him to come heal his daughter before she died. This is real-life drama, better than watching “real police episodes” on TV. Indeed, TV would have loved catching this scene. Will Jesus make it on time? Will he be able to heal the little girl before she dies? Get a close-up on the father’s face and capture his anguish. The crowd, caught up in the drama, heightens it as well, because they press around Jesus, making it more difficult for him to move quickly.
But he forges on with the father, who undoubtedly grows more frantic with the slow pace. Suddenly, Jesus stops and asks, Who touched my clothes? His disciples, who themselves are having to press through the crowd, respond, “Are you serious? 31 You see the people crowding against you and yet you can ask, ‘Who touched me?’” Don’t you like the disciples? They are just like us. They are so exasperated. They are getting their share of pushes and bumps, and Jesus is concerned that someone touched his clothes. What’s going on?
What’s going on is another miracle. It is a common miracle for him – healing – and yet there are aspects about it that don’t quite fit what we would expect. For example, Jesus makes public a secret healing. Why do that when he’s never played one up before, and especially when he is on his way to prevent a death? That’s all he needs – more drama to draw the crowd around. The way the healing takes place is bothersome. It happens, not only without his permission, but without his knowledge. He, or really, his clothes, are treated like a magic talisman, which conveys power when touched. That phrase, power had gone out from him, makes him seem like a battery that has to be recharged.
Well, let’s explore this miracle event. Read what Mark has to say first about the woman. 25 And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years. 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.
For twelve years this woman has suffered through a medical condition that has caused her to hemorrhage. She has a chronic illness that is steadily weakening her. Her many efforts to be healed through the common medical practices of the day have failed. Indeed, Mark describes her as suffering a great deal at the hands of doctors, not to mention that she has spent all of her money on them. This is not a mere slight tossed at doctors. The treatments for illness can involve suffering as any cancer patient will attest, and we all have suffered through ill tasting medicines and painful shots. This woman would have suffered through painful treatments that were also futile and plain silly. Here are some examples: drinking a goblet of wine containing a powder compounded from rubber, alum and garden crocuses; taking a dose of Persian onions cooked in wine administered with the summons, “Arise out of your flow of blood!”; receiving sudden shock; and, carrying the ash of an ostrich’s egg in a certain cloth.
Twelve years of bleeding; twelve years of futile cures. She also endured twelve years of being shunned. If the woman lived today, we would embrace her with sympathy. Our women would hug her and include her in their activities. Men might place a sympathetic hand on her shoulder and pray for her. When she came to church, the greeters would shake her hand, and she would sit at her favorite spot beside her friends. But if we operated under the laws of her day, we would ask her not to come at all. We’d send tapes and talk over the phone, but we would not visit, and we definitely would not want her walking into our sanctuary.
Why? She’s unclean. Her disease makes her an unclean person. Remember what we learned from the story of the leper? The unclean cannot come in contact with the holy. That’s a no-no. And whenever someone unclean touches someone clean, the clean person also becomes unclean. If she sat in a pew, no one else could sit on it without becoming unclean. Anyone whose hand she shook would become unclean. That’s the life she lived for twelve years. She probably lived alone. No man would marry her, and, if she had a husband, he most likely would have divorced her.
This unclean status explains why she approaches Jesus covertly, trying not to draw attention from him or the crowd. It also could be a matter that she is shy. She would not be unusual about not wanting attention directed on her, especially about such a personal matter. Anyhow, all she wants to do is touch his cloak and then fade back out of the crowd. No one would be the wiser.
So, she carries out her plan. 27 When she heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, 28 because she thought, “If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed.” Why does she think the touch will work? Twelve years of treatments – you would think that she would be a little skeptical. Instead, her faith seems to be beyond the norm. Just a touch when Jesus is not looking and, poof! she will be healed. It seems more realistic for her to think this way: “I’ve tried everything else; I might as well give this a try.” Why believe Jesus would make a difference?
I suppose it has to do with what she heard about Jesus. We’ve talked about this before. Jesus is a popular man. Some of it has to do with his preaching, and a lot has to do with his healings and exorcisms. By this time he has healed dozens? hundreds?, and every healing has added to his fame. She has heard, no doubt, that he is a miracle-healer and the best of them. Jesus healed every person who came to him, regardless of the disease. Shriveled hands, paralysis, fevers, even leprosy was not too difficult for this man. She had tried all the other medical men, but then, none of them had a great track record to boast of. This guy had a 100 percent success rate. He never had to tell a patient, “I’ll try my best.” And she would not be the first to try the method of touching him. Mark had told us back in 3:10 how people with diseases were crowding around him to touch him. It’s probable that this woman heard how they had been healed.
So, she touches him discreetly, according to her plan, and, just like that, she is healed. 29 Immediately her bleeding stopped and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering. That must have been a thrill! It actually worked! All of her hope was realized by that one, inconspicuous touch. No telling how long she had to wait or the effort required to get through the crowd and touch Jesus’ garment, all the while saying to herself, “Oh please work; oh please work.” And it does! She would have been weak through her blood loss, but after touching Jesus, she immediately feels invigorated. What an incredible feeling of joy; freed at last from twelve years of suffering! Now, if she could just slip away from the crowd and go home with her news.
Then, rushing back over her like a breaking wave, is the sensation of fear as she hears, Who touched my clothes? Jesus has stopped, meaning everyone has stopped. He is looking for the person who had the audacity to touch him. Of course, many people have touched him, which his disciples graciously point out to him, but he and the woman know what he means. She knows the power that came from that touch, and when he refuses to be dissuaded from looking, she comes forth.
33 Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell at his feet and, trembling with fear, told him the whole truth. She told him everything: the sickness, the years of suffering from it and from the doctors, the humiliation, the hope stirred from hearing about him, and she didn’t mean to do anything wrong by touching him, and all she had wanted was to just touch him without bothering him or anyone and…
And then she hears the most blessed words of her life from the gentlest voice: 34 Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering. Did you know that this is the only record of Jesus addressing someone as Daughter? He had to be smiling, and his face and voice must have been filled with compassion. It was for this – to affirm her – that he had sought her out. Consider what he tells her.
Your faith has healed you. I wished Jesus had elaborated more, because one could interpret his meaning a couple of ways. For example, does he mean to say that faith itself is what does the healing? The woman healed herself with her faith. If all that was needed was faith, she probably would have been healed years ago through the other remedies she had tried. You could say that Jesus inspired greater faith in her, but that’s just the point: her faith was directed at Jesus.
I bring this out, because faith is fashionable today. All of our movies and TV shows grind into us how important faith is – in ourselves, i.e., or love or magic. Just believe; that is what matters.
What mattered in this case is that the woman believed in Jesus to heal. She could have believed all she wanted in the other remedies, but they would not have availed. Hers was not a psychosomatic disease that just needed a change in her attitude to go away. She needed the real healing power of Jesus.
But this leads to another question. Was her faith in Jesus a guarantee for healing? Does belief that Jesus will heal always result in healing? It would seem so in Jesus’ time. Again, there is no record of Jesus refusing or failing to heal anyone who came to him, but it doesn’t seem to be the case after his departure. It is true that in the first days of the church the apostles carried out miraculous healings in the same manner as Jesus. Paul, in 1 Corinthians 12:9, lists healing as a spiritual gift. And yet, Paul himself was afflicted with a lifelong disease that the Lord refused to heal. And though he clearly had the gift to heal, the best he could do for his assistant Timothy’s stomach ailment was give advice on what to drink. Another assistant, Epaphroditus, almost died from illness, and though he recovered, Paul indicates that it was only by God’s mercy and not out of his or Epaphroditus’ faith claims.
This really bothered me in my younger days in the ministry. Why would the rules change? Why commend this woman for her faith only to tell those who believe in him after his death, “Sorry, faith in Jesus to heal doesn’t apply anymore.” But then, maybe the rules have not changed? There are plenty of faith healers and ministers who say the rules are the same. If you have enough faith to believe that Jesus will heal, then he will heal. Maybe I am the problem. I keep taking insulin for my diabetes because I refuse to believe that Jesus will do what he says he will do.
Now, I am not going to answer the question of why God, or Jesus, heals some people and not others. Sometimes faith may be a factor, but more often not. But here is the point to make: illness does not exist because of lack of faith, but because of the fact of sin in the world. Remember, this world remains under the curse of sin. It is a fallen world. And our hope is not that everybody in the world will finally believe in Jesus’ power to heal; it is in Jesus’ promise to return and establish a new heaven and earth.
Jesus did not come to make everybody feel healthy. He did not come to earth for the purpose of healing as many people as he could. He came to proclaim the gospel and redeem us of our sins. The healings signified that he indeed was the Messiah. They certified him, so to speak, as truly being of God. Don’t healings in his name still serve that purpose? They may, but the sign, the seal of authenticity, is his work of redemption: his death and resurrection. The real sign is the cross; it is the cross to which our faith is to be drawn. The real sign is the resurrection that fills us with hope. And our hope is his return to raise us to sick-free glorious bodies.
The real miracle of healing is the healing of our sin-sick hearts. You and I have been miraculously healed from a sickness that leads to eternal death. We somehow have missed understanding that our conversion is the real healing miracle; it is the one that really matters; and it is the one that is given by Jesus to everyone who has faith in him.
That – what Jesus has done in our hearts – is to be the focus of our faith and hope and joy, not being cured of diabetes or cancer or back pain.
Let’s go back to the woman. Suppose she had slipped away. What would she have left with from her healing? Anything? She got what she had come for – a physical healing. Isn’t that what Jesus was good for? She ended up getting a lot more. She received grace. Go in peace. She received the blessing of peace from a man who by rights could have condemned her – an unclean woman who through deception touched a holy man. Without his words, she would have left regarding Jesus as someone to manipulate like people try to do today. You know. If I go to church Sunday, maybe God will favor me next week. If I give money to the church or help out with a project, then I can prod God to help me out with my problem.
We all at some time want to do what this woman did. Touch Jesus for some help and then get out before he calls attention to us. A lot of people stay on the periphery of the church and religion for that very reason. They know there is something to the gospel; they know they can get some benefit, but they do not want to be drawn in. They, by no means, want Jesus and his clan to surround them. And what they miss is the blessing of peace that Jesus would give to any who comes to him.
And they miss a whole healing. That’s what the woman received through Jesus’ attention. She could have left merely physically healed; now she leaves healed in spirit as well. The man of God spoke words of peace. She does not have to worry about being found out by God or anyone. She does not have to fear God plaguing her with a double dose of the disease because of her deception. She really will be regarded by God now, as clean. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering. Her suffering from alienation and the sense of being punished for her sins, are over. Jesus found her out and blessed her with peace and freedom
Do you understand that that is what Jesus wants to do for you? He’s not out to get you. He doesn’t look for you so he can make an example of you. He wants to heal you; physically heal? Maybe. But more importantly he wants to heal the disease of your heart that alienates you from his Father and that will lead you to your eternal death. He wants to make you whole, not just feel better. It is ironic that so many people keep away from Jesus because they are afraid of being “drawn in,” chained down. What they miss as a result is real freedom.
The greater irony is that we Christians can still treat Jesus as someone to touch but not be caught. We’ll touch him to get saved from hell, and then again whenever we have a problem, but all the while keeping our distance and lying low, afraid that he might give us the kind of attention we don’t want. We touch him with a church attendance and maybe some volunteer work or donations, but we do not personally expose ourselves to him. I can’t guarantee that we will always like the attention he gives, but I can guarantee his attention is always blessing for his daughters and sons.
Come to him in faith and you will hear the blessing of peace and of freedom from your fears and shame.
