Meditation on Mark 5:21–43
Pastor Karen Crawford
Second Sunday in Lent
Feb. 25, 2024
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Our gospel reading today touches me deeply, in a personal way. There is so much I could say about this passage. What is on my heart is that what is said will help someone find hope for their healing or the healing of their loved one.
Today’s passage, specifically the story of the woman in the crowd, healed while Jesus is on his way to heal the synagogue leaders’ daughter, feels so real and relevant for today. Especially with the many details provided.
I have heard stories of women who were misdiagnosed or have undergone treatments that were ineffective and made them sicker than they were before. Women have shared with me how they left doctors’ offices feeling embarrassed and unheard, some of them being told that their pain or illness was all in their head. They left feeling as if they wasted their money and time.
Maybe you have heard some of these stories. Maybe you have a story to share.
My main question for this healing series is whether sickness or disability means the sufferer is an outsider or marginalized in their community. Did they become “other” because of their illness or disability? How did their family and community treat them—before and after the healing? Who was advocating for them? Were they seeking help for themselves? And finally, how did their lives change after their healing? Did they change, at all?
In today’s passage, those who are sick or disabled are not marginalized in their community. That is my conclusion after studying the passage and seeking the help of two Bible scholars. In fact, being gravely ill may mean, as in the case of the little girl, that the one who is sick is at the center of the community’s concern.
The controversial part of this passage is not the little girl’s story; it is the story of the healing of the woman. Past scholarship has emphasized how the woman must have been a loner, ostracized and marginalized because of her long illness that made her “impure” and unable to participate in synagogue and other community activities, which I no longer believe is true.
Today, I challenge you to see her in a different light.
Wendy Cotter, a tenured Professor of Scripture in the Theology Department of Loyola University in Chicago, comments on the “extraordinary attention” given to the woman’s situation. [1]This story is significant! Mark provides “six items of information” about her flow of blood when “flow of blood” may have been enough. [2] Mark says, “She had suffered for 12 years (5:25); she had suffered under many physicians (5.26); she had spent all her money (5.26); she was no better but rather was growing worse (5.25); she heard about Jesus (5.27); and she decided to come up behind him and touch his garments (5.27) because she said, “If I touch even his garments, I shall be made well (5.28).” [3]
What was the purpose of the narrator providing all those details? Cotter asks. The “lengthy and detailed introduction seems almost defensive, an excuse for her unfitting behavior, an explanation of innocence on the question of why she would touch Jesus.” [4] Cotter can’t understand why the narrator thinks her behavior “requires an excuse” and why the woman would seem so fearful. This is the part that usually ends with scholars going off on a tangent about the woman being ritually impure and suggesting that the woman must be ashamed, “that she has violated Torah by entering a crowd and touching another when she” is bleeding. But there is no mention of Torah in this story. The reason for her fearfulness, Cotter says, may have more to do with the context of the world of Greco-Roman antiquity. She says, “The ideal woman was expected to be found at home, surrounded by her family, shy, modest and quiet.” [5]
I am not sure if the ideal woman of the Greco-Roman world is that different than society’s expectations for the ideal woman of today.
Dr. Amy-Jill Levine, professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies at Hartford International University, is also critical of the scholarship. “A number of commentators,” she says, “after addressing the woman’s ritual impurity (as if that, and not the fact that she’s had chronic bleeding, is her major problem), then argue that the woman felt shame. Similarly, based on no evidence whatsoever, commentators assert that the woman has been ostracized, and so Jesus becomes the one who restores her to community. Thus, commentators make the woman’s Judaism a context of shaming and ostracizing, and Jesus gets to be the social corrective. … [6]
Levine says that the woman visiting numerous physicians and spending all her money on them, “suggests she was being in public and proactive rather than secreted and shamed. Mark thus makes a plea for affordable health care. Next, the Gospel texts do not mention shaming, and it is unhelpful,” she says, “to project an image of shame onto women because their bodies are not behaving well. Likely everyone in the neighborhood knew about her condition, and probably her economic status as well.” [7]
“What a fabulous woman!” Levine says. She advocates for herself, though she is weakened physically and may have been labeled as disabled today. “Perhaps she was unable to have children. Perhaps her bleeding is the result of pregnancy and childbirth…” (We don’t know.) “We do know, however, that her act is one of enormous courage. She knows that Jesus can heal, both by touch and at a distance…” [8]
On the question of whether she was isolated and ostracized, Levine explains how “later rabbinic literature insists on the mitzvah, the commandment… of visiting the sick. …” [9]She challenges us to imagine her neighbors caring for her, bringing her food “when her bleeding made her too weak to prepare anything for herself.” [10] She suggests that instead of a loner, she may have been “fully embedded in a family that loved her…” [11] Maybe it was the love of her family that emboldens her to seek Christ’s healing.
She WANTED to live, dear friends! She had a life and wanted to have life more ABUNDANTLY. While she may have been annoyed, in pain, frustrated, and despairing, “there is nothing about a woman’s body, or any body, that should cause shame,” Levine writes. [12] She may have worried that Jesus would give the synagogue leader’s daughter priority because of his status. But that’s not what happened. He took time to talk with her and encourage her. I would argue that this intimate conversation was part of her healing. May we also be encouraged to approach God boldly. “That is what children, in healthy family relationships, do with loving parents,” Levine says. [13]
What Jesus says and does in these stories of healing intrigues me. I have so many questions. Why does he demand to know who in the crowd has touched him? Does he already know the person he has healed? Was he just giving her permission to speak with him? His command stirs her to come forward. She immediately, obediently, tells him what happened. He calls her “Daughter!” He compliments her on her faith that led her to approach him-because real faith compels us to act! Faith isn’t passive! “Your faith has made you well,” he says. “Go in peace and be healed of your disease.”
Cotter writes, “Jesus is indeed cosmically powerful, but that power is at the service of ordinary people, and in situations of frank human vulnerability…There’s no dramatic performance here for the sake of a crowd of people.” [14]Only the parents and his disciples see Jesus take the little girl by the hand, and say in Aramaic, “Talitha koum,” “Little girl, get up!” They will be overcome by amazement. Though he tells them not to tell anyone, many will find out soon enough. Why does he tell the family to feed the little girl? Some say it’s to keep the focus on her wellbeing and off himself. [15]Others say the food will help with her healing and speculate if the little girl suffered from diabetes.[16]
One word stands out to me, as I finish my study of this passage, for now. The Greek word sozo, translated “healed” or “be made well.” Jairus says, “My little daughter is at the point of death; please come and lay Your hands on her, so that she will get well and live.” The 12-year-suffering woman thinks aloud, “If I only touch his cloak, I shall be made well.” Jesus will say to her,“Your faith has made you well.” Sozo. The word may also be translated “saved,” but it means more than being forgiven and escaping eternal damnation. Salvation can happen in this world, dear friends!
Dr. Levine says, “Salvation for (the woman) is having the bleeding stop. Salvation, in Jewish thought and here in the Gospel … is not primarily something that concerns life after death.
Salvation is also life during life; it is rescue from enemies and disease, from loneliness or accident, from flood or fire. It is something we will all need at one point or another, and it is something that we all can provide to others, if we try.” [17]
In both stories, hope is not lost! Faith matters—in the one advocating for the healing of his daughter and for the one pleading for her own well-being. Jesus cares about the bodies and lives of women and girls! Isn’t that wonderful? Even those whom the gospel writers fail to provide names. There may be a reason for that. What if the Lord wants us to put ourselves in these healing stories? Instead of seeing the woman and the little girl as nameless, we could see them as symbolic of the healing of every woman, the healing of every girl.
I hope that today’s message touched you in a personal way. That I found the right words, somehow. May you never lose faith. May you never give up. May you never stop praying for healing.
Let us pray. Holy One, thank you for your Son who has done all the work of suffering on a cross for our salvation. Thank you for your love and concern for our being made well in this world and in the world to come. We look forward to meeting our Messiah, face to face. When there will be no more sickness. No more disease or death. We long for that day when our mourning will turn to joy; you will wipe away every tear. Help us to be strong in our faith and never give up hope and prayer for healing for our loved ones and for ourselves, being made well, made whole, in body, mind, and soul. Amen.
[1] Wendy Cotter, “Mark’s Hero of the Twelfth-Year Miracles” in A Feminist Companion to Mark (ed. By Amy-Jill Levine with Marianne Blickenstaff, Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press, 2004) 57-58.
[6] Amy-Jill Levine, Signs and Wonders, A Beginner’s Guide to the Miracles of Jesus (Abingdon Press. Kindle Edition) 77-80.
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