Why Do I Struggle to Approach Jesus? (Matthew 9, Mark 5, and Luke 8)
Do you ever struggle to approach Jesus because of your past? This woman’s story reminds us that faith overcomes shame and Jesus responds to those who reach for him.
Matthew 9:18-34; Mark 5:21-43; Luke 8:40-56
Today's Scripture Passage
A Few Thoughts to Consider
Do you struggle to approach Jesus because of shame from your past?
In the synoptic gospels (Mathew, Mark, and Luke), we see this story of Jairus, a synagogue leader, who pleads with Jesus to heal his dying daughter. On the way to Jairus' house, where Jesus raises his daughter back to life, we have another story sandwiched inside this broader narrative. Jesus encounters a woman who has had a menstrual bleeding problem. She’s tried everything and spent all her money on physicians, but nothing has worked. The pain she feels is enormous. The Greek work in Mark 5:29, translated as “affliction,” is the Greek word mastix, which means to whip, lash, or torment. “The term combines physical suffering and shame, hence something akin to punishment.[1]
After twelve long years of suffering, she turns to Jesus—believing she will be healed if she can just touch him. But this comes with a catch. Because of her condition, Leviticus 15:26-27 shows that “even contact between an unclean person and another’s clothes rendered ritually impure the person whose clothes were thus contaminated.”[2] Speaking to the depth of this woman’s shame and isolation, Alan Cole writes,
The terrified woman knew that in touching Jesus’ clothing she had ceremonially defiled him and that contact with her had probably defiled every other member of the crowd as well. Menstruation made women ceremonially unclean and cut them off from any fellowship with God’s people for a part of every month. This woman’s sickness had meant that in her case the exclusion had been for twelve long years.[3]
Imagine the shame, isolation, and embarrassment she suffered. This makes her faith all the more astonishing. Laying aside every natural impulse and societal regulation, she reaches for Jesus. And rather than contaminating him, he transforms her. Mark 5:30-34 says,
30 Immediately Jesus realized that power had gone out from him. He turned around in the crowd and said, “Who touched my clothes?” 31 His disciples said to him, “You see the crowd pressing against you, and yet you say, ‘Who touched me?’” 32 But he was looking around to see who had done this. 33 The woman, with fear and trembling, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell down before him, and told him the whole truth. 34 “Daughter,” he said to her, “your faith has saved you. Go in peace and be healed from your affliction.”
This exchange reveals something mysterious and marvelous about the nature of faith. Yes, it was Jesus’ power that healed this woman, but it was her faith that saved her. How can this be? N.T. Wright says, “The answer must be that faith, though itself powerless, is the channel through which Jesus’ power can work.”[4] Passages like Mark 6:5 further drive home this point, showing that Jesus could not do a miracle in his hometown due to their unbelief. There are some things God only chooses to do in our lives in response to our faith.
