THE END OF ALL OUR ROADS
Opening Prayer
Savior, Healer, Comforter, King—you are all of those things, and more, Jesus. Thank you for making yourself known to me; help me to continue to grow in my understanding of who you are.
Read MARK 5:21–34
For additional translations of the passage, use this link to Bible Gateway.
Jesus Raises a Dead Girl and Heals a Sick Woman
21 When Jesus had again crossed over by boat to the other side of the lake, a large crowd gathered around him while he was by the lake. 22 Then one of the synagogue leaders, named Jairus, came, and when he saw Jesus, he fell at his feet. 23 He pleaded earnestly with him, “My little daughter is dying. Please come and put your hands on her so that she will be healed and live.” 24 So Jesus went with him.
A large crowd followed and pressed around him. 25 And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years. 26 She had suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors and had spent all she had, yet instead of getting better she grew worse. 27 When she heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, 28 because she thought, “If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed.” 29 Immediately her bleeding stopped and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering.
30 At once Jesus realized that power had gone out from him. He turned around in the crowd and asked, “Who touched my clothes?”
31 “You see the people crowding against you,” his disciples answered, “and yet you can ask, ‘Who touched me?’ ”
32 But Jesus kept looking around to see who had done it. 33 Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell at his feet and, trembling with fear, told him the whole truth. 34 He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.”
New International Version (NIV)Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV® Copyright ©1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
Reflect
‘Plenteous grace with thee is found, / grace to cover all my sin. / Let the healing streams abound, / make and keep me pure within.’1
Two very different people had exhausted all human healing possibilities. Both had reached the end of their physical and emotional roads. Only Jesus remained. The first person, Jairus, fell on his knees before Jesus in desperate anguish. This man of high status humiliated himself on the dusty ground before the itinerant healer. His daughter may have suffered a long illness, but her collapse seems to have been sudden. The mourners were gathering. The other person, an unnamed woman, had bled for 12 years. She crept behind Jesus to touch the hem of his cloak.2 Both people had tried everything they could and had reached the end of their search. One last resort remained: a choice risky to each of them. There was Jesus.
The woman’s bleeding made her permanently unclean, unable to complete the seven-day exclusion period.3 She had become an untouchable. Shrouded perhaps to avoid recognition, she risked contaminating others to reach Jesus. Competing emotions – shame, fear, desperation, hope – flooded through her as she stooped to touch Jesus in the least obvious way. In that instant, two things occurred. The woman’s bleeding stopped, and Jesus became ritually unclean. Jesus was fully divine, but also culturally a first-century Jewish man. He challenged people’s interpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures but not the Scriptures themselves. Jesus lived under the old covenant and he had become ritually unclean.
This almost unnoticed event prefigured the death of Christ. The woman’s blood had made her unclean, but Jesus became ritually unclean for her and made her whole. Soon Jesus would take upon himself the sin of the world. His shed blood would be enough for all our uncleanness. We, too, can be whole.
Apply
Jesus shed his blood for the sin of the world, taking away our uncleanness and making us whole.
Closing prayer
Jesus, thank you that you are always available when I come to you with my needs, no matter how great they are. Thank you, too, that you always receive my cries for help and respond with love beyond measure.
1 Charles Wesley, 1707–88, ‘Jesu, lover of my soul’ 2 Matt 9:20; Luke 8:44 3 Lev 15:19
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