Summary: What must life have been like? Twelve years sick. Destitute from medical bills, Likely excluded from her religious community, perhaps from any community. Alone. How much energy must it have taken each morning to lift her fatigued, anemic body, to look for food, to search - again - for a cure. To wash her clothes. Always, to wash her clothes. I wonder if she prayed. I wonder if in her forays into the community anyone ever noticed her. One day, Mark tells us, Jesus came to town. She went to see him. Maybe at first, as was her custom, she hovered around the edge of the crowd. But eventually, something awakened inside her and propelled her into the crowd, to reach out, to touch Jesus' cloak. With the touch, finally, came the healing she'd been longing for. Jesus, aware that healing had gone out from him, asked who had been healed. The disciples noted the large number of people around him. What kind of question was that? But maybe Jesus' question wasn't for information. Maybe instead it was an invitation - an invitation to the woman to testify, to witness to her own healing, to her own determination to obtain that healing. "Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease." Today's story of the hemorrhaging woman is what some would call the "meat" of a "Markan sandwich." The author of Mark's Gospel is fond of starting to tell one story, interrupting it with a second story, then concluding the first story. The stories are meant to be read together. They inform each other.
