There is Nothing in Our Lives that God Cannot Redeem
Mark 5:25-34
And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years. She had suffered a great deal under the care of may doctors and had spent all she had, yet, instead of getting better she grew worse. When she heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, because she thought, “if I just touch his clothes, I will be healed.” Immediately her bleeding stopped and she felt in her body that she was freed from suffering.
At once Jesus realized that power had gone out from him. He turned around in the crowd and asked, “who touched my clothes?”
“You see the people crowding against you,” his disciples answered, “and yet you can ask, ‘who touched me?’”
But Jesus kept looking around to see who had done it. Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell at his feet and, trembling with fear, told him the whole truth. He said to her, “daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.”
There is nothing in our lives that God cannot redeem, fix, or use for good. This is a really short story, but it is full of a lot of really important stuff. There’s the really obvious thing; this woman reaches out to Jesus and because of her faith is healed. Don’t get me wrong, that is super important, I don’t want to talk about it.
First, I want to talk about this woman. The bible calls her “the woman with the problem of blood.” She had been “subject to bleeding” for twelve years and suffered under doctors. That is a nice, delicate, way of saying that she was on her period for twelve years. In my head I think that I understand how awful that is. I have spent some of my life struggling with similar health issues and it is the worst (we’re adults lets talk about this). I do not know the half of it. I think we all know that twelve years is a long time for that kind of suffering, but we live in a different world and culture than she did. This woman was subject to Jewish law, not to mention pre-middle ages medicine. Under Jewish law a woman on her period was ceremonially UNCLEAN. That means she was not allowed to go to any religious ceremonies including festivals and feasts, and anyone she touched was also unclean. I cannot even begin to imagine what that is like. She was cut off from the community that she lived in and completely isolated because of something she could not control and when she tried to treat it, it got worse, check out Luke’s version of the story, he was a doctor.
By the way, that whole touching people thing includes everyone in that crowd that she pushed through to get to Jesus AND Jesus. According to Jewish law everyone she touched should have been made unclean. Jesus was not. Just touching Jesus’s cloak made her clean, healed her, because there is nothing too imperfect that it can hurt the perfection of God. We cannot make God less perfect, instead God makes us pure and clean so we can be with God.
God can redeem any situation so long as we have enough faith to reach out.
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