2 October 2022
In Mark 5:21-43, the author shares the stories of a desperate father with a dying daughter and a woman suffering from a flow of blood. The story of the woman with a blood flow appears within the frame of two parts of the father’s story, creating a signature Markan sandwich that allows the scenes to mutually inform one another. This Markan sandwich appears within yet another sandwich: in Mark 4:40, after rebuking the raging storm at sea, Jesus asks his disciples “‘Do you not yet have faith?’” and in Mark 6:6a, Jesus’ hometown leaves him “marveling at their unbelief.” The negative portrayal of the disciples and Nazareth serves as a contrast to the positive images of faith that Jairus and the woman represent (Byrne 99). By juxtaposing the disciples’ blundering and Nazareth’s unbelief with the confession and faith of the woman and Jarius’ faith in the face of death, Mark is able to more fully develop the motif of faith in the narrative. This double sandwich also develops another theme present throughout the book of Mark: those who you expect to exhibit faith (e,g., the disciples) fail to “get it,” while someone else acts positively, and that person is not who the reader might expect to do so (e.g., the minor characters).
The scene opens with Jesus standing before a crowd on the shore of the sea when a Jairus, a synagogue ruler, approaches Jesus. Falling at Jesus’ feet, Jairus explains that his daughter is about to die and asks that Jesus come to place his hands on her to save her. As Byrne notes, given his standing within the religious establishment, it is unusual for Jairus to entreat Jesus in this way (100). Jairus’ expression of faith in the ability of Jesus to help his daughter in the midst of this hopeless situation portrays him as an exceptional religious leader – one willing to humble himself and push past social barriers in faith. In response to Jairus’ plea, Jesus goes away with Jairus at once, pushing through a large crowd of people following him and pressing against him. One of the people in this crowd is a woman who Mark describes using a string of present participles: “being in a blood flow,” “having suffered much,” “having spent all,” “having profited nothing,” “having gotten worse,” “having heard about Jesus,” “having come in the crowd” (v. 25-27). Here, Mark’s use of anaphora emphasizes and reflects the striving and hopeless nature of the woman’s condition. This string of clauses is halted by a definitive past-tense verb as she “touched his garment” (v. 27). The contrast between this verb and the list of participles hint the reader toward the same hope that the woman has – that this action will mark the end of her suffering. Byrne describes how the woman’s condition gave her the unfortunate status of permanently unclean, which would leave her ritually and socially excluded, risking making anyone who she touched unclean as well (100). Despite this, the woman chooses to press through the crowd and through the purity barrier. After Jesus asks who touched him, the woman trembles with fear as she tells Jesus “the whole truth” (v. 33), adding to her exceptionally positive portrayal as a foil to the disciples who failed to even understand why Jesus would ask such a question. Using this woman as a model, Mark exhibits the obstacle-breaking quality of faith, as Jesus tells the woman that it is her faith that has healed her. Before Jesus has even finished speaking his message of renewal to the woman, Jairus is informed that his daughter has died. The reader, who shares in the anxiety of the father as Jesus pauses to heal this woman, is pulled back into the journey toward Jairus’ house as Jesus pushes Jairus further into the journey of faith (Byrne 101). As Jesus arrives at the house, he interrupts their grief with a remark that conversely sends the crowd into laughter: “The child did not die but is sleeping” (v. 39). In response, Mark says Jesus casts the crowd out of the house, much like he might cast a demon in an exorcism scene (Byrne 102). Once in the room with the young girl, taking her by the hand and raising her to her feet to walk, Jesus foreshadows his own resurrection. This foreshadowing supplies meaning to Jesus’ command to silence, as Mark develops his secrecy motif, for that Jesus and his miracles can only be understood in light of his obedient death on a cross and subsequent resurrection (Byrne 103). In the wider scope of this story within its narrative frame, the reader might notice certain enriching similarities between not only the bleeding woman and Jairus in terms of being models of faith, but also between the woman and Jairus’ daughter as their stories both represent the restoration of life. Mark calls the reader’s attention to the connections between the two characters as the woman is addressed as “Daughter” by Jesus (v. 34). Both of these characters were unclean, being a dead body and a chronic menstruant, and both were healed by the touch of Jesus in spite of their impurity. At the close of the scene, Mark mentions that the girl was around 12 years of age, calling the reader back to the same amount of long years of suffering the woman endured. Both of these women see the close of a 12 year period in their lives – the woman’s being her years of bleeding and the child’s, her life itself. Yet in both of these stories, Jesus restores them to life, ushering his ministry another step closer to his own death and resurrection. When viewing the parallel passage in Matthew, it stands out in the first verses of the passages (Mark 5:21, Matthew 9:18) that while Mark takes care to mention the presence of a large crowd, Matthew just jumps in to begin describing Jairus’ interaction with Jesus. By drawing on the crowd, Mark enables the reader not just to read the story, but to place themselves within it as well. Mark’s special interest in developing the crowd almost as its own character is evident again as Mark describes the great crowd pressing in around Jesus before the woman touches him, while Matthew simply mentions that his disciples were following him as he moved. In the opening scene, another concern Mark seems to have that Matthew does not share is the positive portrayal of religious leaders, as he fails to mention that this “ruler” is the ruler of a synagogue. An interest of Matthew’s that Mark doesn’t show a similar concern for is the motif of sovereignty, demonstrating that Jesus is in complete power and authority. While Mark feels comfortable to have his Jesus ask questions like “Who touched me?” (5:31), Mark removes these questions all three times they occur in Mark’s passage. At the close of the passage, Mark’s Jesus commands the audience to silence, but in Matthew, the report of the miracle is only noted to have spread throughout the land. This difference is reflective of Mark’s Christology, as his understanding of Jesus is oriented around the resurrection and integrates Jesus as a miracle worker and as one who must suffer and die.
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