Two Women: Purity and the Presence of God
Proper 8, Year B. Mark 5:21-43
When the Gospel opens with “When Jesus had crossed again in the boat to the other side,” we could get the impression that this set of episodes is the aftermath to the storm scene read last week; however this is the other other side, the side Jesus had begun from, with parables and all. We have skipped past the story of Jesus’ encounter with demonic forces in the land of the Gerasenes, which was the initial “other side.”
Mark’s sense of geography can be confusing to scholars wanting to make clear sense of the narrative in the Galilean landscape, but the theological sense is clearer: he and the disciples undertook a trip through the storm to a sort of different world, and have now returned to the familiarity of the earlier “here,” where he had left the crowd after the parables discourse and before the storm and the demonic pigs.
This extended reading is a famous example of the “sandwich” method in Mark; the evangelist’s tendency, that is, to present one story interrupted by another so that each part offers some additional perspective when read together. We already saw a version of this in the appearance of Jesus’ family members either side of his controversy with scribes in chapter 3.
Here two women who are to be healed are both contrasted and connected. The initial and closing episode concerns the daughter of a certain Jairus (naming a person interacting with Jesus is a rarity in Mark, and may be intended to emphasize the man’s social prominence) who is an “archisynagogos” which does mean a “leader of the synagogue” as the NRSV puts it, but a person of civic prominence as much or more than a religious leader. The title (not the name) is mentioned three more times after this, emphasizing his status.
Jesus’ initial response—to go and help— is what we have come to expect when he is called upon to manifest God’s liberative power (1: 31, 34, 39, 41f; 2: 5,10-11, 3:5, 10, 5:6-13). The plot thickens on the way however, where the familiar and ambiguous crowd accompanies him and presses against him (again). A particular individual emerges from the chaos, a woman who touches Jesus’ cloak; she takes the initiative here, which contrasts with his choosing to follow Jairus. The fact that Jesus power functions in this remarkable way, via the woman’s hopeful but unauthorized touch, should not surprise us, even though it is different from we have encountered so far in Mark. Jesus acts, or simply exists, in a powerful way that is deeply unfamiliar to a world distant from the reign of God. Yet the willingness of the woman to initiate this process is a striking model of faith, not least given the passivity of the disciples in recent episodes. Jesus’ mysterious power invites courage, not (just) fear.
The circumstances of the woman with the flow of blood are contrasted with those of the girl, in that the older woman is impoverished where the girl is privileged; whether or not the woman was initially poor, her illness or rather the predatory physicians have made her so. Her anonymous approach, while implicitly commended, is contrasted with Jairus’ performance of his plea, which draws on his social status. Yet if she has no name she is the one given an inner life by the evangelist (“for she said ‘If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well’” v. 28) which is very rare in this Gospel, and makes her much the more prominent figure for the reader. Jesus’ commending statement that “your faith has made you well” confirms this courage (which was of course exercised “in fear and trembling” nevertheless) and its reward in a way that is so far unique in Mark’s narrative.
Much has been made by commentators of the particular condition suffered by the woman, an extended hemorrhage, relative to purity laws concerning blood and menstruation. In Leviticus 15 it is specified that women with a flux (primarily referring to monthly periods, but by extension to a situation like this) are ritually impure for the duration—but here, this means twelve years. Christian commentators have been inclined to caricature Jewish practices here, as though this meant the woman, and menstruating women generally, were social outcasts, which is nonsense. She has no “contagion.” Touching such a woman in regular social interaction was not taboo. To tell the story thus is to tell the story of Christian anti-semitism, not the story of Jesus or of this person.
Jesus does not liberate the woman from Jewish purity law, but enables her to fulfill it. The constraints on her life would have been real, but she was not marginalized simply by being in that state. While the main point here is her physical and economic suffering, the additional layer purity does add is to do with worship, to which we shall return.
The dialogue between these two is interrupted by news from the house that the girl has died. Jesus response picks up the theme of fear and faith again: “do not fear, only believe.” The presence of Peter, James, and John is an early manifestation of an inner circle that will continue to be prominent in Mark. The implication is that they are (like the disciples in the boat, with parables) being offered something more. At the risk of offering a spoiler, this group will also tend to appear oblivious to what they will be shown. There is however an implication in the very fact of the Gospel that all this mystery and fear would eventually make sense, even to these obtuse men. For now however, the woman with the flux is the one who understands something and is the most important model of faith who has appeared in the Gospel.
The fact that the child has died makes this next act supremely dramatic, but it does also create another, if subtler, link with the older woman’s body and purity. The reference to the girl’s age of twelve makes a link between the two women, but may also hint at something else, insofar as she is presumably on the brink of physical and social adulthood. While interpretations which suggest the older woman was a sort of pariah are caricatures, what these two bodies really do share is a marginality relative to the Temple. “Purity” in Jewish ritual law was neither a moral state, nor a basis for social exclusion, but referred to one’s readiness to attend the Temple and participate in sacrificial worship. While the woman with the flux was not directly a risk to the ritual purity of others, she herself was excluded from the Temple as long as her hemorrhages persisted; yet the corpse (if it is to be understood so) of the dead girl really would have been such a risk to others. Someone contacting a dead body, even for the necessary and respectful purpose of burial, became ritually impure and would have to bathe.
The narrative does not resolve the flat-footed question “was she dead?” Rather it suggests that death—like demons and sickness and whatever forms of alienation and suffering—is of little consequence in the presence of Jesus. Whether the girl’s body was technically contaminating likewise is not relevant, when Jesus is seen to be the source of life. Jesus does not dismiss the ritual law itself, but instead proves to be more powerful than any force whose oppressive power is marked through the Law’s provisions.1
So these two move from illness or death to health but also to purity, meaning readiness to come into God’s presence in the Temple. It will be some time before the Temple literally features in Mark’s Gospel, but if we are paying attention, the divine presence is already featured in this story. Jesus’ mysterious power is made known, not just in the fact of these wonders but in the ways they signal the reality of God’s presence in Israel and how people are freed to seek it. While we may imagine the two women’s future participation in cultic life as well as the other dimensions of human existence—not least sexual and familial—what the Temple represents has been present here. God is available to all, not by the dismissal of the Law, but by the arrival of one whose life embodies the power of the God who gave the Law.
On this point see Matthew Thiessen, Jesus and the Forces of Death: The Gospels’ Portrayal of Ritual Impurity within First-Century Judaism. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2021.