Reading 25
The hem of his cloak
The reading
Mark 5:24-34
He went with him, and a great multitude followed him, and they pressed upon him on all sides. A certain woman, who had an issue of blood for twelve years, and had suffered many things by many physicians, and had spent all that she had, and was no better, but rather grew worse, having heard the things concerning Jesus, came up behind him in the crowd, and touched his clothes. For she said, “If I just touch his clothes, I will be made well.” Immediately the flow of her blood was dried up, and she felt in her body that she was healed of her affliction.
Immediately Jesus, perceiving in himself that the power had gone out from him, turned around in the crowd, and asked, “Who touched my clothes?” His disciples said to him, “You see the multitude pressing against you, and you say, ‘Who touched me?’” He looked around to see her who had done this thing. But the woman, fearing and trembling, knowing what had been done to her, came and fell down before him, and told him all the truth. He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well. Go in peace, and be cured of your disease.”
The companions
Psalm 30:1-3
I will extol you, LORD, for you have raised me up, and have not made my foes to rejoice over me. LORD my God, I cried to you, and you have healed me. LORD, you have brought up my soul from Sheol. You have kept me alive, that I should not go down to the pit.
Malachi 4:2
But to you who fear my name shall the sun of righteousness arise with healing in its wings. You will go out, and leap like calves of the stall.
The note
Twelve years, every physician, all her money, and she is worse than when she started. That is the state she is in when she works out a plan that requires nobody to notice her.
The plan works. She touches the clothes, the bleeding stops, and she could be gone in the crowd within ten seconds, holding exactly what she came for.
He stops everything to find her. The disciples think the question is absurd, and by any normal reading it is; hundreds of people are pressed against him. He asks anyway, and waits, and she comes forward shaking, because she has broken a rule in public and expects to be handled for it.
Instead he gives her a word: daughter. In front of the same crowd that had kept her outside for twelve years. She had come for the healing. He would not let her leave without the standing that goes with it.
This week
Say one true thing out loud to a person, not into a search box. Most of us now handle the humiliating questions privately, at 2am, with a browser open, and take the answer without ever being known by anybody. Pick the thing you have only ever typed.
Tell one person this week, face to face or voice to voice. She got the cure in secret. Being seen was the part she had not planned for.
Scripture quotations are from the World English Bible (public domain). The divine name is rendered “the LORD” in the Psalm.
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