Bloody Mercy: Leviticus 15.25-30

Imagine: according to the laws of your day you have a physical infirmity that renders you socially outcast. The very chair you sit in, the bed you lie in, the cloths you wear are all deemed unclean and therefore unusable by anyone else. You cannot host friends or family in your home, none the less go visit others, lest you mar them and their home as well. Who would marry someone unclean? No one should or maybe even could. If you had children they might be given to another for care while you were ill. Normally this infirmity only lasts a few days but you have possessed this disgrace for 12 years!

For 12 years you have been this outcast, unclean even to go offer sacrifices to the God of your people. You have no possessions because you have tried every known treatment to heal you, you have done everything humanly possible to make yourself well . . . but to no avail.

With the background of Leviticus 15.25-33 we find this very individual in Mark 5.25. This very woman who has suffered so hears of him who can heal. She, after exhausting all medical resources and probably praying every day to be relieved of her disease, hears that Jesus is in town. In hope she rushes out her door forgetting who she is, but for a moment. She finds a crowd of people surrounds Jesus but 12 years of misery shoves her to him. Forgetting who she is, she reaches out and touches Jesus’ jacket. 12 years of people unclean and suddenly, miraculously she is healed of her now gone bleeding. Immediately she can become clean, presentable in the temple to worship YHWH, the God of her forefathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; immediately she can become normal again.

As Jesus stopped in his tracks, her heart, struck by the realization of what she just did, stopped as well. Jesus looked on her and saw her faith in him; her faith that said, ‘HE can heal me!’ She confessed she had a disease and that is why she touched him. The crowd around them was on edge. Remember how Aaron’s sons approached God wrongly and were killed? Or how Uzzah touched the ark and died? she thought to herself, what have I done? But she did not die. Jesus’ holiness did not divide the woman and he, and his holiness did not kill her; rather, Jesus’ holiness made her holy. Her Jubilee had come.