The Woman with Bleeding – by Ritchie Way

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• Ritchie Way

Aug 23, 2015 4061

A large crowd followed and pressed around Jesus. And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years. She had suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors and had spent all she had; yet instead of getting better she grew worse. When she heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, because she thought, “If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed. Immediately her bleeding stopped and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering.

At once Jesus realized that power had gone out from him. He turned around in the crowd and asked,

“Who touched my clothes?

“You see the people crowding against you,” his disciples answered, “and yet you can ask, ‘Who touched me?'”

But Jesus kept looking around to see who had done it. Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell at his feet and, trembling with fear, told him the whole truth. He said to her,

“Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering (Mark 5:24-34).

Here was a woman at the end of her tether. She was anaemic from the constant loss of blood; she felt cut off from God as she had not been permitted to participate in any religious services for twelve long years due to her permanent uncleanness (Lev. 15:25-27); she had been exploited by doctors who subjected her to a variety of painful ‘cures’, but who were unable to stop her bleeding; and she had spent all her money seeking a remedy for her distressing condition. In other words, her life was hell and she was desperate. She wanted a piece of heaven, and Jesus was her only hope.

Jesus had come to the synagogue in Capernaum at the request of Jairus, whose daughter was close to death. A large crowd had gathered. The woman who had this chronic bleeding had to force her way through to him. Jesus was her goal and only hope and she permitted no one to keep her from him.

It would have been utterly embarrassing for this woman to approach Jesus in public and explain her problem to him, so she decided that all she needed to do was come up behind him and touch his robe to be healed. Just as she believed, the moment she reached out and touched the edge of his cloak a pulse of healing swept through her body, and she knew she had been healed.

In spite of the dense crowd, Jesus was able to discern the imperceptible touch of faith from all the other jostles and bumps, and ask who touched him. The woman hadn’t actually touched Jesus; just the edge of his garment, but it was as if she was the only person there. There was a healing relationship between Jesus and that ’empty cup’ of a woman that did not exist between him and the others that crowded around him. And Jesus did not disappoint her.

Jesus ministers his grace to everyone who craves it, but it’s a grace that doesn’t discriminate. He didn’t make the woman wait until after he had healed Jairus’s daughter. Her needs were just as important to him as the needs of any government or religious official. And he treats us similarly.

– Ritchie Way