Notes On The Woman Who Touched His Cloak

This passage was recommended to me recently to spend some time with, and I’ll admit my first reaction was a small sigh. I’ve heard this story more times than I can count. Years of bleeding, ritually unclean, spent everything she had, pressed through the crowd, touched His garment, healed by faith, blah blah blah. I could preach it in my sleep.

But now I’ve spent a couple days chewing on it, here are a few things I’d somehow just picked up on.

For starters: Mark wraps this account inside another one. Jairus, a ruler of the synagogue, falls at Jesus’s feet and begs Him to come heal his dying daughter. Jesus starts toward the house. Then the woman interrupts, and only after her story is finished do we return to Jairus (Mark 5:21-43). Scholars call this Mark’s “sandwich” technique, and he uses it on purpose. The two stories are meant to be held up against each other.

Mark tells us the woman had been bleeding for 12 years (5:25). A few verses later he tells us Jairus’s daughter was 12 years old (5:42). The girl’s entire life is the length of the woman’s suffering. While one daughter was being born, raised, and loved in a respected home, the other had been bleeding.

And the contrast goes further.

Jairus has a name, a title, and a public place. He comes to Jesus openly and asks. The woman has no name in the text, no standing, no one to speak for her. She approaches from behind and asks nothing at all. Jesus stops for her anyway, while the important man’s daughter lies dying. By the time He’s finished, messengers arrive to say the girl is dead (5:35).

It’s one of the costliest interruptions in the Gospels. And Jesus doesn’t treat it as one.

I have to admit this next detail delights me as someone who works in a hospital. Mark is blunt: she “had suffered much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had, and was no better but rather grew worse” (5:26). Luke, the doctor, tells the same story and simply says she “could not be healed by anyone” (Luke 8:43).

Professional courtesy…. and centuries before anyone coined the phrase at that. I appreciate that. But I also take Mark’s version seriously. She’d been spending herself on remedies that didn’t work, and she was getting worse.

Yet when she touches Jesus, Mark says “she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease” (5:29). The Greek word for disease there is mastix. Its ordinary meaning is a whip. A scourge. It’s the word used for flogging elsewhere in the New Testament (Acts 22:24; Hebrews 11:36). For twelve years, her body had been her scourge. And the One whose garment she touched would soon be scourged Himself, with the same kind of instrument that named her suffering. Frankly, I don’t think Mark’s original readers would have missed that.

Under the law, her touch should have made Him unclean.

Leviticus is clear that anyone who touched a woman with a discharge of blood became unclean (Leviticus 15:25-27). She knew that. It’s almost certainly why she came from behind and hoped to go unnoticed. She was, in effect, about to defile a rabbi in a crowd.

There’s a little passage in Haggai that helps me see what happened instead. The prophet asks the priests a ruling: if someone carries holy meat in a fold of his garment and that fold touches bread, does the bread become holy? No, they say. But if someone unclean touches the bread, does it become unclean? Yes (Haggai 2:12-13). Uncleanness spreads by touch. Holiness doesn’t.

That was the rule of the world for as long as anyone could remember. And when this woman touched Jesus, the rule reversed. Her uncleanness didn’t flow into Him. His wholeness flowed into her. In Christ, holiness became contagious.

She touched the tassels… and not just “the cloak.”

Matthew and Luke both specify that she touched the kraspedon of His garment (Matthew 9:20; Luke 8:44). It’s usually translated “fringe” or “hem,” but it refers to the tassels, the tzitzit, that God commanded Israelite men to wear on the corners of their garments, “to look at and remember all the commandments of the LORD” (Numbers 15:38-39).

She reached for the very part of His clothing that was meant to remind God’s people of His word. I can’t prove she knew that or anything, but I notice what happened after that: A chapter later, wherever Jesus went, people “implored him that they might touch even the fringe of his garment. And as many as touched it were made well” (Mark 6:56). Her desperate, private act became a public pattern. A woman with no name taught a whole region where to reach.

On top of that: He wouldn’t let it stay a secret.

She planned it as an undetected transaction: touch, heal, disappear. And it worked. She was healed before Jesus said a word.

But Jesus stopped and asked, “Who touched my garments?” (5:30). The disciples thought it was a ridiculous question with a crowd pressing in. He kept looking. And she came forward “in fear and trembling,” fell at His feet, and “told him the whole truth” (5:33). 12 years, in front of everyone.

Then He gave her the one thing she hadn’t come for. He called her “Daughter” (5:34). It’s the only time in the Gospels Jesus addresses someone directly with that word. In a story framed by a father pleading for his daughter, the bleeding woman nobody claimed is the one Jesus calls His.

And He said, “your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.” She was already healed. He said it anyway, out loud, before the crowd. I think it was for her standing as much as for her body. Everyone who’d avoided her for 12 years now heard the rabbi declare her whole.

As for me: I’ve spent a lot of this year reaching for remedies that haven’t worked.

Some of them have left me worse. I relate to Mark’s version of her far more than Luke’s.

But what’s moved me most this week isn’t the healing. It’s that she tried to take something as quiet as she could from the edge of the crowd, and Jesus turned around and insisted on giving it to her face to face, and with a name she didn’t expect.

I think I’ve been reaching for His hem when He’s been asking me to come around and let Him look at me.