Someone Touched Me

As Jesus went with him, the crowds pressed around Him.

“Him” is Jairus, a synagogue leader who has just fallen at Jesus’ feet in front of a waiting crowd. His only daughter, “about twelve,” is dying. There is no errand more urgent than that. Everyone in the street knows where Jesus is going, and everyone knows he needs to get there quickly.

Luke then introduces “a woman who had suffered from bleeding for twelve years.”

Twelve years. As long as Jairus’s daughter had been alive. Luke sets the two numbers side by side and lets us notice.

What twelve years costs

“She had spent all her money on physicians, but no one was able to heal her.” Mark adds that she only grew worse.

Luke says nothing about religious impurity, and it is easy to overstate. But under the law in Leviticus 15, a woman with a discharge of blood beyond her time was unclean for as long as it lasted, along with the bed she lay on and the seat she sat on. Whatever that meant in daily practice, she had lived with it for twelve years, and the money was gone.

“She came up behind Jesus and touched the fringe of His cloak, and immediately her bleeding stopped.”

The word for fringe is the one Matthew uses for the tassels some men lengthened to be seen. It may be that she reached for the tassel at the corner of his cloak. It may simply mean the edge. Either way she came from behind, touched as little as she could, and planned to be gone before anyone knew.

Jesus stops

“Who touched Me?”

Everyone denied it. Peter, practical as ever, points out the obvious. “Master,” he says, “the people are crowding and pressing against You.” Dozens of people had brushed against him in the last minute.

Jesus does not accept that answer. “Someone touched Me, for I know that power has gone out from Me.”

Here is what makes the story strange. She is already healed. Verse 44 says so: immediately. Nothing more needs to happen to her body. And there is a father standing beside Jesus whose child is dying while they wait. Every second of this search is borrowed from Jairus.

Luke does not tell us why Jesus insisted. He does tell us what the stop produced.

“Then the woman, seeing that she could not escape notice, came trembling and fell down before Him. In the presence of all the people, she explained why she had touched Him and how she had immediately been healed.”

The healing had happened in secret. Now the whole street hears it from her own mouth. The people who knew her, and perhaps knew to keep their distance, now know she is well.

“Daughter”

“Daughter,” said Jesus, “your faith has healed you. Go in peace.”

In all four Gospels, this is the only encounter in which he speaks to someone directly as “Daughter.” He says it in public, to a woman with no family mentioned and nothing left, while the father of a dying daughter stands close enough to hear.

“Your faith has healed you” is the same Greek phrase Luke used a chapter earlier, when Jesus told another woman in a Pharisee’s house, “Your faith has saved you.” The verb covers both. Her body had been made well at the touch. What Jesus adds is a name, and peace, and a place.

The girl was still waiting

“While He was still speaking, someone arrived from the house of the synagogue leader. ‘Your daughter is dead,’ he told Jairus.”

It is hard to read that line without thinking the stop was expensive. Jesus turns to Jairus: “Do not be afraid; just believe, and she will be healed.” The verb is the same one again. The daughter in the street and the daughter in the house are held in one word.

A few verses later Jesus takes the girl by the hand: “Child, get up!”

For today

Some of us are the woman. We want the help without the attention. Jesus seems to want more for us than that. He wants us known.

Some of us are Jairus, standing in the road while God appears to be busy with someone else, getting news that sounds final. The story does not soften that moment. It only says that Jesus heard, and turned, and kept walking toward the house.