Wis 1:13-15; 2:23-24/2 Cor 8:7, 9, 13-15/Mk 5:21-43
Today’s Gospel narrative of the radical healing of the daughter of the synagogue official Jairus is divided into two parts which are separated by the healing of the woman who had lived with a hemorrhage for twelve years.
The most significant theme that ties these two narratives together is, I believe, the theme of death. As the narrative opens, the young girl is on the point of death. The woman is suffering from a constant discharge of blood. As the Book of Leviticus says, “The life of every creature is its blood” (17:14). Plagued by this hemorrhage, life is perpetually draining away from her, she is enfeebled and always moving toward death. According to mosaic law, she is in a perpetual state of ritual impurity. Everything she touches, lies or sits on becomes unclean. Others avoid contact with her since touching her would make them unclean. If she’s married, sexual relations for her and her husband are forbidden. Worst of all, she is prohibited from entering the temple to worship with the rest of God’s people, and therefore alienated from the sense of belonging and communion inherent in temple worship.
We are told she has spent all her money on remedies, but she is not only not rid of her illness but has become worse.
Neither Jairus nor the woman turn to Jesus as simply another option offered in the market place of possible healings. Rather, they both come to him in the humility and simplicity of genuine faith, convinced that he can help them.
Today I would like to focus on the experience of the woman with a hemorrhage.
The woman has heard reports of Jesus. And she has chosen not to let herself be ruled by her sense of discouragement over all her previous attempts at being cured but to go to Jesus. So based on these reports she has made a choice to take up a particular course of action and to follow through on it.
But to get to Jesus she has to place herself among the crowds pressing upon him. Despite her state of ritual impurity and the restrictions that have been imposed on her by the law, she made her way.
The law is good, it has its origin in the Father. It is given by God as instruction for the sake of the covenant relationship he has established between himself and his people. As coming from God, rightly understood in the light of faith, the divine precepts, each in their own way, ought to point toward Jesus as their fulfillment. They should never be understood in such a way that they would restrain God’s people from coming to his Son. It is clear to us that the woman’s action is a response to the Spirit of God that is pushing her toward Jesus in spite of the letter of the law that might have caused her to stay at home or at least to stand at a distance from the dense crowds and therefore from Jesus himself, so as to avoid making others unclean by coming into contact with her. She, too, sees that she must go to Jesus.
Trusting in the reports she has heard of Jesus, she is confident that to be healed all she needs to do is touch his clothes. She has grasped that the result will be not that she will make him unclean but that he will make her clean. “If I but touch his clothes, I shall be cured.” This confident assurance is an act of faith that aligns her with the Spirit of God. It allows her to overcome all obstacles, even that of a certain understanding and interpretation of divine precepts. By it she shows that her intention and her deed come from God, take place in God, and are in movement toward him. All of this is her “faith”. As soon as she had fulfilled her intention she knew that she had been healed of her disease.
She touched his cloak. Immediately, her flow of blood dried up. She felt in her body that she had been healed of her disease.
Jesus, on his end, at the same moment sensed that power had gone forth from him. Jesus has received power from the Father, from whom he receives all things, but here we see that this power at the same time remains with the Father and belongs to him to bestow in the Holy Spirit upon whom he chooses. In the healing of the woman, we see the Father’s sovereignly free and gracious decision to bestow on this woman the power that was active in Jesus.
Although the release of the power was an act of the Father, it nevertheless took place in the context of a personal relationship between the woman and Jesus, made living by her faith. The woman touched him in faith, and despite all the people jostling around him, Jesus knew that he had been touched. In this moment, the beginning of a relationship has been established between Jesus and the woman. At the same time Jesus’ words, “Who touched my clothes?” make it clear to the woman that he is not acting on his own but in union with his Father, for it was not explicitly his choice to heal her, but the power of God acting in him. In this way, the way is opened up for the woman in an inchoate way into the mystery of the relationship between Jesus and his Father, for she sees that God himself is acting through him.
The woman’s experience is important to keep in mind in all the healings we encounter in the gospels. They are all Trinitarian events, engaging all three Persons in an active, living way. Each of the Persons has his role. Jesus never acts on his own.
But the relationship initiated in this exchange is not enough for Jesus. If the woman were simply to go away healed and that were end of it, it might seem that the object of Jesus healing is, or can be, a generic or anonymous humanity. People he only knows abstractly. But this is not the case, he always heals individual sufferers, persons with whom he wants to draw into a personal and intimate relationship. Up to now, he has had his back to her, but upon recognizing that power has gone out from him, he immediately turns around and asks, “Who has touched my clothes?”, and looks about the crowd to see who had done it.
Jesus wants her gaze to meet his. She is to behold him and he her. Only in the meeting of their eyes, in this mutual seeing and knowing, will the relationship he desires be established. Going forward, the faith of the woman and her service to others will be nourished by the remembrance of the divine power she experienced in her body and power of this mutual gaze.
Her response of “fear and trembling” is not surprising. On one level, she has breached the rules of ritual impurity. She does not know what the reaction of Jesus, as God’s representative, will be, or that of the crowd.
More importantly, she has experienced concretely, in her body, a display of divine power, a mighty deed of God. She knows that somehow, in Jesus, she has encountered God himself. She is filled with awe, like the disciples in the boat in last Sunday’s Gospel who exclaimed after Jesus calmed the storm, “Who is this that even wind and sea obey him?” Who is this who has such power to heal?
More important, however, than the woman’s fear is the courage and gratitude she showed by coming forward and falling before the Lord and telling him the whole truth. He confirms the disposition in her we have seen all along. “Your faith has healed you.”
But there is still more. It is not enough for him that her gaze meets his, nor that she be healed of her affliction. He again deepens the relationship. He calls her “daughter”. She is a child of God and a daughter of his. He welcomes her into his family.
He dismisses her with a traditional formula, “Go in Peace”, which in Jesus’s mouth is never simply a wish but is active now and points forward to its fulfillment in his kingdom. The anxiety caused by the burden of her affliction has been erased. She is once again to participate fully in the covenant life of God’s people.
In the continuation of the narrative, in the raising of Jairus’ daughter, we see that Jesus has much more in mind for his work on earth than the healing of a chronic illness, he has come to destroy death and restore life for all who believe. Jesus does great things for both Jairus and the woman, but he asks of them both the courage of a radical faith. He asks them to take risks. Jairus was confident that if Jesus would come, his daughter’s life would be saved. For this he was ready to risk his reputation as a synagogue official. The woman was confident that if she just touched his cloak she would be healed. For this she was willing to risk the breaching of the laws of ritual impurity.
The same full power of God that was present then is alive and present now in this Eucharist. In it we touch God. The full power of God is alive also in each of us through the gift of the Holy Spirit. May we respond to the gift of this presence with our own radical act of faith. Confident that through it we will he healed, we will have his peace, and granted a share in eternal life with the Lord.