“The Healing Touch of Faith”
Scripture Reading: Mark 5:34
Text: Mark 5:21-34
Sermon Idea: Healing is at its best in hopeless and situations.
The scream of sirens pierced the warm air as what had promise to be a quiet summer night turned into a nightmare of flashing red lights, twisted metal, and whirring pain.
The driver of a small red sports car had lost control and crashed over a 30-foot embankment. The tiny baby riding on his mother’s lap had been thrown clear to land safely on a grassy knoll, but his mother was not as well off. Her legs were crushed and pinned the wreckage.
Rescue workers fought feverishly to free the woman. They knew she was in shock. Finally, after some 45 minutes of prying and cutting, they managed to slide a blood-spattered stretcher into a waiting ambulance that lunged into the muggy night, hospital bound with the woman on board.
Two hours later a nervous husband paced the floor outside the emergency room, praying to God that he would be able to see his wife alive again.
Suddenly, a Doctor appeared in the hall with a clipboard and pen. “Are you Mr. Johnson?” he asked. “Yes I am.” “Please step inside the waiting room with me for just a moment.”
The young husband steeled himself for what he was afraid he was going to hear.
“Sir, there is just too much damage to save your wife’s legs. We are going to have to amputate both of them. Your wife is unconscious. We need your permission to do the surgery. Will you sign the release that allows us to operate?”
Mark was writing about healing in a hopeless situation. Here we have a woman who was afflicted with bleeding that she had for 12 years. Medical science of her day had no cure for her. Medicine even today is not an exact science but it has made leaps and bounds from what this woman was probably subjected to. She is not even given a name in the Scriptures. She has no family waiting in the waiting room for her. There is no one to sign the release form. Herbert Lockyer gives her a bit of humanity other than a faceless and nameless woman. He gives her a name and a place where she could have come from. The name Lockyer gives her is “Veronica” and she came from either “Paneas or Caesarea Philippi.” Healing is at its best in hopeless situations. Where does healing happen? Healing happens in the crowd.
I. Healing happens in a crowd. (Vs. 24-29)
This unclean woman had spent everything she had on trying to obtain a cure for her problem. Herbert Lockyer shed some light on her condition which he stated was an “organic disease of the uterus and its appendages.” Veronica was “marginal to Jewish society.” Everything she touched was contaminated. She couldn’t openly seek Jesus for her healing so she had to do it under cover in the midst of a crowd. Leviticus 15:19-31 paints a clear picture of the seriousness with which the Jews handled a woman’s uncleanliness from a woman’s monthly “discharge” and beyond. (Read passage). People have done some remarkable things in hopeless situations.
Take for instance, Morgan Rowe. As a young boy he was sitting on a moving tractor at his father’s fence company in Georgia when he fell and was dragged under the machine. His left arm was ripped completely off in the accident and his right arm was badly mangled. Doctors were able to restore some of the use of the right arm, but the left one was lost. After three months in the hospital the boy was released with a medical bill totaling $30,000. (Remember. This incident took place nearly twenty years ago. Inflation has made that $30,000 look smaller to us than it was then.)
This story would probably have lost its newsworthiness right then and there had this been someone besides Morgan Rowe. You see, the boy set out to pay his own bill! As soon as he could walk without any help, he scoured the roadsides picking up cans and bottles. He collected and sold newspapers.
His mother said in an interview, “He has gathered hundreds of cans, thousands of can, I don’t know how many. He started out with Coke bottles. Then he read . . . about recycling cans. I thought he’d give up after awhile, but he’s kept it up. He’s still doing it.”
Morgan first paid off the $455 ambulance bill. Then he put $2500 down on the hospital bill. His family raised another $9000 toward the hospital bill.
Then in the month of July following the accident, someone mentioned him to the Bear Archery Company in Florida that makes aluminum arrows. Bear donated its scrap metal to help. As the boy’s story made headlines, contributions from 2,000 people began pouring in. Donations totaled $25,000, more than enough to pay the bill. The extra money was used to finance additional operations in an effort to restore more mobility to Morgan’s remaining arm and hand.
Many of us would have given up under such seemingly impossible circumstances. But not this eleven-year-old boy, he overcame! Many of us would have said, “Certainly no one would expect me to go to such extremes. I just can’t pay my bill. It’s too much to ask!” Where does healing happen? It happens in the unconventional.
II. Healing happens unconventionally. (Vs. 30-32)
This healing was unconventional, not because it was instant but because it occurred without any apparent conscious participation from Jesus. Jesus was very aware of what was happening. We cannot confuse the touch of His garment to mean anything significant. We have all seen the televangelist who for a gift of whatever amount will send you a piece of cloth and you healing will be received. This was a popular notion during Jesus’ time, that the healer’s power was in the clothing they wore. It was His “omniscience” that felt the woman’s touch.
Pastor R. A. Torrey relates a story about a woman whom one day walked into his office in Minneapolis, MN. She asked him if he had any missionaries that he sent to dying people. He replied that he did. She told him about a dying woman who lived around the corner. She wanted him to send a missionary as soon as he could. As soon as the woman left a couple of woman missionaries came in. Dr. Torrey told them about the dying woman and asked them to go and see her. Dr. Torrey also relayed to them, that the woman was probably an outcast, by the information he received from the woman who had come in. When they returned, they came in with faces glowing. They related to Dr. Torrey how the woman was dying from an awful incurable disease. The doctors had given up on her. How they had prayed with the woman to receive salvation and then were led to pray for her to receive a complete healing to be “raised from the bed of sickness and healed.” Dr. Torrey relates how he was unsure of their prayer and its effectiveness because there was no human possibility for a cure. God heard and healed this woman. She became an active member of Dr. Torrey’s congregation and was still serving boldly. Where does healing happen? Healing happens when truth is revealed.
III. Healing happens when truth is revealed. (Vs. 33-34)
Veronica comes forward to testify. She is going to tell us the “whole truth” (v 33). The Greek word used for whole is pas and it used with the article aletheia. It means the “unveiled reality.” This woman was about to unveil the reality of what had happened to her. The text does not reveal to us about whether or not she gave her entire twelve-year history of this disease. It does say she “told him the whole truth” (v 33). If you tell someone the whole truth, you must begin at the beginning. The beginning was twelve years ago.
Jesus uses the title of “Daughter” (it is his only recorded use of the word). It signified a new relationship with her. Before hand she was a faceless person who touched Him. Now she had caught His eye. He told her it was her faith that had made her well. It wasn’t His clothing. It was her faith. Her last ditch effort to seek Jesus because she had nothing else to lose had delivered her. She had put her confidence in Jesus. It was not her faith but it was the one whom she put her faith in.
Jesus told her, “Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.” Her healing was “complete and permanent.” In her extremity of need–incurable illness and socio-religious isolation-she was a living “dead” person for twelve years.
Let us turn our attention back to the young couple at the hospital. The couple whose life had been torn apart in an instant.
The thought hit his mind with the impact of a freight train.
“Her legs? She will never walk again? Always in a wheel chair? There’s no other way?”
“I’m sorry, Sir. There just isn’t. If we don’t do the surgery, your wife will die.”
Mr. Johnson took the clipboard and wrote out his name on the blank line. Quickly the doctor walked back down the corridor and disappeared into the room marked “surgery.”
Four weeks later, that young husband was visiting his wife in the hospital to bring her flowers. Had the doctors not amputated her legs, he would have been bringing his flowers to the cemetery.
How would you like to lose your legs, both of them, right up to the bottom of your hips? Not a very pretty thought, is it? But when the alternative is certain death, what other choice is there? Which one of us would have refused to sign the release had it been our loved one?
“Veronica’s” restoration to wholeness is powerfully and fully summarized in the old hymn by George Frederick Rook.
She only touched the hem of his garment
As to his side she stole,
Amid the crowd that gathered around him,
And straightway she was whole.
O touch the hem of his garment,
And thou, too, shalt be free;
His saving power, this very hour,
Shall give new life to thee!
She came in fear and trembling before him,
She knew her Lord had come,
She felt that from him virtue had healed her;
The mighty deed was done.
He turned with: Daughter, be of good comfort,
Thy faith hath made thee whole!
And peace that passeth all understanding
With gladness filled her soul.
(304/759)
