The Daughter of Jairus and the Woman with an issue of blood.
These two stories appear in all of the Synoptic Gospels. The healing of the twelve-year-old daughter of Jairus, a ruler of the synagogue, and alongside it the healing of a women ‘with an issue of blood for twelve years’. Does the repetition of the twelve years carry any symbolic meaning? Perhaps it could be embracing the beginning and the end of woman’s effective biological life? It is always a mistake to assume there is no special point to the details that are included in the stories.
While Jesus is on the way to the ruler’s house two things occur. The first is the encounter with the older woman. She has such a strong sense of the power of this man that she knows that merely touching His garment will heal her. And it does. As I said before “Healing can take it out of you” and here we have a concrete example of that being true, even for Jesus. He is aware of the effect of her touch in His person and calls to her to speak her truth. It cannot have been easy to speak about so personal a problem in front of a whole gang of strangers. Maybe if she had got away with her secret venture, she would have had doubts later and then the return of her problem. The word of Christ erased any possibility of future doubt and left her strong again in body and spirit.
At this point in the account the servants of Jairus come with the news that there is no point in Jesus coming as the girl has died. He contradicts them saying she is only sleeping, but they just laugh. They know a dead child when they see one. At the house He takes only His three closest friends and the parents into the room where the child lies. Without fuss He simply raises her up and tells them to give her something to eat. The sheer simplicity of it is astounding, as though Mark is saying that in the light of the Resurrection, such things are normal! As the story circulated immediately after the event it could not have been so unadorned. With such amazing things happening in their midst, it is no wonder that the populace was feeling that God indeed was among them in a new way, and the authorities were getting very twitchy about all this fuss.
Launching again into biblical criticism for just a moment, it is instructive to notice the slight variants that Matthew and Luke make to Mark’s story. As examples of the subtle differences, in Mark, Jairus comes and asks for healing as his daughter is close to death. In Matthew’s account he comes to beg because his daughter has died. In the subsidiary story of the woman who touches Jesus’ garment Mark tells us that the doctors she consulted proved worse than useless, but the two evangelists who followed him toned those comments down. There is always a point made by these differences but we can only guess at what it might be. In case you want to follow up for comparison the references are Mark 5:21 -43; Matthew 9:18-26; Luke 8:40-56.
