Posts Tagged ‘Interruptions’

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Mark 5:21-43

You might have noticed that the gospel story read this morning contains two healing miracles, not one.  What makes them particularly interesting is that they are interwoven – in fact, one story interrupts the other.

We find Jesus surrounded by “a large crowd” just after his return from a healing mission that had taken him across the Sea of Galilee.  A man approaches him – not just any man, but a leader of the synagogue, a person of considerable social status and importance.  He is desperate with worry and grief and, abandoning all dignity, he falls to the ground at Jesus’ feet and “begs him repeatedly,” the gospel writer tells us,to come and lay his hands on his sick daughter, who is at the point of death.  There is a mixture of desperation and hope in his eyes.  He is convinced that Jesus has the authority to make her well, if only he will come, and quickly.  So Jesus went with him.  The crowd followed.

On the way a curious thing happens.  Jesus suddenly stops and looks around.  “Who touched me?” he asks.  This strikes even his own disciples as an odd question, given that throngs of people are surrounding him and jostling against him.  But he is “aware that power had gone forth from him” and he wants to know to whom it has gone.  There is a pause, until a woman slowly comes forward and admits that it was she who reached out to touch his robes.  Her situation is similarly desperate.  The gospel writer Mark underscores the seriousness of her case by telling us that not only had she been suffering from hemorrhages 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”!  Unlike Jairus, the man whose daughter was gravely ill, she has no high social standing. Her disease has impoverished her and isolated her; anyone coming into contact with her would have been rendered ritually impure.  For twelve years she had been in pain physically and ostracized socially! It is no wonder that she took the risk she did in reaching out to touch the man of God. Read More