Lent 4
30 March 2025
Vineville Baptist Church
Macon, Georgia
Gregory Pope
TOUCH
Mark 5:21-43
Following Jesus Through the Gospel of Mark
When Jesus had crossed again in the boat to the other side, a great crowd gathered around him, and he was by the sea. Then one of the leaders of the synagogue, named Jairus, came and, when he saw him, fell at his feet and pleaded with him repeatedly, “My little daughter is at the point of death. Come and lay your hands on her, so that she may be made well and live.” So he went with him. And a large crowd followed him and pressed in on him. Now there was a woman who had been suffering from a flow of blood for twelve years. She had endured much under many physicians and had spent all that she had, and she was no better but rather grew worse. She had heard about Jesus and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, for she said, “If I but touch his cloak, I will be made well.” Immediately her flow of blood stopped, and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease. Immediately aware that power had gone forth from him, Jesus turned about in the crowd and said, “Who touched my cloak?” And his disciples said to him, “You see the crowd pressing in on you; how can you say, ‘Who touched me?’ ” He looked all around to see who had done it. But the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came in fear and trembling, fell down before him, and told him the whole truth. He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.” While he was still speaking, some people came from the synagogue leader’s house to say, “Your daughter is dead. Why trouble the teacher any further?” But overhearing what they said, Jesus said to the synagogue leader, “Do not be afraid; only believe.” He allowed no one to follow him except Peter, James, and John, the brother of James. When they came to the synagogue leader’s house, he saw a commotion, people weeping and wailing loudly. When he had entered, he said to them, “Why do you make a commotion and weep? The child is not dead but sleeping.” And they laughed at him. Then he put them all outside and took the child’s father and mother and those who were with him and went in where the child was. Taking her by the hand, he said to her, “Talitha koum,” which means, “Little girl, get up!” And immediately the girl stood up and began to walk about (she was twelve years of age). At this they were overcome with amazement. He strictly ordered them that no one should know this and told them to give her something to eat.
If the woman in today’s gospel story had been raised in an better culture this is the way it could have been: When her womanhood came to her in early adolescence, her mother would have taken her to a woman’s spa where she would have been bathed in oils and perfumes, pampered, and given a beauty treatment and told the wonderful secrets of womanhood. She would have returned home to flowers sent by her father. The scary passage from childhood into young womanhood would have been met with love and understanding.
Instead she grew up in a male-dominated culture of religious laws and told that for seven days every month she was considered unclean and whoever touched her was considered unclean.
In biblical days, women were already prohibited from parts of the temple of God and assigned to the court of the Gentiles. A bleeding woman was prohibited from all parts of God’s temple. She could not approach God in worship during these days. She was unclean.
No one was there to tell her: “Your body has been wondrously made to be a co-creator with God. Your womb prepares for the potential of a child every month. If no child is conceived, then the womb cleanses itself and prepares for a new one.” A contemporary woman has described it as: “The gift of women bleeding that others might have life.”
But this woman in our story was not given so exalted a picture of the miracle of her body. She was told by her religion that she was unclean. She was barred from worship in the temple of God. Her suffering was deeply spiritual.
So imagine then if you will, the point in her life when her bleeding became constant, every day for 12 years.
Imagine her constant physical suffering: The pain. The muscle cramping. The anemia. The weakness.
As well as the emotional and relational suffering: The disturbance of that cycle meant she could not bear children. She may well have been abandoned by her husband. Her condition was a legal religious allowance for divorce.
Her suffering was devastatingly social. She was literally an untouchable because she was ritually unclean. Imagine: Not being touched for twelve years. No hand in your hand. No hug. No arm around your shoulder. Imagine knowing that if anybody touched you they too were considered unclean before God and community and had to go though a religious ceremonial cleansing.
Mark tells us this woman “had suffered many physicians.” Medical care, for all its miraculous goodness, can be its own ordeal, right? Painful. Humiliating. Costly.
And there is the unusual torment for us if our illness is chronic as this woman’s illness was. People with chronic illness, whether it’s chronic mental illness or chronic physical illness, endure a special kind of suffering. There is the emotional suffering added to the physical suffering that almost every chronically ill person endures. They begin to accuse themselves, saying, “If I were strong enough, spiritual enough, emotionally healthy enough, good enough, I wouldn’t keep getting sick.” Not all, but many, chronically ill people bear shame along with their illness.
The woman in our gospel story has suffered for twelve years. 4,380 days of pain, weakness, humiliation, uncleanness. Twelve years of “no touch.” She had gone from doctor to doctor. She had spent all the money she had. And she was not getting better. She was getting worse. She had probably become utterly hopeless. Twelve years of chronic illness and frustrated physicians can kill your hope.
And she might have died utterly hopeless, except for one saving thing: “She had heard about Jesus.” Somebody had told her. She had seen. She had heard how he could heal infirmities, how he touched lepers, how he was not too good for unclean people. And for the first time in a long time she felt something like hope rising up in her body, rising from the ashes of her life.
So she does a bold and risky thing: She tries again. Do you know how risky that is? To try again after so many failures, so many doctors? She tries again. She takes initiative and she goes toward Jesus. No doubt the crowd that pressed around her intimidated her. But she forged ahead. “If I can only touch his clothes,” she said to herself, “I will be made well.”
So she weaved her way through the crowd and came up behind him and touched his garment. Remember now, she’s unclean. She’s not supposed to touch, even in busy crowds, or let someone touch her. I don’t know where she got that courage! I do not know where she got that courage! Except from God. Faith is sometimes a surge of power that gives you courage – courage to act, courage to take on the people and forces and illnesses that have pushed you down and kept you down.
God gave her courage here to break biblical law. Scripture said she was unclean. Faith said, “If I can find Jesus, he will make me clean.” This woman found the God beyond her religion, the real living God. And this God gave her the power to challenge the religious tradition of her day, to cross barriers that God’s people had set up to protect themselves but which had become barriers to God and barriers between God’s people.
This woman finds the courage to push her way through the crowd. She does not do it, I don’t think, with flare. She comes up from behind. And only wants to touch Jesus’ garment. And then unnoticed, unknown, slip away.
As soon as she touches his garment her body knows it is healed. I love the words of the text: “She knew in her body she was healed.” She feels her bleeding cease. After all those years of weakness she feels strength begin to surge back.
And just as suddenly as she feels that, Jesus feels something. He feels his own streaming power go out from him. He knows that some transfer of divine healing power has gone from him some place. So he asks, “Who touched my clothes?”
The disciples are incredulous: “Jesus, this is like Times Square on New Year’s Eve and you want to know who touched you? Get real! Pick a thousand!”
Ignoring them, Jesus looks around to see who did it. He doesn’t have to look far. For the woman, knowing what had happened to her, now scared and trembling, comes and falls down before him. The next words are extraordinarily moving: “She told him the whole truth.” Her life and her pain are now speakable.
Sometimes we are ashamed of our weakness and our pain, especially if our pain is chronic. And that pain is always worse, many times worse, when we are isolated. Whether its chronic pain or chronic guilt. And Jesus lets us talk. We can tell him the whole truth about our lives. Everything. When she came before him scared and trembling, Jesus said to her, “Daughter” (not woman, but daughter, a term more intimate, a word of inclusion in the family of God) – “Daughter,” he said, “your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your ailment.”
Her faith was a courage to push through the crowd and a boldness to approach and touch Jesus. And she found healing. God’s healing love knows no barriers of clean or unclean. It just goes! God’s healing love does.
According to the law of Moses, Jesus has just been made unclean by this woman. And here he is on his way to heal Jairus’ daughter, the ruler of the synagogue’s daughter. How could he heal this little girl if he were unclean? How? Because he wasn’t unclean.
“There is cleanness and there is uncleanness,” Jesus said. “There is good and there is evil, but it doesn’t have to do with what comes out of a person.” Jesus will say in Mark chapter 7 that uncleanness has to do with distortions of the heart. And he lists several distortions: sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, meanness, deceit, slander, pride, foolishness. Distorted hearts that lead to destructive behavior. It is not our bodies themselves that are unclean or that make for uncleanness. Jesus is announcing: “You may not call a person made in God’s image unclean. You may not.” Paul said: “Whatever and whomever God has cleansed we cannot call common anymore.”
Do you understand what is happening here? Jesus is teaching us how to read Scripture. We now must interpret the Written Word of God in light of the Living Word of God, the Word made flesh in Jesus. And sometimes Jesus blows apart our sanctuaries of certainty, our theological systems of cleanness and uncleanness. Though the Old Testament law said this woman was unclean when Jesus speaks to her, he does not tell her to go to the priest and be ceremonially cleansed. Jesus does not even go to be cleansed. And the reason is because Jesus supersedes biblical law.
“Ceremonial washings do not make clean,” Jesus said. “Faith does! Daughter, your faith has made you clean.”
Jesus placed love and compassion above the biblical law. He touched and cleansed every unclean person he ever met: lepers, bleeding women, the dead, sinners, Gentiles, prostitutes, and many others.
Perhaps the cleansing power of God’s love is what we most need to trust. Because in our experience instantaneous healing does not often take place. Things do not always work out for us the way they worked out for the people in today’s gospel lesson. Like the woman who suffered illness for 12 years, we often have to endure the opinions and treatments of many physicians on the road to healing. It often takes time. Such is the nature of life.
To say as much is not to be negative or pessimistic or unbelieving, but, rather, to be truthful. I do not think people come to church to be told cheerful sounding platitudes that will look good on a bumper sticker but which will not prove true in life’s toughest arenas. As one wise pastor said: “Anything we say concerning suffering and loss must ring true on the saddest ears in the room.”
The truth is, there is a long list of ways things can go wrong in this life, not because God wills it for us or sends it to us, but because that is the mysterious nature of life in the world. As one wise soul once said, “Faith is what you have left when you don’t get the miracle.” Mark even records a time where Jesus could not heal people.
The God we meet in Jesus is the God always on the side of life and healing. And sometimes because of the mysterious nature of life in this world, physical healing may not take place. However, Jesus can always touch and clean the unclean, unspoken places in your life and mine.
Just as I am without one plea,
but that thy blood was shed for me.
And that thou bidst me come to thee.
O Lamb of God, I come.
Those words of Charlotte Elliot could have been the words of the woman in our text healed by Jesus. And maybe your words as well.
Just as I am thou wilt receive,
wilt welcome, pardon, cleanse, relieve.
Because thy promise I believe,
O Lamb of God, I come.
Just as I am, thy love unknown
hath broken every barrier down.
Now to be thine, yea, thine alone.
O Lamb of God, I come.