This is one of the most anti-sexist stories I have encountered in the gospels. Twenty-two verses concentrated on attending to the bodies of a woman and a girl in a patriarchal society occupied by a patriarchal empire. Twenty-two verses in which men spend their day moving toward the social margins produced by gender injustice to care for a woman and a girl whose lives are being drained from them. Twenty-two verses that challenge the disempowerment, invisibility, and silencing of human beings who have been deemed less valuable because they are not men.
Yes, the anti-sexism—by which I mean movement away from sexual or gender inequity and toward equity [1]—is incomplete. The narrator does not give readers the names of any of those identified as women and girls. The narrator lets readers hear the sick woman speak once briefly but not the girl or her mother. Men are still agents of most of the action in the story.
Even so, this is the only story in the gospels that I know of in which the centerpiece of the plot lifts up a woman advocating for and trusting her own body. The body of a woman in pain and in poverty gains healing through the body of Jesus. Her body believes. And her body is believed. She believes, and she is believed.
For societies like theirs as well as mine, contemporary America’s, in which women’s and girls’ bodies are treated primarily as instruments for men and bodily knowledge tends to be suppressed or dismissed, this is a powerful story. Over and over it resists male domination and sides with the sexually oppressed. It announces that the kingdom of God is defined by gender justice, not sexism, patriarchal oppression, male privilege, female submission, or cis-gender oppression. [2] The coming of God’s kingdom that Jesus brings turns the sexist social order on its head and sets the sexually oppressed free.
The story begins with a father taking the time to find Jesus to beg him to heal his daughter. Although the narrator tells readers nothing about the relationship this girl has with her father, the lengths that this father is going to for the sake of his female child’s health and life already position this story in opposition to its ancient patriarchal context. Children’s lives were marked by powerlessness and vulnerability in economic and political systems that valued and revolved around free, upper class adult men, and female children’s lives even more so. [3] The synagogue leader Jairus acts in a way that runs counter to the Roman imperial patriarchal view of this girl of a conquered people as expendable. He goes to Jesus, falls at Jesus’s feet, and calls upon Jesus for help—not with a polite request but with urgency and desperation.
He uses a diminutive form of “daughter” to refer to his young child and describes her situation not with words most often used in the gospels for being ill or dying, but with a word that connotes last place as well as the end. His young, vulnerable girl is both holding last place in that social context and on the brink of the end, and Jairus tells Jesus what he can do—to come and put his hands upon the girl—so that she will be saved and live. This father seeks out Jesus to save his daughter’s life and won’t take no for an answer. In advocating for her, Jairus bears witness to the truth that this girl in last place is indeed worthy to have Jesus go to her and raise her body to life renewed. She deserves to be fought for.
As Jesus starts traveling with Jairus to his home, another person desperate for help enters the scene. A woman who has been battling a serious health condition for as long as Jairus’s daughter has been alive makes her way through the crowd of people surrounding Jesus. The narrator gives readers quite a bit of backstory about this woman’s journey to Jesus. The disease or disorder with which she is struggling seems to involve incessant bleeding. I am no medical expert, but I can imagine a condition with blood loss like this possibly causing her to feel physically weak or exhausted on a regular basis. Just getting up in the morning and through a bustling crowd to Jesus may have taken every ounce of strength she had that day. The narrator also lets readers know that she had sought health care again and again. But the doctors and healers she visited only brought more suffering to her body and charged her so much money that after twelve years, she was impoverished, in pain, and watching her condition grow worse.
Two things stand out to me in this backstory. The first is the woman’s determination to find healing for her body. She advocates for herself with doctor after doctor. When that treatment fails, she tries the next. Even in an inequitable health care system, she does everything she can to care for herself when others don’t.
The second is the narrator’s point of view in telling this woman’s story. The narrator’s language in relaying the events in her life make this woman the subject of her experience and story. She is not cast as an object to whom things are happening. Her perspective remains at the center of the narrator’s account of her story. In a patriarchal context in which women’s words and experiences are often marginalized, the narrator’s mode of storytelling exhibits an anti-sexist slant.
With compromised health and no money left, this woman decides to go see Jesus. Word about him had reached her ears, and she could not help but wonder if this person that so many had been buzzing about could make her body well again. The narrator lets readers hear her speak with her own voice as she gets close enough to Jesus to touch him: “If I can touch him, even just his clothes, I know I will be healed” (5:28, my paraphrase). The woman is not acting on a whim; she has given careful thought to this moment. Based on the grammar of this verse, I picture her repeating these words to herself like a mantra with every step she takes toward Jesus: “If I can touch him, even just his clothes, I know I will be healed . . . If I can touch him, even just his clothes, I know I will be healed . . .” In light of all she has endured in trying to regain her health, her confidence that this time things will be different is astounding. [4]
So she reaches out her hand in a sea of people, and as soon as her hand comes into contact with Jesus’s clothes, the bleeding in her body stops. Then readers encounter these remarkable words in the mouth of the narrator: “And she knew in her body that she was healed from the affliction” (5:29, my translation). She knew in her body that she was healed. The verse can even be translated, “She knew with her body that she was healed.” The narrator could have easily left out “in her body” or even just stated, “And she was healed,” without any reference to the woman’s knowing or the bodily insight that she had in this moment. But the narrator affirms the woman’s knowing of her own healing, centering her perspective once more, and portrays this as a bodily form of knowledge that the woman acquires.
The reason I am blown away by this verse is threefold:
1) Just by suggesting that the human body can know anything and that bodily knowledge can be valuable and true, this verse defies Western mind/body dualisms as old as ancient Greek thought in Plato and others that privilege the mind over the body and locate knowledge and wisdom in the rational mind or soul—not the irrational, passion-ridden body.
2) This woman actually pays attention to the knowledge that her body conveys to her about her healing, and she trusts her body. In opposition to patriarchal contexts in which women and their bodies are viewed as anything but trustworthy, she trusts her body’s knowing and testimony.
3) The narrator presents the woman’s bodily knowing as valid and true. The narrator’s account does not dismiss her insight or depict it in a negative light. At this crucial moment of the miraculous, the narrator shows trust in the woman and her body as well.
But this scene’s twists are not over. Right when the woman touches him and the bleeding in her body stops, Jesus experiences power or energy going out of him. Even though the woman’s hand only managed to make contact with his clothes, the power or energy within his body changes. Just as the woman knows in her body that she is healed, Jesus comes to know in himself that power or energy has left his body. Jesus too pays attention to what seems to be a bodily knowing, and he also trusts that bodily knowledge and starts looking for a source, despite how futile such a search may be among a throng of people.
Jesus asks, “Who touched my clothes?” In light of the narrator’s language, I imagine Jesus turning to multiple people near him and repeating the question to each, as if to see if someone around him may have spotted the culprit. When the disciples hear his question, they respond with the words of a logic-based reality check to what seems to them an absurd inquiry. “You want to know who touched you? You do see the crowd pressing upon you from every direction, right? Who isn’t touching you right now?” (my paraphrase).
But their comments do not deter Jesus. Neither the disciples nor Jesus seems to have witnessed the woman’s action, but while the disciples’ words reinforce her invisibility, Jesus’s insistence on finding her counters it. He keeps looking around for her.
The woman must have seen Jesus searching in the crowd. She may have even overheard his words to those nearby. She suspects that she is the one he is trying to find because of what she experienced. Terrified to reveal herself to him, perhaps unsure of how he will react, yet maybe more terrified to keep hiding, the woman steps forward, her body shaking, and bows down at Jesus’s feet. As the narrator sketches the scene, they underline the woman’s knowing of what had happened to her as what propels her to face Jesus, once again affirming her insight into her own experience.
The narrator does not give readers the woman’s story to Jesus in her own words but does characterize what she says as “the whole truth” (5:33). As Christena Cleveland describes this woman’s opportunity to “tell her whole truth” in her lecture at Virginia Theological Seminary in 2017 [5], I envision the woman sitting up and sharing her story with Jesus, her body and face gradually lifting up and her voice growing steady as she details everything she has been through: The day she first realized she was sick. The series of doctors and healers that she visited in the region. The pain that their treatments caused. The signs she started noticing that told her the illness was getting worse. The day she had to stop working because her body no longer had the strength. The struggle to find affordable food and other necessities as her money dwindled. And then how her spirits lifted when a neighbor—maybe one who brought her some fresh water when she needed it—told her about the things Jesus was doing for other sick people. How she got ready to try to find him the next day. How she summoned all the energy she had to move in and out of people until she could reach him. How she knew that just touching his clothes would heal her. How the healing was instantaneous. How her body felt when the bleeding stopped. And her name.
Her story could have unnerved Jesus. Hearing her truth could have made him feel even more vulnerable than he already may have after experiencing power leave his body without warning. This had never happened to him before. How was he supposed to make sense of the energy in his body responding to a need for healing with or without the rest of him being involved? In the context of patriarchal ideals of masculinity in the Greco-Roman world as in control and active, never passive, Jesus’s role in this healing event looks unmasculine. [6]
But Jesus does not react in a way that strives to masculinize himself. He does not take credit for the healing or position himself as the savior. Nor does he call into question the woman’s story, man-splain to her, or recenter the spotlight on himself by talking about his experience. He does not shame her in any way. Instead, he says to the woman, “Your faith has saved you” (5:34).
With this simple statement, Jesus takes a distinctly anti-sexist stance. His words show, first of all, that he takes her at her word. He believes this woman. By believing her, he, like the narrator, also shows trust in the woman’s body and the knowledge that her body has conveyed to her that she indeed is healed. Jesus trusts this woman’s trust in her own body and thus trusts her body too. And he acknowledges her action as what brought about her healing. He confirms the active role she took in seeking to be healed and the faith she enacted—not only in his healing power and in the possibility of connecting with that power just by touching his clothes, but also, I believe, in advocating for her body time and time again all the way to this salvific moment.
Jesus also calls this woman “daughter” (5:34). While the familial attribution knits this woman’s story to the story surrounding it about the gravely ill daughter of the synagogue leader, “daughter” also knits this woman to Jesus. In the course of this entire narrative, there has been no mention of the woman having any family. The backstory does not allude to marriage, a husband, children, or siblings in this woman’s life. This omission does not mean she definitely lacked close relatives, but it does portray her as lacking significant support and as socially and economically (and possibly sexually) vulnerable in a culture where women often had to depend upon or be attached to men to survive. [7] By identifying her as “daughter,” Jesus is connecting her to himself. Whether claiming her as his daughter or highlighting their common Jewish ancestry or relationship to God through familial language, he expresses to her that she is not on her own. They belong to one another.
Jesus’s final words to the woman in this scene confer a blessing: “Go in peace and be healthy and whole free of your affliction” (5:34, my translation). I imagine his pronouncement giving voice to a deep desire she has held for the last twelve years, that health and wholeness and wellness would indeed fill her life again.
The narrator says nothing else about this woman. The story presses on by shifting focus back to the critical condition of the synagogue leader’s daughter. News about her arrives while Jesus is still blessing the woman, and his attention must go now to the young girl in need. But as Jesus turns to Jairus, I picture the woman standing tall, no longer afraid, taking a deep breath, relishing the vitality in her body, and turning around to go and tell her neighbors all about her encounter with Jesus.
While this woman and Jesus have been conversing, people have been traveling to relay awful news to Jairus. They may have even left the house with word about his daughter before Jairus made it to Jesus. They weave through the crowd to get to the synagogue leader and tell him that his girl has died. Because she is no longer alive, they assume that Jesus can no longer do anything for her and continue with the rhetorical question “Why bother the teacher still?” (5:35, my translation).
I imagine Jairus staring at them, through them, in shock, the news not fully registering and his body unable to move. He had come up with a way to help his daughter, and he had traveled as fast as he could to Jesus to seek help. They were headed to where she was right now. But now none of it mattered. Death had overtaken his little girl.
Jesus hears what the messengers say, and he responds directly to Jairus, “Do not fear, only believe” (5:36). Jesus does not offer his condolences and walk away. He tells everyone around him that they can’t go any farther with Jairus and himself, inviting only Peter, James, and John to keep going with him. And this small group of men continues traveling to the synagogue leader’s house where his daughter lay.
I find Jesus’s instructions in response to the news about the little girl’s death puzzling. Jesus could have offered words of comfort or reassurance that he would see if there was any way he could help, but he invokes language of faith. What exactly could Jesus have been asking Jairus to believe in the context of a situation now defined by death’s finality? For people on that side of Jesus’s death and resurrection, who have not read the end of the gospel story yet, let alone the conclusion of Mark 5, it was unlikely even to cross their minds to believe that Jesus, a human being like them, could bring this girl back to life from death. A leader of the synagogue would be familiar with the scriptures that portray resurrection as something God does. For those of us on this side of Jesus’s resurrection, this perspectival discrepancy is worth recognizing and sitting with in order to discern the full texture of this moment and the actions that follow. The post-resurrection narrator may very well be writing at this gap to create dramatic irony for their readers.
What stand out to me most in these puzzling words are two things:
1) The words in Jesus’s mouth echo words that appeared in the previous scene. The woman that found healing through touching Jesus’s clothes was afraid when she approached Jesus, and her faith, as Jesus noted, saved her. Jesus’s statement to Jairus recalls this woman’s story and actions. In exhorting Jairus to not be afraid and to have faith, Jesus places before Jairus the woman’s persistence in advocating for restored health and life for herself. Whatever else Jesus’s instructions to believe might mean, I think he is encouraging Jairus to follow the woman’s example by persevering in advocating for his daughter.
2) Through these instructions, I also hear Jesus opposing the perspective that the messengers expressed when they characterized Jairus’s actions as bothering Jesus, not just from this point forward but from the beginning. The message that their negative rhetoric sends is that seeking help and healing for this little girl is a bother or burden. While their message reinscribes patriarchal devaluing of Jairus’s daughter, Jesus’s exhortation to keep going toward and advocating for this girl defies such sexism. She is not a bother or burden, Jesus’s words and actions proclaim, and seeking to do everything possible for her is no bother or burden.
At this juncture, this group of five men opts to keep moving toward a marginalized, powerless girl. They do not stop or turn their attention to other matters. They are aware that they may not be able to do anything to help her now. But they continue their journey to her anyway. They choose an anti-sexist path that upsets patriarchal norms for men to move away from everything associated with the feminine and powerlessness. [8]
The group arrives to the sound of mourning at Jairus’s home. Once inside, Jesus asks the mourners why they’re weeping when the girl is only sleeping. Why Jesus characterizes her state as asleep and thus not dead when everyone else is certain that she is no longer alive, I don’t know. Perhaps this is another instance of Jesus’s attempt throughout the early chapters of Mark to keep his miraculous activities quiet. [9] If the official press release frames this incident as awakening from a deep sleep instead of rising from the dead, then stories associating Jesus with resurrection won’t develop and spread before the right time. But his comment sends the mourners immediately into fits of laughter.
Once more Jesus perseveres in standing up for this sick girl when others do not, even when it may appear downright foolish to others. He gets the mourners and everyone else out of the house except for the girl’s parents and the three disciples with him. The narrator uses the same language here that shows up when Jesus casts demons out of people to describe how Jesus clears the room. [10] I don’t think the narrator’s point is to demonize the mourners. I think the repetition of this language for Jesus’s action does two things: it indicates that the mourners on this particular occasion are acting in ways that go against God’s work, and it begins the process of casting the threat of death and all its trappings out of this girl’s life, this family, and this space.
Jesus and the five people with him go to where the girl is. Jesus takes her hand in his and then speaks to her. The narrator provides readers with both the Aramaic words that Jesus uses to address her and their translation in the imperial language of Greek: “Little girl, I say to you, rise” (5:41, my translation). This one who is counted least and hovering at the end of life, whose social and physical vulnerabilities have dominated her story in this story so far, is called to rise. Jesus’s word to her is simultaneously corporeal, resurrecting, and empowering.
Her response is immediate, according to the narrator, and the transformation that she experiences is dramatic. She accepts that invitation and gets up from where she had been lying. She doesn’t just sit up but stands up on her feet and starts walking around the house. Her body exudes life, energy, and power. The powerlessness and helplessness that overshadowed her until now has fled.
In this empowering moment, the narrator decides to disclose one detail about this girl. She is twelve. Her life has spanned the number of years that the woman healed earlier that day had been sick and suffering. These years also correspond to the number of Israel’s man-led tribes and of the men that Jesus chose to be his disciples. [11] Based on these symbolic associations, what I hear in the narrator’s repetition is an invitation to all of Israel, God’s people, including Jesus and the disciples too, to see themselves and their story in the stories of this girl and this woman. Their two stories, unbeknownst to one another yet entangled in similar trajectories of sexism’s injustice, oppression, illness, and suffering at the poles of both youth and adulthood, reflect the disempowerment and suffering of God’s people, particularly for the women, girls, and gender-nonconforming persons of Israel. In their healing, God’s people can also catch a glimpse of what the coming of God’s kingdom looks like for them: It looks like a woman saying no to gender, economic, and social oppression and finding liberation and wholeness for her body in the body of Jesus. It looks like a girl in last place rising up, alive and empowered. It looks like a transformation of the social order in which power and value are not determined by masculine domination but redefined by health, liberation, and life for all through prioritizing the health, liberation, and life of non-masculine bodies, young and older.
The narrator does not let readers hear the girl speak or share the girl’s own response to all that she is experiencing. The focus of the action returns to all the people surrounding her, who are so surprised that the narrator double-underlines their out-of-body astonishment, literally, “They were amazed with great amazement” (5:42, my translation). I picture the room exhibiting a combination of jaw-dropped speechlessness and deafening shouts, some frozen in place and others rushing toward the girl in celebration.
Then Jesus talks to them, first saying something that seems to invoke their silence so that no one would know what took place here and then instructing them to feed the girl. The scene closes with Jesus attending to what the girl and her body need in this moment, nourishment, and calling upon the adults to care for her.
The last comment I want to make about the anti-sexist significance of this story concerns the language that identifies this girl. The narrator never provides her name. The first words used to refer to her were variations of “daughter,” which centers her identity on her relationship with her father. The next label that appeared in the text when Jesus and the group arrived at Jairus’s home was “little child,” a word also applied to infants, which conveys powerlessness and helplessness. The final term used to identify this girl is a diminutive form of “girl,” a word that not only attaches a gender identity to her personhood but also bears connotations in first-century Greek that direct attention to other people’s perceptions of her. According to A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, the terms for girls were also used to refer to “the ‘pupil’ of the eye” because of how a “tiny image reflected in the iris of the eye” of the person looking at them. While this understanding, according to this dictionary, could imply that the one deemed “pupil” or “girl” was “held dear” or “cherished,” that meaning revolves around reference to someone other than the girl herself doing the cherishing and favoring. [12] In other words, what it means to be a girl at the linguistic level is associated with being looked at, being the reflection or object of someone else’s gaze.
With this progression of identifications from men’s mouths and the narrator’s ink for this twelve-year-old human being, she is left little room to be an actor in her own story. She is excluded from the power to name and identify who she is, and the identities attributed to her reduce her to situations of dependence imposed upon her: on her father, on adults period, on someone powerful enough to save her from death, and on others in society seeing her. Sexism in conjunction with other modes of disempowerment, including age and lower social and political status under the empire, seems to reign in her life in this narrative. Regardless of the transformation she experienced rising from death or near-death to life, the path ahead of her promises no liberation from sexist systems that loom over her life as the story ends.
Though the narrative leaves this crucial dimension of gender inequity unacknowledged and unchallenged, I think the trajectories of anti-sexism throughout the story call readers to recognize and challenge the inequitable construction of this twelve-year-old’s identity as a powerless, helpless, dependent object. After all, as Jesus will say later in the gospel story, “Many who are first will be last, and the last will be first” (10:31). The ways in which these twenty-two verses in Mark 5 place this young girl and an afflicted woman at the center of attention and highlight their empowerment in their encounters with Jesus subvert both the narrative’s sexism-laden identifications of the girl as well as any sexist conclusions that readers might draw at the end of the story. Ultimately, I think that the girl and woman and their stories bring readers face-to-face with the anti-sexist shape of the kingdom of God and leave readers with the question: Will you stand with us in God’s kingdom and pursue liberation from sexism’s oppression for all bodies?
Updated March 10, 2024
Notes & References
A piece about Mark 5:21-43, one of the Revised Common Lectionary readings for Sunday, June 27, 2021
1. I am using Ibram X. Kendi’s understanding of antiracism as both active and ongoing as a model for anti-sexism throughout this post. He illuminates the active shape of antiracism in How to Be an Antiracist in this way: “One endorses either the idea of a racial hierarchy as a racist, or racial equality as an antiracist. One either believes problems are rooted in groups of people, as a racist, or locates the roots of problems in power and policies, as an antiracist. One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an antiracist. There is no in-between safe space of ‘not racist'” (9). Kendi points to the continuous work involved in antiracism in these words: “Racist and antiracist are not fixed identities. […] What we say about race, what we do about race, in each moment, determines what–not who–we are” (10). Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist (Random House, 2019). Similarly, I envision anti-sexism as both challenging sexism’s inequities and promoting equity among persons of all gender identities.
2. This essay does not provide a thorough critical treatment of gender binaries in engaging this scripture, mainly because my study of transgender and queer interpretations of scripture is still developing. As a cis-gender woman who has been shaped in gender-binary cultural norms and is working to understand and resist them, I bear responsibility for this underdeveloped dimension in this piece and will work to amplify further transgender and non-binary perspectives in future writings.
3. Two sources that gave me insight into these dynamics are: Sharyn Dowd, Reading Mark: A Literary and Theological Commentary on the Second Gospel (Smyth & Helwys, 2000), 96-97; and Ekkehard Stegemann and Wolfgang Stegemann, Jesus Movement: A Social History of Its First Century (Bloomsbury Academic, 1999), 16, 59, 86, 134, 204-205.
4. Dowd also characterizes this woman’s disposition as showing “confidence” in this scene. Dowd, Reading Mark, 57.
5. Christena Cleveland, “Sprigg Lecture II,” Virginia Theological Seminary (Oct. 11, 2017), Virginia Theological Seminary YouTube channel, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwaKkISZWpE.
6. The source that helped me understand this history is Dale B. Martin, The Corinthian Body (Yale University Press, 1999), 32-34, 226.
7. Stegemann and Stegemann, Jesus Movement, 65-67, 134.
8. Martin, The Corinthian Body, 29, 33-34.
9. Here I am referring to the concept of the “messianic secret,” an idea developed by William Wrede about the phenomenon in Mark where Jesus tries to keep people and demons alike from spreading the word about his messianic identity before he is raised to life from death. See William Wrede, The Messianic Secret, trans. J. C. G. Greig (James Clark & Co., 1971), 71-72.
10. See Mark 1:34, 39, for example.
11. Mark 3:13-19.
12. Walter Bauer, Frederick William Danker, W. F. Arndt, and F. W. Gingrich, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, 3rd ed. (University of Chicago Press, 2000), 559-560.
Scripture quotations, unless otherwise identified, are from the New Revised Standard Version.
Featured image of “Silhouette of Person with Fist Raised” is by Miguel Bruna on the Unsplash website, www.unsplash.com.
