Mark 5:25-34: 25 Now there was a woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years. 26 She had endured much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had; and she was no better, but rather grew worse. 27 She had heard about Jesus, and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, 28 for she said, “If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well.” 29 Immediately her hemorrhage stopped; and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease. 30 Immediately aware that power had gone forth from him, Jesus turned about in the crowd and said, “Who touched my clothes?” 31 And his disciples said to him, “You see the crowd pressing in on you; how can you say, ‘Who touched me?'” 32 He looked all around to see who had done it. 33 But the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came in fear and trembling, fell down before him, and told him the whole truth. 34 He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.”

For five weeks now we have been listening to stories of healing, Jesus healing: casting out demons, lifting up the feverish, cleansing the leper, ordering the paralyzed to stand, and today, a woman's faith touches fabric and a family name is given: “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.”

To be whole is to belong. Healing, in the ancient world was never simply a restoration of the body: joints, bone, blood, skin, mind, or only of the spirit. It was a restoration of relationships. Anthropologists make a careful distinction between disease and illness. Disease is a biomedical condition: something wrong with bodily organs, for example. Illness, on the other hand, is more a social condition, the breakdown of social ties and bonds that leads to a loss of one's sense of meaning and value. The ancients, as we see in our stories, grasped human sickness as illness: broken relationships that diminish one's sense of meaning and value.

Today we still treat sickness almost exclusively as disease because we treat bodies rather than people. We see a patient as a collection of organs rather than a person within a community. One reason for this may be that in the Western, modern world we have become disconnected one from another. We have come to value dogged self-sufficiency, rugged individualism, fierce independence, and stubborn autonomy, . . . as people and as nations. When last did a colleague or family member, a fellow student or friend say to you, “I need you?” When last did you say it? To say, “I need you” does not make us “needy.” It makes us whole, I believe. It simply affirms the Swahili proverb: mtu ni watu: woodenly translated, “a person is the people.” Or, “I need you to be fully me.”

In addition, we are people that value production. We are task-oriented people. Humans that don't produce or can't function well are often devalued. Therefore, the aim of healing has been reduced to restoring a person to functionality: getting them back to work, the office, the factory line, the classroom, the gym. As Bruce Malina has written, ancients, including Jesus of Nazareth, “focused on restoring a valued state of being rather than an ability to function.” This leads to “quick fixes” and short cuts offered by the medical community and preferred by patients.

Another pair of words that you have already heard me use is “cure” and “healing.” Jesus was a healer, not a curer. That is, Jesus eyed sickness through the lens of his own ancient world view: sickness was as much illness as disease, a social as well as physical condition for healing, something more than cure. Today's story signals this for us.

“Now there was a woman,” the story goes, “who had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years. . . suffered much under many physicians, spent all she had . . . but only grew worse.” If we were among the first hearers of this story, those of two thousand years ago, this description would cause us great alarm and concern. Not because of her chronic physical suffering, and mistreatment by the medical professionals of her day but, rather, because of her chronic social stigma. She, because of her bleeding condition would have been “unclean” like the leper we heard about two weeks ago. This would leave her ostracized, unwanted, outside, one of the un-belonging.

Healing, as restoring one to relationship, is heard at the very end of our story for today, on the lips of Jesus. “Daughter,” he says, “your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.” Her identity has changed: from “a woman” to, now, “daughter.” “Daughter.” It's a “belonging” word, isn't it? It's a family word, you see. To be called “daughter” is to be called back into relationship.

Her courageous move toward Jesus has been credited as faith and “saved” her. This is one of the curious things in these healing stories: to “be made well” and “to be saved” is the same Greek word. Why? Because a healing is a saving, a making whole. Jesus knows little about separating body and spirit as we often do today. It's all of one piece.

“Be healed of your disease,” Jesus finishes. The word “disease” here is mastigma . Do you hear it? “Stigma.” She has been healed of her “stigma”: her plague, her scourge, her public disgrace, her private anguish, all that has made her unbelonging. Of this she has been healed.

To be whole is to belong. Through faith in Jesus Christ you are “daughter.” You are “son.” You belong. When our lives do not feel so, and we carry either in body or spirit stigma-like illnesses that shame and diminish us, the promise still remains. It is yours, today, it is mine. AMEN

-Rev. Dr. Philip Johnson

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