St. Óscar Romero once said: There are many things that can only be seen through eyes that have cried. How true that is! Likewise, there are things that can only be understood through direct, face-to-face encounters, through the forging of connections, through touching the lives of others. Jesus uses touch in a physical, rather than metaphorical sense. Multiple times in Mark’s Gospel Jesus heals with a touch which renders him ritualistically unclean: the leper, the paralytic, the two men who were blind, the demoniac, the man with a hearing and speech impediment, the man with the withered hand, and in this week’s text Jairus’ daughter and the hemorrhaging woman.
What is it about touch (haptō) that is so powerful? True, it is a sign of love and affection, but something even deeper seems to be at hand. (No pun intended.) The hemorrhage is a menstrual/vaginal one. This much is clear from the language Mark uses – rhysis hamatos, and pēgē – each of which is found in the Leviticus Code with the former being so rarely used that this is in fact the only example to be found in the entire Old Testament translation in use at the time! (see Leviticus 15:25-27). Just how unclean is unclean? Well, here is the text under discussion, judge for yourself:
If a woman has a discharge of blood for many days, not at the time of her menstrual impurity, or if she has a discharge beyond the time of her menstrual impurity, all the days of the discharge she shall continue in uncleanness; as in the days of her impurity, she shall be unclean. Every bed on which she lies during all the days of her discharge shall be treated as the bed of her impurity, and everything on which she sits shall be unclean, as in the uncleanness of her impurity. Whoever touches these things shall be unclean and shall wash his clothes and bathe in water and be unclean until the evening.
These touches (touching a dead body was equally taboo) cost Jesus something – and not just the power that had “gone forth from him” (vs. 30). He met people who were on the margins, and in so doing he too was marginalized. But it was Jesus’ empathy and compassion that drove him to heal Jarius’ daughter. You see, the language used is so incredibly tender – it is his “little daughter” (thygatrion) in the sense of affectionate and not size. Jesus describes the girl as “child” (paidion) which has a similar affectionate nuance (it’s the same word Jesus uses towards the disciples in his resurrection appearance in John 21:5. And this affection reaches its peak at verse 41 with Jesus’ use of the Aramaic phrase talitha cum, which literally means “little lamb, arise.”
The immense faith (trust) of the hemorrhaging woman is a sight to behold. She moves through the tightly packed crowd – which is absolutely forbidden, as each person she brushes against is made unclean. And she touches Jesus without permission (again, forbidden). She knows that she’ll find healing for what ails her, and forgiveness for these transgressions.
And so, a woman who has been sick for twelve years, and a girl who has lived for twelve years, find new life in the touch of a wandering, itinerant, marginal rabbi.
