On Sermons: Jesus and the woman 12 years cursed

By Russell E. Salesman, OSV News

“So Jesus went with (Jarius). A large crowd followed and pressed around him. And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years” (Mk 5:24-25).

This is about that woman.

She hasn't been a comfortable subject for sermons. “Subject to bleeding” is a euphemism for the more embarrassing “menstrual hemorrhage.” Everyone knew what it really meant but no one willingly used the word “menstrual.” The translations we have use “a flow of blood,” “hemorrhages,” “internal bleeding,” “an issue of blood” and the like.

In that era, on normal occasions, a woman with the regular “issue of blood” would have isolated herself for five to seven days -- maybe she’d have a little “me” time away from her ordinary chores. Being separate was important because a menstruating woman was considered “unclean” by the standards of the law, as was a woman following the birth of a child.

Menstrual uncleanness -- “niddah,” meaning “cast off, or “put away” -- always meant isolation for a woman. Anything or anyone in physical contact with her was made unclean as well, until nightfall.

There were other ways besides menstrual periods where women would become “niddah.” Following the birth of a son a woman is “niddah” for 40 days -- 80 for a daughter.

This unnamed woman was always “niddah.” She had not been clean for 12 years. No hugs in all that time; no kisses, no embrace from her children. Every cooking utensil she might touch became polluted.

It had to be a kind of desperation that led her to deliberately violate the space between herself and Jesus by touching him -- “If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed” -- (Mk 5:28) and thus making him as ritually polluted as herself. By law, Jesus should have isolated himself until evening as well.

Compounding this, the 12-years-cursed woman was interrupting Jesus on his way to Jarius’ house. Jarius was the synagogue president who’d come to Jesus a bit earlier, begging him to come heal his daughter who (Mark mentions in verse 42) was about 12 years old.

There is a connection there, don’t you think? At least it caught my eye: a woman trapped 12 years in a living death, and a 12-year-old girl near death. I don’t know what to make of it, but there it is.

Followed by what is described as a “large crowd” tagging along with Jesus and Jarius, it is here that the unnamed woman gets next to Jesus and ever so lightly touches his clothing. She fails in slipping away unnoticed.

Jesus, turning around in the crowd, demands to know “Who touched my clothes?” His disciples all speak as one, says Mark -- plural, disciples, all of them together asking: “You see people crowding against you, yet you can ask, ‘Who touched you?’” (I can almost hear them, humanly and bemusedly derisive, muttering “Silly Messiah …”)

The mob presses upon Jesus, and yet he knows somebody has touched him, and it was somebody with a driven intention. His gaze searches through the crowd, intently looking for the guilty party, the one who received the “power that went out of him.”

The woman was caught, no getaway for her.

Now, mark these words in verse 33, and hear the fear and the shame threatening to overcome her. “She came and fell at his feet and, trembling with fear, told him the whole truth.”

I’d guess she spilled it out while cringing, all in a hasty rush. Something like, “Forgive me for making you unclean. Forgive me for being a woman. Forgive me for living.”

Jesus’ reply is simple and compassionate: “Daughter, go in peace and be freed of your suffering.” What he did for her is what he would do for all of us, later. He took her curse of the law to himself and released her from it.

The hemorrhagic woman is unnamed in the Western Christian tradition. We have no word of her after this incident. But the Eastern Orthodox Church refers to her as St. Veronica, the daughter Christ healed before raising the daughter of Jarius.