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Throughout the week, I write daily reflections for paid subscribers. Sundays are my opportunity to open the doors a little wider and share something with the whole Sacred & Secular community.
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There is something strangely anonymous about sitting in a waiting room.
It might be a doctor’s surgery, hospital clinic or somewhere else entirely. People arrive, take a seat, and silently wait for their name to be called. You may spend half an hour sitting only inches away from someone without knowing anything about them. You do not know what brought them there, what they are worried about, how long they have been waiting for answers, or what kind of news they are hoping to hear.
From the outside, everybody looks much the same. Another person in another chair, waiting their turn.
Yet every person in that room carries an entire story.
Someone may have been living with pain for years. Another may be waiting for test results they have barely dared to think about. Somebody else might be there for something completely routine and wondering why the appointment is already twenty minutes late. Unless a conversation begins, none of us knows.
I sometimes think about that when reading one of the most familiar healing stories in Mark’s Gospel. We usually call it the story of the woman with the issue of blood or the bleeding woman. Even after two thousand years, we still identify her by what was wrong with her because Mark never tells us her name.
Yet when Jesus eventually speaks to her, he calls her something completely different.
And I think that single word changes the story.
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The story actually begins with somebody else.
A man named Jairus approaches Jesus because his daughter is desperately ill. Mark tells us that Jairus is one of the synagogue leaders, which means he would have been a recognised and respected figure within the community. People knew who he was. He had a name, a position and, presumably, a certain amount of influence.
None of that matters much when your child is dying.
Jairus falls at Jesus’ feet and repeatedly begs him to come. His daughter, he says, is close to death. Whatever dignity normally accompanied his position has been swept aside by desperation. He is simply a father asking Jesus to save his little girl.
Jesus agrees to go with him, and immediately the story acquires a sense of urgency. A large crowd follows, pressing around Jesus as they make their way towards Jairus’ house.
We know where Jesus needs to be and why he needs to get there quickly.
Somewhere ahead of them is a child whose life is slipping away.
Then the journey stops.
Somewhere in the crowd is a woman who has been bleeding for twelve years.
Mark gives us remarkably little information about her beyond her suffering. We do not know her name, where she lived or whether she had family around her. What we are told is painful enough. She has endured this condition for twelve years, has been treated by numerous physicians, has spent everything she possesses trying to become well and, rather than improving, has become worse.
Her condition would undoubtedly have complicated ordinary life considerably, adding religious and social difficulties to the physical exhaustion and financial cost she was already carrying.
Twelve years is a very long time to live with anything.
Long enough for hope to be repeatedly raised and disappointed. Long enough for medical appointments and treatments to become part of the rhythm of life. Long enough, perhaps, to find that other people increasingly know you through the thing that has happened to you.
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The contrast between the woman and Jairus is difficult to miss.
Jairus is named. She is anonymous. Jairus occupies a recognised place within the religious community. Her condition places her in a much more complicated relationship with it. Jairus approaches Jesus openly, falls at his feet and tells him exactly what he needs. The woman approaches from behind, hoping to receive what she needs without attracting any attention at all.
She has heard about Jesus and believes that touching his clothing might be enough. So she moves through the crowd, reaches out and touches his cloak. Immediately, Mark tells us, the bleeding stops. She knows within herself that something has changed. After twelve years, the thing she hoped for has finally happened.
At this point, Jesus could simply keep walking.
In fact, from Jairus’ point of view, that would presumably have been the ideal outcome. The woman has been healed, nobody needs to know anything about it, and there is still a desperately ill child waiting at home.
Instead, Jesus stops. He turns around in the crowd and asks, “Who touched my clothes?”
The disciples are understandably baffled. People are pressing against Jesus from every direction. Everybody is touching him. Yet Jesus continues to look around until the woman eventually realises that she cannot remain hidden.
Mark tells us that she comes forward in fear and trembling, falls before him and tells him “the whole truth.”
That little phrase has always intrigued me.
We are not told exactly what she says or how long the conversation lasts. Perhaps she simply explains what she has done. Perhaps the whole truth means that she tells him something of the twelve years that brought her to that moment: the treatments, the expense, the disappointment and the final desperate decision to reach through a crowd and touch the edge of his clothing.
Whatever she tells him, Jesus listens.
Then he speaks.
“Daughter, your faith has made you well. Go in peace.”
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That first word is extraordinary.
Daughter.
It appears to be the only occasion in the Gospels where Jesus directly addresses a woman as ‘daughter’. He does not call her woman, friend or simply congratulate her on being healed.
He calls her daughter.
Suddenly, Mark’s two stories become almost impossible to separate.
Jairus has come to Jesus because of his daughter. A few verses later, we discover that she is twelve years old. The woman standing before Jesus has been suffering for twelve years.
One daughter has spent twelve years growing into life, loved so fiercely that her father is now pushing through a crowd to find help for her. The other has spent those same twelve years living with an illness that has consumed her money, her strength and perhaps much of the life she once imagined for herself.
One daughter is known to everyone. The other does not even have a name in the story. Yet Jesus calls her daughter, too.
I find myself wondering what that word sounded like to Jairus.
His entire world must have been narrowing around his own child at that moment. Every second mattered. He had found the person he believed could help her, and now Jesus had stopped in the middle of the road to speak with somebody else.
Yet Jesus refuses to treat this woman as an interruption.
There are two daughters in the story.
The daughter Jairus came to save, and the daughter Jesus refuses to overlook.
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There is another detail here that I think makes the encounter even more moving.
The woman had already been healed before Jesus said a word to her. The physical miracle happened when she touched his clothing. Jesus could have carried on walking, and her body would still have been restored.
So why stop?
Perhaps because healing her body was not the only thing that mattered. Jesus draws her out of anonymity. He allows her to tell her story. Then, in front of the very crowd through which she had hoped to pass unnoticed, he addresses her with a word of belonging.
The healing happened privately, the restoration happens publicly.
For twelve years, her life has been shaped by what is wrong with her. Even we, as readers, have continued the habit. We call her the bleeding woman because that is almost all Mark tells us about her.
Jesus gives her another identity.
Daughter.
That seems profoundly important because human beings are remarkably good at allowing one part of a person’s story to swallow everything else.
We do it with illness and disability. We do it with failure, addiction, divorce, unemployment, grief and the mistakes people made years ago. Sometimes other people place the label upon us. Sometimes, after enough time has passed, we begin doing it to ourselves.
What happened becomes what defines us. Yet Jesus seems to see something larger.
He sees more than the problem. He sees the person.
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Then the news arrives that Jairus has been dreading.
His daughter has died.
The messengers tell him there is no longer any point in troubling Jesus. The delay now appears disastrous. If we were encountering this story for the first time, we might reasonably assume that Jesus had allowed one person’s need to get in the way of another.
But Mark is not telling two unrelated miracle stories that happen to collide.
He has deliberately woven them together. Scholars sometimes describe this kind of storytelling as a Markan sandwich: one story begins, another is inserted into the middle, and then the first resumes. The two stories are meant to interpret one another.
Jesus continues to Jairus’ house. He takes the dead girl by the hand and tells her to get up.
She does.
Both daughters are restored. One is restored to life, whilst the other is restored to health, peace and, perhaps just as importantly, visibility.
Neither daughter’s need diminishes the other’s.
That, for me, is where this becomes much more than a story about miraculous healing.
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Most of us know what it feels like to believe somebody else’s needs are more important than ours.
There will always be somebody whose situation seems more serious, whose problems are more obvious or whose voice carries further than ours. Sometimes that leads us to minimise what we ourselves are carrying.
We tell ourselves not to make a fuss. After all, other people have it worse. Other people need attention more urgently. Perhaps we should simply get on with it and manage.
The woman in Mark’s story appears to expect very little. She does not ask Jesus for a conversation or demand that he stop. She hopes merely to reach him unnoticed, take whatever healing she can and disappear again.
Jesus will not allow her to disappear, and perhaps that is the part of the story I need to remember most.
The crowd sees an interruption. Jairus may have seen an agonising delay. Mark’s readers might initially see an unnamed woman who has wandered into somebody else’s miracle.
Jesus sees a person.
There are many things in life that can make us feel invisible. Illness, age, grief and failure can do it. Sometimes simply living among louder, more confident or apparently more important people can do it. Yet again and again, the Gospels show Jesus noticing individuals in crowds.
The person everyone else is passing.
The person nobody expects him to stop for.
The person who has become accustomed to standing at the edge.
The woman reached through the crowd because she wanted to be healed without being noticed.
Instead, Jesus gave her something she had not even asked for.
He noticed her, heard her story and reminded her that she belonged. Before continuing towards the house of the daughter everybody knew about, Jesus stopped for the daughter nobody knew.
Perhaps sometimes being seen is part of the healing, too.
A question to ponder: Where in your life might you have become so used to being overlooked that you no longer expect to be seen?
Thank you for reading today’s reflection.
Paul