Studies in Mark Pt.

21

Mark 5:21-34 –

And when Jesus had crossed again in the boat to the other side, a great crowd gathered
about him, and he was beside the sea. Then came one of the rulers of the synagogue, Jairus by
name, and seeing him, he fell at his feet and implored him earnestly, saying, “My little
daughter is at the point of death. Come and lay your hands on her, so that she may be made
well and live.” And he went with him.

And a great crowd followed him and thronged about him. And there was a woman who had
had a discharge of blood for twelve years, and who had suffered much under many
physicians, and had spent all that she had, and was no better but rather grew worse. She had
heard the reports about Jesus and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his
garment. For she said, “If I touch even his garments, I will be made well.” And immediately
the flow of blood dried up, and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease. And
Jesus, perceiving in himself that power had gone out from him, immediately turned about in
the crowd and said, “Who touched my garments?” And his disciples said to him, “You see the
crowd pressing around you, and yet you say, ‘Who touched me?’” And he looked around to
see who had done it. But the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came in fear and
trembling and fell down before him and told him the whole truth. And he said to her,
“Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.”

§ I. Introduction

The last time we met, we looked at how Mark shows us that Jesus is our High Priest. He truly
declares the Law of God, and truly identifies all sin and uncleanness, and, what is more, he forgives
sins and makes men and women clean. He renders sinners fit to worship the Father in Spirit and in
Truth, and by this fact his priesthood far surpasses that of Aaron and Aaron’s descendants. We
noted, also, in passing that the Lord Jesus’ healing of people who were ceremonially unclean are of
specific value to us as we consider his priesthood in Mark’s Gospel. Today, we see the Lord Jesus’
priesthood in action again, as he makes heals an unclean woman, a woman with an issue of blood
that rendered her unfit for social life and life in the body of God’s people, the people of Israel.

We also learn, however, that between our Lord being implored to save the life of a child and his
actual healing of that child, namely the daughter of Jairus, the Son of God stops to acknowledge the
saving faith of a woman who acknowledged that his power, his holiness, the beauty and purity of his
person could overpower the uncleanness from her own flesh that no human power could make any
better. In fact, this woman’s illness only grew worse after she had tried doctor after doctor, healing
method after healing method. Mark tells us that she “had suffered much under many physicians, and
had spent all that she had, and was no better but rather grew worse.” While she was not dead, her
situation was every bit as hopeless as that of Jairus’ daughter. This woman could not humanly be
healed.

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So what brought her to turn to Christ in faith? The testimony of who Christ is, and what Christ
could do. Mark tells us that the woman “heard the reports about Jesus.” The message of Jesus’ person
and work was being spread by those who were forgiven and healed by the Lord Jesus (as is the case
with people like the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4, the blind man in John 9, or even the
demoniac in the first twenty verses of this chapter of Mark). And the woman heard it. And she
believed. And by faith, she “came up behind him in the crowd and touched his garment.” Whereas
she had tried everything else to bring healing to her, to be made clean and acceptable within the body
of God’s people and fit for worship – she now turned in faith to Christ, after having heard about his
person and work. By faith, she drew near to the Lord Jesus. By faith she reached out to touch the
hem of his garment.” And by faith, our Lord says, she was “made well.” It isn’t as though she believed
and then acted. The substance of all of her acting was faith in him. She believed what she had heard
about him. And she acted in faith as she approached and touched the Lord.

The woman came to our Lord, Mark tells us, in fear and trembling, recalling the words of David when
wrote about our Lord Jesus in Psalm 2:11. This woman, in faith, fulfils the command God gives to –

Serve the Lord with fear,

and rejoice with trembling.

This is unlike Adam who hid when he heard the Voice of the Lord God walking in the garden of
Eden, and calling for him to give an account for his sin. In our text, the Word of the Lord calls the
woman to speak the truth, saying – “Who touched me?” And she came forward and “told him the
whole truth.”

What does Mark mean by “the whole truth”?

It seems plain that “the whole truth” means everything Mark has already told us –

1. She had a defiling issue of blood for twelve years.

2. She had tried every method possible of being healed.
3. She had exhausted her monetary resources.
4. All of her efforts to become clean were in vain,
seeing as they only made her condition worse
5. She heard about Christ – about his person, and about his work.
6. She believed and reached out to him, believing that he,
in contrast to all of the medically trained professionals she had previously trusted,
could heal her by virtue of his person.

This woman is exercising true faith in the Son of God. And she concretely demonstrates the nature
of true faith. You see –

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Firstly, true faith comes to rest entirely upon Christ to receive cleansing from uncleanness,
forgiveness of sin, restoration to fellowship with God, as well as restoration to fellowship with his
people. This woman exhausted all she had, spending a lot of money and time and energy in seeking
out help from men, doctors, specialists – none of which could do anything for her but maker her
condition worse! When she turns to the Lord Jesus, she does so fully, entirely depending upon the
word declared about his person and his work. This is true faith.

And so, secondly, we see that true faith rests in Christ as he is revealed in the Word of God. In this
woman’s case, she heard the truth about Jesus from her countrymen, from those who had already
seen and heard and believed that Jesus is indeed the Son of God who came to bear our sins, take
upon himself our punishment for sin, all of it from Adam to our very own individual sins, and so
bring us healing of body and soul. Since we have the more sure word of prophecy, i.e. the Scriptures,
it follows that if we have real faith, true faith, then we will believe the Word of God, not the words
of philosophers, astrologers, folk wisdom, unbiblical psychological theories, and especially our own
imaginations. This is true faith.

Thirdly, then, we see that true faith permeates the whole of our lives, and does not just exist at one
moment in time – for example, the moment of our conversion, or the moment of some crisis, or at
the moment of some great blessing. This woman’s faith resulted in her seeking the Lord that she
would find him, knowing from the testimonies about him that she would be healed, made whole,
and never need to turn to the world for these things ever again. This is true faith.

Fourthly, true faith is the means whereby we are healed and we enter into communion with our
Lord. The woman reached out in faith, and what does our Lord do? Does he reject her? Does he
walk away, knowing that she was healed and that’s good enough? The Lord Jesus tells her –
“Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.” What is the
meaning of this? Note that the woman who was an outcast from Israel, from the synagogue, from the
Temple, from life in general among God’s people was now called a daughter. She went from only
having conversations with doctors to having a relationship with the living God. She went from
being an unclean outcast, to being a daughter of the living God.

The unclean woman believed and reached out and touched the garment of our Lord, and she was
healed and brought into fellowship with God, made a daughter. And the same is true for us today –
we believe in the Word of God about his Son, we reach out by faith in Christ and touch the garment
of his righteousness, we are saved, and we are declared to be sons and daughters of the living God.
The Scriptures say that the life is in the blood (Lev 17:11), and so this woman’s issue of blood is a
draining of her life, a living death, as it were. But upon touching the Lord Jesus’ garment her blood is
dried up – and upon the cross of calvary our Lord’s blood is poured out profusely in her and our
stead.

This woman’s story is not an instruction guide on how to get material blessings. It isn’t a story

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teaching us that God will heal our physical ills if we just reach out with enough faith in him. It isn’t
about these things. This text is about the person and work of Jesus our Lord, about the nature of
true faith, about where our spiritual healing comes from, about how that healing takes place –
Christ takes the punishment of sin upon himself in our place, so that the punishment upon us is
“dried up” as it were – and how God seeks his children, in the midst of crowds of myriads of people
with mixed and impure intentions running after Christ because they have heard he can make their
lives easier.

This text is another reminder that it is not by works – either our own or those in our employment –
that we are saved, but through faith in the person and work of Christ as declared by those who
know him, have been healed by him, and have been sent into the world to tell others about his
person and work. This is no less true today than it was when the writers of Scripture recorded their
Gospels and epistles. Today, we hear them telling us about Christ, about who he is and what he
came to do – either we believe that word and reach out to him, or we remain in uncleanness. Why
exhaust yourself anymore with those who can’t cleanse you of your guilt and uncleanness? Why
squander your time and livelihood and life on trying to do what you cannot do? Turn to the Lord
Jesus Christ, and be made whole.

§ II. Lessons

1. The root of our uncleanness is not in the effects we see, but in our very nature as children of Adam.

Mark tells us that the woman in our text had an issue of blood, and this has been taken by
many to mean that the woman’s bleeding problem was related to menstruation. If this is the
case, and I think there is reason to believe it is, it should call to mind Genesis 3, the Fall of
our parents, where after sinning the Lord appears in judgment and tells the woman, in Gen
3:16 –

“I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth
children.”

The pain in childbearing here doesn’t just refer to the act of giving birth, but to the frustration
related to being fruitful and multiplying. As one commentator puts it, the way the wording is
in Hebrew makes it clear that what is meant is “the sorrows peculiar to a woman's life...and
indeed (or more especially)...pregnancy (i.e., the sorrows attendant upon that condition)”
(Keil and Delitzsch).

So the woman’s physical problems are not directly related to anything she did, it seems, but
to her simply being a descendant of Adam, the man through whom sin and death were
passed to all of us. And this would be the case even if her condition was not related to
menstruation, which is a view of the woman’s condition that is held by other commentators

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too. The point we can gather from her illness, and every illness really, is this – the illness that
makes her unclean, or that makes a man who has had a bodily emission unclean is the same:
the reality of our fallen nature, of our being physically, emotionally, socially, and especially
spiritually by our being born in Adam. The root of our uncleanness is deeper than what
appears on the surface. The blood flowing from this woman’s body is a symptom of a deeper
problem, one that finds its origin in the beginning of human history. And it’s one that only
the Sovereign God over all Creation can fix.

I want to stress this, because we need to be reminded of how all of the ills that we experience
– from the slightest headache lasting only two minutes to a chronic illness that requires
thousands of dollars to treat just keep us alive for a few decades – all of these ills are the
result of the Fall. No matter how accustomed we get to these things, that doesn’t make them
“normal.” In contemporary science and philosophy, there are people who foolishly think that
they can gain immortality by reversing certain bodily processes or by adding mechanical
prosthetic limbs and organs to their bodies. But this is a pipe-dream. It’s an attempt to fix
the symptoms of the fall, which leaves the main problem in tact: Man has sinned against a
holy and righteous God, creation as a whole is under a curse, itself laboring in pain as time
moves on and things fall apart seemingly faster than they come into existence.

The woman in our text reminds us that the problem we have is not physical per se, but
spiritual. The fall brought death into the world, and so we live under those conditions of
pain, disease, chronic and recurring suffering – and we cannot look to ourselves to fix the
problem. We are the problem.

2. The solution to our problem is necessarily outside of ourselves – in Christ, the Last Adam.

The woman in our text had to look outside of herself to become clean. In Leviticus 15:19-27, the
Lord explains the uncleanness brought about by an issue of blood.

“When a woman has a discharge, and the discharge in her body is blood, she shall be
in her menstrual impurity for seven days, and whoever touches her shall be unclean
until the evening. And everything on which she lies during her menstrual impurity
shall be unclean. Everything also on which she sits shall be unclean. And whoever
touches her bed shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water and be unclean
until the evening. And whoever touches anything on which she sits shall wash his
clothes and bathe himself in water and be unclean until the evening. Whether it is
the bed or anything on which she sits, when he touches it he shall be unclean until
the evening.

[...]

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“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 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, all the days of her discharge, shall be to her
as the bed of her impurity. And everything on which she sits shall be unclean, as in
the uncleanness of her menstrual impurity. And whoever touches these things shall be
unclean, and shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water and be unclean until
the evening.

Now, I emphasized the words – anything, whoever, everything, and every – to draw our
attention to the fact that this woman could not fix herself. Why? She was unclean. And
whatever she touched was unclean. She could only spread her uncleanness. How then could
she cleanse herself?

The situation is the same for us, with sin, with our uncleanness – the problem is not outside
of ourselves, it is our selves. So how can we cleanse ourselves? The woman couldn’t do this
ceremonially and physically, and we cannot do it for ourselves spiritually. The woman had to
look outside of herself to doctors, to those who were familiar with her symptoms and had
possibly had success in treating suppressing similar symptoms in other people. And this is
what we do as well, isn’t it? This isn’t a rant against going to the doctor or to a counsellor, so
please don’t misunderstand me. We, like the woman in our text, rightly look outside of
ourselves for one who can solve our issues. But we forget that in order to be made clean, we
need to deal with the cause of our uncleanness – our being in Adam, our being sinners
whose very bodies are a constant reminder that creation is groaning.

Creation needs to be put aright. And this is what our Lord Jesus does in our text today. He
replaces the woman’s everflowing issue of blood with rivers of living water. Her shame is
removed, and at the cross he becomes the object of ridicule and shame. She is reconciled to
God, because at the cross our Lord bears the separation from the Father our sin earned us,
and he cried out “My God, My God, Why have you forsaken Me?” Jesus isn’t only
demonstrating his power as God Incarnate to heal the sick and overcome our uncleanness
with his purity and holiness – he is demonstrating that what Adam, and we in Adam, has
ruined is being made made whole again in the Second Man, the Last Adam.

The woman’s looking to Jesus should be a reminder to us that our salvation, in body and
soul, is found only in our Lord. Not in medicine. Not in peace treaties. Not in social
programs. Not in ecological policies that reduce the production of cancer causing foods.
While these temporal solutions to our problems are a blessing from the Lord who in his
mercy gives us doctors and rulers and botanists and pharmacologists – our hope is to be in
Christ, the Last Adam who has borne our curse and promised to make all things new.

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3. The Lord does not despise a contrite spirit and a broken heart.

So we’ve talked about how deep the issue of our uncleanness goes – all the way back to our
fall in Adam – and how we can do nothing in ourselves to fix that problem, but need to look
to the Last Adam, our Lord Jesus Christ. Now, consider the mercy of God in giving us
insight into these things. Looking at our text again, consider what Mark tells us –

...there was a woman who had had a discharge of blood for twelve years, and who
had suffered much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had, and was
no better but rather grew worse.

Consider that the Holy Spirit tells us that there were many physicians. There were many
men, in other words, who understood quite a bit about the body, about illness, about
medicine, about ways of treating illnesses and giving rest to those who suffered from illnesses
similar to the woman with the issue of blood. Many doctors.

And the Lord did not reveal to them, it seems, what he has revealed to us in his Word. We
know why we suffer. We know why there is hurt. We know why there is suffering. We know
why our bodies fail us and need to be managed with medicines and machines and every
other health aid we can imagine up. And, more importantly, we know that there is no hope
in ourselves, or in trying to save the present kind of life we have. God has been merciful to
show us that his Son came to make all things new. God has been merciful to show us that we
can be made whole, clean, forgiven, and reconciled to God through the Last Adam, our Lord
Jesus.

Our Lord is merciful. He is gracious. He calls the woman out to speak the truth about her
condition, about what she did, about who she was before she touched the Lord’s garment.
And she comes in fear and trembling. But he doesn’t add to her shame. In front of the very
people who would have been diligent to not touch her, to not even brush against her in the
street – in front of all those who knew that she was unclean and to be avoided, lest her
uncleanness become their uncleanness too, our Lord calls her daughter, declares her to be
cleansed of her uncleanness, and blesses her with peace.

Our text should serve to remind us that although “We have all become like one who is
unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment” (Isa 64:6), we can turn to
the Lord in our uncleanness, and reach out in faith to touch the garment of his righteousness.
He delights in mercy. And he does not despise the broken in spirit and contrite in heart.
[Isaiah 57:15-19] –

For thus says the One who is high and lifted up,
who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy:

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“I dwell in the high and holy place,

and also with him who is of a contrite and lowly spirit,
to revive the spirit of the lowly,
and to revive the heart of the contrite.
For I will not contend forever,
nor will I always be angry;
for the spirit would grow faint before me,
and the breath of life that I made.

Because of the iniquity of his unjust gain I was angry,

I struck him; I hid my face and was angry,
but he went on backsliding in the way of his own heart.
I have seen his ways, but I will heal him;
I will lead him and restore comfort to him and his mourners,
creating the fruit of the lips.
Peace, peace, to the far and to the near,” says the LORD,
“and I will heal him...”

Let us pray.