Luke 8:42b-44 42And as Jesus went along, the people pressed around him. 43And there was a woman who had had a discharge of blood for twelve years, and though she had spent all her living on doctors, she could not be healed by anyone. 44Coming up behind him she touched the tassel of his garment, and immediately her discharge of blood stopped.
The story takes a surprised turn as Jesus was on his way to Jairus’ home to help his daughter. Jesus’ popularity is evident with all the people crowding around him, even to the point of touching him. Luke and the early church tradition record a special touch from someone in the crowd. Verse 43 gives the background information to the story about a woman with a bothersome and difficult health condition. The description of her problem is simple because it deals with a private situation for women with such issues. No doctor could help her because she required the best of what our modern surgical care can give and obviously nothing like that was even remotely in people’s understanding.
People had given up on her a long time ago since since she had this problem for twelve years. Doctors are always expensive, and this woman had spent everything she had for medical care that proved useless. She had a lot against her: an unsolvable medical problem that likely made her weak and also ceremonially unclean, no money left because it all went to doctors, discouraged with no hope for a cure, and likely isolated from the community.
Somehow this woman pushed her way into the crowd and timed it just right to get next to Jesus. Luke notes that she only touched the edge of Jesus’ clothes. The word that describes the part of Jesus’ clothing she touched could have been the tassel that Jewish men had on the four corners of their cloak. This would have been the outermost part of the clothing. The woman was reaching for anything to touch and just happened to touch the smallest part flopping as Jesus walked. All it took was this touch for her bleeding to stop. She looked to Jesus in hope, even just to touch the outermost part of his cloak.
There are many elements of this story left to the imagination, such as how this woman came to know about Jesus, what her personal struggles were for twelve years, what people thought about her in the community, and what led her to chase down Jesus and push her way through the crowd so she could just even touch him. She represents the seeking disciple who knows his or her desperate need to find Jesus. She had reached the bottom of discouragement. Everything seemed against her. But when Jesus came to town, hope sparked in her imagination.
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