2024.04.28 | Healed
“Healed”
The Rev. Dr. Arlene K. Nehring
Senior Minister & Executive Director
Eden United Church of Christ, Hayward, California
Fifth Sunday of Easter, Sunday, April 26, 2024
Mark 5:24b-34 | Español
Jesus’ healing of an anonymous woman with a flow of blood is found in all three of the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke). I don’t have a Ph.D. in New Testament, but I did pay attention to what my professors said—especially when they made comments that could be applied broadly.
For example, NT Professor Pheme Perkins, who I studied with at Boston College School of Theology, said more than once in class, “If a story is mentioned in all three of the synoptics, you can trust that there is an historical basis for the events described in the story, and whatever happened had profound meaning to the first followers of Jesus and the early Christians.”
Today’s gospel reading is one of those stories. So is the story of Jairus’s daughter, which envelopes it. Note, that the healing story about the healing of this anonymous woman is a story within the story about the healing of Jairus’s daughter.
So what’s the buzz? What exactly is so important about these two stories in general, and the healing of the anonymous woman in particular?
II
Answer: In both cases, Jesus crosses the Sea of Galilee twice illustrating that he ministered to both Jews and Gentiles. He ministered to and with people both near and far, to the clean and unclean, to the rich and poor, to the young and the mature, and to the powerful and the powerless.
Nevertheless, both people whom Jesus healed in Mark’s accounts, were unnamed. The child’s identity is based on her father’s identity, and the woman with the flow of blood was identified with her infirmity. This situation calls to mind Virginia Woolf's infamous proclamation in her essay, A Room of One’s Own, “Anonymous was a woman.”
The number 12 is significant in both miracles. The child was 12 years old. The adult had suffered for 12 years. The child was part of a household with loving parents and caregivers. The woman was alienated from her family and ostracized from her community on account of her illness. One was rich. The other poor. One had an advocate. The other was left to advocate for herself.
On the face of it, Jairus and his daughter and the anonymous woman and her even more anonymous loved ones represented two different families from two quite different social locations.
Jairus was a man of wealth and privilege whose family carried Platinum-level health insurance. The unnamed woman, by comparison, had no healthcare plan and she had no one to advocate for her other than herself.
Today, most people living in California are eligible for and have public or privately funded healthcare coverage, so it may be easier for us to imagine being Jairus, who had access to health care for himself and his family, than it is for us to imagine being the anonymous woman.
Unless you just landed at Eden Church today and are waiting to meet with Yuliana, the director of our Newcomer Navigation Center, the unnamed woman’s experience may be less familiar to us. So let’s try for a moment to imagine what it was like to be her. Let’s start by trying to imagine why we don't know her name.
I venture that we don’t know this woman’s name because she had been quarantined for 12 years on account of her health and her lack of access to quality care. In the ancient world, quarantine was one of the few medical interventions available to treat disease and infirmity. Most ailments were deemed contagious until proven otherwise. So even if the woman’s malady wasn’t contagious, she would have been subject to quarantine for medical reasons. But that is not all.
It’s extraordinary then, when you consider both the Gentilian context that this woman lived in, and you remember that Jesus was a Jew, that he ministered to this woman, because he had been taught to adhere to the Levite purity codes which required that a sick person quarantine. Since we have all lived through COVID-19, it’s not hard to imagine life in quarantine. Add to these understandings that in first-century Palestine, those who were living with a disease had to wear a mask, remove their head covering, and shout “Unclean!” whenever someone approached them.
Imagine the psycho-social consequences of those practices and the stigma associated with illness and disease. Is it any wonder that Mark didn’t know this woman’s name? He may never have been introduced to her, much less known her well enough to have developed a friendship. Anonymous had been cut off from her family and friends, from participation in the local economy and society in general. She had been pushed to the margins, to the outer limits of her city, to the fringe of society.
Yet, Anonymous dares to reach out and touch the fringe of Jesus’ garments, even at the risk of repercushions for defying the social norms. She reaches out and touches the fringe of Jesus’ garments, and he feels her touch and wants to know who touched him.
Anonymous doesn’t hide. She says, “It was me.” Then she went on to explain that she knew the rules. She didn’t touch his body. She only touched the hem of his robe, the part that had touched the ground, the part that was unclean, like her. And she did this because she knew if she could just touch the fringe, she would be healed—and she was.
III
This encounter between Jesus and the anonymous woman created quite a stir for several reasons. For starters, this sick, unhoused, alienated woman had interrupted the national healthcare delivery system. That system was designed to deliver benefits to paying customers, not those without insurance or the ability to pay the copay.
In addition, Anonymous had the audacity to advocate for herself. Jairus’ 12-year old daughter had her influential father to serve as her advocate. But Anonymous was a beggar and an outcast. She had no one to rely on except Jesus.
Furthermore, this woman had the audacity to believe that God had a better day and a better way in store for her, and that her current fate was not her intended destiny. She challenged the status quo. She resisted social otherizing. She believed, not only in Jesus’ healing power, but in her right to receive care, and her ability to heal and reintegrate into her community. She was a pauper, a Dalit, a scourge to her family. She was the fringe of the fringe. And yet she dared to challenge the systems that were in place. She touched the fringe of Jesus’ garment, and she was healed.
I mean really, just who did she think she was?!
According to Mark’s gospel, Anonymous thought—no, I venture, Anonymous knew—that she was a child of God. She knew that she was fearfully and wonderfully made in the image of God. And she knew that her creator longed for her to be healed and whole, so that she could return to her people, her work, her house of prayer, and more.
This—this—is why Jesus said to Anonymous, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.”
IV
Imagine if we were like Anonymous. Imagine if we believed, like she believed, that we and others are more than our diagnosis or disease.
Imagine if we believed that everyone is a child of God, that God wants all of us to be healed, and that the right to accessible and affordable healthcare is a basic civil right for all of us.
Imagine. And as you imagine this reality, I’ll tell you what would happen. We would all be healed in body, mind, and spirit. God would be glorified, and God’s vision for creation would be fulfilled. Amen.