She Touched His Coat

A woman had spent every coin she owned on doctors and was worse than when she started. Twelve years of that. Now she was pushing through a crowd with her head down, aiming for the back of one man's coat.

She had a good reason to hide, and it was not shyness. The strange part of this story is not that she got better, but which way the healing went.

Mark wrote one of the four accounts of Jesus' life that Christians keep. This happens in Galilee, in northern Israel, about two thousand years ago. Jesus was a Jewish teacher whom Christians believe is God's own Son.

He has just stepped off a boat when a man named Jairus falls at his feet. Jairus runs the local synagogue — the meeting house where Jewish neighbours gathered to read the Scriptures and pray — and his twelve-year-old daughter is dying. Jesus goes with him, and the crowd follows.

Then someone with no name in the story gets in the way.

1. Twelve years of paying to get worse

And there was a woman who had had a discharge of blood for twelve years, and who had suffered much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had, and was no better but rather grew worse.

Mark 5:25-26

She had a bleeding illness that would not stop, and every doctor cost money. Mark reports two things a kinder writer would soften: the money ran out, and the treatments made her worse. Twelve years is also the exact age of the dying girl Jesus is walking toward (Mark 5:42). This woman had been ill that girl's whole life.

Centuries earlier, God had a prophet named Jeremiah — a man whose job was to say God's words out loud — describe a wound nobody could close.

Your hurt is incurable, and your wound is grievous… no medicine for your wound, no healing for you.

Jeremiah 30:12-13

That is God refusing to pretend: nothing they could buy would fix it. It sounds like the end of hope until five verses on — "I will restore health to you, and your wounds I will heal" (Jeremiah 30:17). A cure exists, just not for sale.

A letter in the Bible called Hebrews turns that into a test, about the animals Israel killed year after year to cover the nation's sin.

Otherwise, would they not have ceased to be offered, since the worshipers, having once been cleansed, would no longer have any consciousness of sins?

Hebrews 10:2

If a treatment works, you stop needing it. A queue that forms again every year proves nothing was finished. That is her twelve years — pay, hope, fail, start again. Most of us have a smaller version of it.

2. She was not allowed to touch anyone

She had heard the reports about Jesus and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his garment. For she said, "If I touch even his garments, I will be made well."

Mark 5:27-28

His garment is his outer coat, the loose cloak worn over everything else. Watch how she does it: from behind, in a crowd, silent. A plan for not getting caught.

Her illness made her what the Bible calls unclean. That does not mean dirty, and it does not mean guilty. It meant off-limits under God's law — shut out of the worship of God, and able to pass that same state to whatever you touched.

If a woman has a discharge of blood for many days… all the days of the discharge she shall continue in uncleanness.

Leviticus 15:25

Anyone who touched her bed or her seat had to wash and stay off-limits until evening (Leviticus 15:27). Read that as a life, not a rule. For twelve years nobody hugged her, no chair she sat on was safe for the next person, and she could not go where God was worshipped. She had done nothing wrong — she was ill — and the result was the same as punishment: alone. So she reaches for his coat, planning to vanish.

By everything that crowd had been taught, the plan should have hurt him. A prophet named Haggai once tested the priests, whose job was to rule on what counted as clean.

"If someone carries holy meat… and touches… any kind of food, does it become holy?" The priests answered, "No." … "If someone who is unclean by contact with a dead body touches any of these, does it become unclean?" … "It does become unclean."

Haggai 2:12-13

Two answers that do not match. Holy — belonging to God — does not spread by touch. Unclean does. Put a clean hand on a muddy one and you get two muddy hands. The crowd knew what her touch would do: not lift her up, but pull him down.

3. The rule ran the other way

And immediately the flow of blood dried up, and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease.

Mark 5:29

It goes the wrong direction. Nothing of hers moves into him. Something of his moves into her, through cloth, in a crowd, without a word. Mark does not explain it. He reports it, and lets you notice that the oldest rule in the room has just been overruled.

He had shown this once already. Earlier in the same book, a man with a serious skin disease came to Jesus — the law told such a man to tear his clothes, live outside the town, and call out "Unclean, unclean" so people stayed clear (Leviticus 13:45-46). Jesus "stretched out his hand and touched him" and said, "I will; be clean" (Mark 1:41). The word alone would have healed him. What that man had lost most was being touched, and Jesus gave it back before he gave back the skin.

Then he does it at full size. At Jairus's house the girl has already died. Under Israel's law a dead body was the strongest source of uncleanness there was — "Whoever touches the dead body of any person shall be unclean seven days" (Numbers 19:11).

Taking her by the hand he said to her, "Talitha cumi," which means, "Little girl, I say to you, arise." And immediately the girl got up and began walking.

Mark 5:41-42

Talitha cumi is Aramaic, the everyday language Jesus spoke at home; Mark keeps his words, then translates. He takes the hand nobody else would take. Again, death does not spread to him. Life spreads to her.

4. He stopped the crowd so she would not go home a secret

She could have slipped away. Jesus would not let her.

And Jesus, perceiving in himself that power had gone out from him, immediately turned about in the crowd and said, "Who touched my garments?"

Mark 5:30

To her, that must have sounded like being caught.

But the woman… came in fear and trembling and fell down before him and told him the whole truth.

Mark 5:33

The whole truth: twelve years, the money, the rule she just broke in front of everyone. She says out loud the thing she came to avoid saying.

Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.

Mark 5:34

He does not call her woman. He calls her daughter, and it is the only time in Mark's whole account that Jesus calls anyone that. She arrived as a problem to be hidden and leaves as family, in front of the crowd that had kept its distance.

Then "made you well." The Greek word is sesōken, from sōzō, which covers both being healed and being rescued; Mark uses it both ways. Her body was mended before he said it. Something larger has been settled.

That is why he stopped everything. A quiet healing would have left her well and still hiding. Isaiah described the servant God would send as gentle with what is nearly broken — "a bruised reed he will not break" (Isaiah 42:3). Calling her out was not exposure but that same gentleness, done in front of witnesses.

Now the honest difficulty, because this is not a technique. Paul, who wrote many of the letters in the Bible, had a physical trouble he called a thorn.

Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me. But he said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness."

2 Corinthians 12:8-9

He asked, and the answer was no. Anyone who says enough faith always ends in a cured body is not reading the whole Bible, and is setting sick people up to blame themselves. What Jesus refuses is not every illness. It is leaving you outside.

Where the exchange finished

Israel's unclean lived outside the camp (Leviticus 13:46). That is where he ended up.

So Jesus also suffered outside the gate in order to sanctify the people through his own blood.

Hebrews 13:12

To sanctify is to make clean and set apart for God. He was executed outside the city wall, the place kept for whatever had to be kept away, and he took the position the woman had lived in for twelve years.

For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

2 Corinthians 5:21

There is the swap. He had nothing wrong with him and took what was wrong with us; we had nothing right and were handed his standing before God. He does not stand clear of the weight. He picks it up.

What to do with this

Name the thing you keep paying for. Say it out loud to one person this week: this has not worked, and I have stopped pretending it will.

Tell one person the whole truth. Her healing was real before she spoke; speaking ended the hiding. Choose the person and the day this week.

Come without cleaning up first. If you are staying away from God until you are more presentable, say it tonight in plain words: I am not fixed, and I am coming anyway.

She reached for the back of his coat, hoping to take something unseen. She left with the illness gone, the crowd listening, and a name she did not have that morning. Daughter.