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What kind of God resonates with a sick person?
In today’s Gospel reading from Mark, Jesus performs two healing miracles. He’s asked by Jairus, a synagogue official, to help his daughter who is dying, but on the way to see her, Jesus is approached by another sick woman—one who has been suffering from hemorrhages for many years. Her story draws my attention today; unlike many other Gospel passages that deal with healing, the section about this afflicted woman sets her up as the first actor, not just someone who is at death’s door and passive at the hands of Jesus. We learn that she has exhausted every other option in seeking medical care and now lives only in hope of a miracle. From what she’s heard about Jesus, she’s willing to give him a try—and to press through the crowds to do it.
What strikes me is the moment when this woman is healed. After touching Jesus, Mark says she “felt in her body that she was healed of her affliction.” But she’s not the only one who has an immediate sense that something has happened; Jesus also feels it. Mark tells us Jesus is “aware at once that power had gone out of him.” To heal this woman’s bodily illness, Jesus gives something of himself, and he feels that loss.
While ailing people in stories like this one seem initially drawn to Jesus for the promise of healing, the interaction between him and this afflicted woman suggests an even deeper connection: a mutual understanding between two humans who both know pain. It’s not just about approaching a superior being with divine power; it’s now also about a relationship with someone like you who understands.
When you’re sick or suffering, your body is an essential, inextricable part of how you perceive your own experience and the world around you—and therefore, an embodied theology speaks to you much more than anything purely abstract or theoretical.
Jesus’ love, his active presence in the lives of suffering people, is not simply about ideas. It is made manifest in his very being here, his taking on a human body and relating to other humans from the vantage point of a peer. A God who becomes human and experiences the pinnacle of human pain has something real and tangible to offer a sick or suffering person as they navigate their own pain. The afflicted woman in today’s Gospel couldn’t have known the physical anguish that was ahead for Jesus, and yet there was a mutuality between them, a give and take that was experienced in their very bodies.
Gospel stories like this are waiting for us when we experience suffering and come close to losing our faith. A God who saves is there for us, but perhaps more importantly, he is also a God who understands our experience personally. |
