Too Desperate to be Denied

Scripture Reference: Mark 5:25-34

A large crowd followed and pressed around him. ²⁵And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years. ²⁶She 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. ²⁷When she heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, ²⁸because she thought, "If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed." ²⁹Immediately her bleeding stopped and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering.

³⁰At once Jesus realized that power had gone out from him. He turned around in the crowd and asked, "Who touched my clothes?"

³¹"You see the people crowding against you," his disciples answered, "and yet you can ask, 'Who touched me?' "

³²But Jesus kept looking around to see who had done it. ³³Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell at his feet and, trembling with fear, told him the whole truth. ³⁴He said to her, "Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering."

This scripture is an overlapping narrative about two females whose circumstances are dramatically changed by Jesus. These two are persistent women, one suffered for twelve years with an incurable bleeding disease, and the other Jairus’ daughter is a twelve year-old critically ill girl causing her father to seek out Jesus for a healing. Each woman needed a spiritual change in their lives. They both had been given the expert opinions of physicians declaring that their situations were beyond help.

This scripture is full of anticipation, just as Jesus was on his way to Jairus’ home, to heal his twelve year-old daughter he was interrupted. The importance of Jesus’ ministry, to the ritually unclean woman, is heightened by the fact that he allows it to disrupt him going to Jairus’ house. Laws in the book of Leviticus rendered the bleeding woman unclean (Lev. 12:1-8; 15:19-30), which meant that she lived a life of segregation. She was excommunication from her ethnic heritage, social isolation, and separation from her spiritual birthright. Her physical condition stigmatized every aspect of her life.

The gospel of Mark does not give the name the woman, she is known as the woman that had been afflicted for twelve years. What is so compelling is that she would not be deterred or dissuaded from obtaining the blessing that she sought from Jesus. Through enormous crowds she was pressed to touch the hem of his garment. She held the conviction that if she only touched Jesus’ garment she would be made whole (v. 33). She may have known that others had touched him and been made well (Ch. 3:10: 6:56). At the exact moment that she reaches out in faith, that which she was told impossible becomes possible—she experiences the cessation of her hemorrhage and knows that she is healed.

Pastor Collins’ sermon detailed several people through the book of Mark, whose names was never given. Jesus delivered from a dilemma those that were too desperate to be denied. The sovereignty of God as revealed in the scripture imply that when we make a “by any means necessary” move by executing a radical, courageous, and bold move of faith, we are find miracles in unexpected places. The power of God will not be deterred, so that the kingdom might come on earth as it is in heaven.