Of God and Old Women

AM Psalm 80 • PM Psalm 77, [79]
Gen. 44:18-34 • 1 Cor. 7:25-31 • Mark 5:21-43

Anyone who has ever read Mark 5:1-43 will not soon forget the moment when a woman in a great crowd thronging about Jesus touched his cloak, for she had said to herself, “If I touch even his garments, I shall be made well.” And immediately, “the woman felt in her body that she was healed.”

Was she an exceptionable person? I have always felt so because she was so certain.

However, there was more to this story because, when she touched Jesus, he “perceiving in himself that power had gone forth from him”… said, “Who touched my garments?”

And his disciples said to him, reasonably enough, “You see the crowd pressing around you, and yet you say, ‘Who touched me?’”

If I had been the woman I would have gone on my way or perhaps I would have told people around me but she was kinder than I. The passage then reads: “…the woman, knowing what had been done to her, came in fear and trembling and fell down before him, and told him the whole truth. And he said to her, ‘Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.’”

And this scene, with its many possibilities for action and where suffering happens reminds me of a Brueghel painting where the details are hidden in plain view. In a print I have, by the artist, John Newman, two old women are bending over picking nuts from the ground beside a fence. And one looks up to see what is on the other side. There she observes, what we now know, was a Japanese Internment Garden. They are sisters, beholding an event that is beyond their scope, occurring right in their Arkansas world. The artist, I have always felt, bore the last name Newman because of being African American and also, because he felt new-born, like the woman in our story today about faith and healing.

Written by Rebecca Newth

Rebecca Newth is glad to be a member of St. Paul’s and sing in the choir.