Smoodock's Blog

A very brief account of Jesus healing a woman of her disease is given in Matthew’s narrative. Both Mark and Luke offer more details of the healing. The woman had been suffering for 12 years from chronic bleeding. The point of the matter isn’t that she had a disease, but that she was unclean due to the disease and for 12 years hadn’t been able to enter a synagogue or even the Temple at Jerusalem (Leviticus 15:25). It was as though she was cast out of Jewish society, for, according to Mark and Luke, she had spent all her living on doctors, seeking a cure by them, but instead of being healed, she grew steadily worse (Mark 5:26; Luke 8:43). Her disease was incurable. Thus, for 12 years she was unable to participate in any public worship service, whether in a synagogue or the Temple.

Jesus met this woman, while he was on a different mission, vis-à-vis he was asked to heal the daughter of a ruler of a local synagogue (Matthew 9:18). Both he and the ruler were on their way to the ruler’s home to save his daughter from death.

Apparently, Jesus had still been making his way through the multitude that had gathered around Matthew’s house in Capernaum, where he had made a feast to introduce Jesus to some of his friends and associates, who as tax collectors, were not accepted in normal Jewish society. Many folks had gathered there, simply because of Jesus’ reputation of performing miracles. Probably, the woman, who suffered a chronic bleeding disorder for 12 years, was among the crowd. As Jesus was passing by, she reached out and touched the tassels of his coat (cp. Matthew 5:40), a shawl like garment thrown over one’s shoulders. The tassels served not only to distinguish the Jews from other nations,[1] but also to serve as reminders of the commandments of the Law (Numbers 15:38-39).

The woman had said within herself that she would be healed, if she but touched the hem or tassels of Jesus’ coat (Matthew 9:21). Some scholars conclude that this was but a superstition, yet on another occasion, when Jesus returned to the Gennesaret, the gentiles living there kept pleading with him to permit them to touch the tassels of his coat, and everyone who did so was completely healed (Matthew 14:34-36). Why would Jesus participate in something that was nothing more than superstition?

A point to consider is that those things that were holy in the Temple, for example the meat of the sacrifices, were carried in the priest’s skirt, and if the skirt touched any other food, the common food would not become holy with the touch of the garment that held the holy flesh (Haggai 2:12). On the other hand, if someone was unclean touched any of the food, including the holy flesh, everything he touched became unclean (Haggai 2:13). So, according to the Law, Jesus should have become unclean with the woman’s touch, but he didn’t, and contrary to the Law, the woman immediately became clean, manifested in the fact that she was healed, when she touched Jesus. Thus, the miracle proves that Jesus is more powerful than the Law, which condemned here!

When Jesus realized that someone had touched him and power to heal had gone out of him, he turned around, and when he discovered the woman, he told her that her faith had made her whole (Matthew 9:22).

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[1] According to Dr. Alfred Edersheim in “Life and Times of Jesus,” each tassel was made up of 8 threads and wrapped and knotted in such a way that the Hebrew characters representing the number of tassels, knots and wraps formed the words “Jehovah One” vis-à-vis a Jew.