Mark 5:25-34
Twelve Years and One Touch
25And a woman was there who had suffered from bleeding for twelve years.
26She had borne much agony under the care of many physicians and had spent all she had, but to no avail. Instead, her condition had only grown worse.
27When the woman heard about Jesus, she came up through the crowd behind Him and touched His cloak.
28For she kept saying, “If only I touch His garments, I will be healed.”
29Immediately her bleeding stopped, and she sensed in her body that she was healed of her affliction.
30At once Jesus was aware that power had gone out from Him. Turning to the crowd, He asked, “Who touched My garments?”
31His disciples answered, “You can see the crowd pressing in on You, and yet You ask, ‘Who touched Me?’”
32But He kept looking around to see who had done this.
33Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell down before Him trembling in fear, and she told Him the whole truth.
34“Daughter,” said Jesus, “your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be free of your affliction.”
Berean Standard Bible
Jesus is walking toward a dying girl and Mark stops everything to tell us about somebody else. He does it on purpose. Jairus is still in that crowd, running out of time, and the delay is part of what we are being shown.
A woman in the crowd has been bleeding for twelve years. Mark spends a whole verse on what it had cost her: many physicians, a great deal of suffering under their care, everything she owned spent on it, and her condition worse at the end than at the start.
There was a second cost, and Mark does not spell it out because his first readers did not need it spelled out. The law in Leviticus puts a woman with a discharge like hers under uncleanness for as long as it lasts. Anything she sits on is unclean, and anyone who touches those things is unclean until evening and has to wash. So for twelve years nobody could touch her without paying for it, she could not go up to worship, and she had no business in a crowd, let alone reaching for a stranger's clothing.
She does it anyway, from behind, where nobody will see her face.
“If only I touch His garments, I will be healed.”
Mark says she kept saying it, the way people do when they are talking themselves into something.
She touches, and it works, and she feels the change inside her body. Then, from where she is standing, the whole thing goes wrong. He stops walking. He knows power has gone out of him, and he starts asking who touched him.
“You can see the crowd pressing in on You, and yet You ask, ‘Who touched Me?’”
The disciples think the question is ridiculous, and in a press like that it is. He looks anyway.
She had come for a healing she could take without ever being seen, and he will not let it end that way. A woman untouchable for twelve years was not going to be sent home with her body mended and her shame intact. So she comes forward shaking, falls down in front of him, and tells him the whole truth out loud where the crowd can hear it.
“Daughter,” said Jesus, “your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be free of your affliction.”
He hands her a family word, in public, after twelve years in which nobody could lay a hand on her. Under the law her touch should have made him unclean, and it ran the other way instead, the same as it did with the leper he touched. Whatever she had did not travel to him. What he had traveled to her.
How We Know
What this woman risked is established in the law. Leviticus 15:25 covers a discharge of blood continuing beyond the normal time, and puts her under the same uncleanness for as long as it lasts. Verse 27 adds that anyone who touches what she has touched becomes unclean until evening.
Twelve years of that, in a crowd, reaching for a stranger's clothing.
The law explains what she was afraid of in verse 33, and it explains why Mark stresses that she came up behind him. Nothing in the passage needs to be inferred about her situation; Leviticus states it.
Questions
1 What is the longest any of us has waited for something to get better?
AnswerTwelve years is the figure Mark gives for this woman, and he fills the time in for us: doctor after doctor, a great deal of suffering under their care, every coin she had spent on it, and she came out of all that worse than she went in.
2 Why does she come up from behind instead of asking him to his face?
AnswerBecause the law made her unclean, and everything and everyone she touched unclean along with her. She was not supposed to be in that crowd at all. Walking up and asking him in the open was not available to her.
3 She was already healed. Why does Jesus stop and insist on finding her?
AnswerHer body was mended and she was about to walk away still carrying what she had carried for twelve years. He would not let it finish like that. She had to be seen, and he had something to say to her where other people could hear it.
4 What does he call her, and why does it land the way it does?
AnswerDaughter. A woman nobody had been able to touch for twelve years gets a family word said over her out loud, in front of the same crowd that had been pressing up against him.
What This Means for Us
She wanted the healing without the conversation, which is understandable, and most of us are the same. We would like the problem fixed quietly, without ever standing in front of anybody and saying out loud what has been true about us for years.
He would not do it that way. Being made well and being put back among people are two different things, and he came for both, so he stopped in the road and waited for her to speak.
So tell one person the true thing you have been managing on your own. Not everybody. Just one person, chosen carefully. The healing is not made smaller by somebody else knowing about it.
Prayer
Father, thank you that you stopped in a crowd for one person nobody was looking at. We would rather be helped quietly than known. Give us the nerve to be known. And thank you for calling her daughter in front of everybody. Amen.