[CatherineTorpey]

New York changed clocks last night. Check your local time for Bible in the Middle here.

This week, Rev. Natalie Renee Perkins will treat us to a sermon called “Are You Sure, Sweetheart, That You Want to be Well?” Her text is Mark 5:24-34.

Mark is one of the four gospel accounts in the New Testament. The gospels (which is an old English word meaning “good news”) are the stories of Jesus’ life and ministry. Mark’s gospel is the earliest of the four, having been written some time around the sacking of Jerusalem by Rome in the year 70. So it was a time of traumatic upheaval and war. Think Ukraine now, and that’s the kind of context in which this story was written down. It is presumably for this reason that the gospel of Mark has a sense of urgency, and is famously full of the word “immediately” which appears a couple of times in our passage.

This passage tells the story of a woman with a hemorrhage (or, more accurately, with a constant flow of blood) reaching out to Jesus in a crowd. This story is sandwiched between two other healing stories: the healing of “the Gerasene demoniac” and the raising of Jairus’ daughter.

The context of this is Jesus going with his disciples from one “side of the sea” to another, in seemingly random ways, with crowds following them at every turn.

The “Sea” of Galilee which they keep crossing is really a lake, and is called Lake Kinneret by Israelis today and has also at times been known as Lake Tiberius. There were many towns in the area of this lake which were very “hellenized” (Greek in language and culture) and/or Roman culturally. The “Decapolis” (referred to in the healing story immediately preceding this one) is a collection of 10 such cities (“Deca” meaning 10, and “polis” meaning cities). So Jesus is not sticking to Jewish strongholds, but going out to all kinds of people.

Assuming the woman in our story was a Jew (or a Samaritan), a constant flow of blood would have had dire consequences for her beyond the physical. A number of things made one ritually unclean under Jewish law, including release of semen or menstrual blood. A woman who is perpetually bleeding is perpetually unclean, and cannot (for instance) have sex with her husband. Depending on the sect of Judaism, she might not even have been allowed to be touched by him. (The same kinds of rules would be true for anyone ritually unclean, such as a priest who has made certain sacrifices and not yet ritually bathed.) One can imagine how very desperate she felt. And how daring it would for her to touch a man.

The story of this woman can also be found in Matthew 9:20–22 and Luke 8:43–48. In those accounts, the woman touches the “fringe” of Jesus’ garment. There has been some speculation (fun to consider, but I think highly speculative) that they do this to specify the fringe (or tassels) that Jesus might have worn, such as observant Jewish men today wear attached to their prayer shawls. This was a religious garments worn by some Jewish sects in Jesus’ day as well. However, Mark’s version has the woman touching Jesus’ cloak.

If you have a bit of time, it wouldn’t take long to read Mark from the beginning through chapter 5. I am thinking we might read all of chapter 5 for context at Bible in the Middle.

See you at 10am Eastern!

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