NOTES for Mat 9:18-26

The woman suffering from a flow of blood is healed by touching Christ. She is healed in passing, while Christ is on His way elsewhere, to the place where a man who believed Him had called Him. And then, when every minute is precious, the bleeding woman touches Christ.

To appreciate the degree of her boldness, one should remember that any bodily contact with someone bleeding was considered defiling. A person defiled by such a touch would not have been able to enter the house without purification procedures, so the woman's action looked not only insolent but selfish, for she could have disrupted the healing of the dying girl. And yet the woman risked publicly admitting that she had committed a forbidden act. And Christ not only does not rebuke her, but encourages her boldness as a manifestation of faith.

Apparently, there are situations when we have to take actions that contradict established ideas and norms of behavior. But the Lord can support our boldness if it is born of faith.

And no touch can defile Him who is Purity itself. Therefore the touch of Christ, who bore on Himself all the sins of the world, raised the ruler's daughter from her bed of illness, and raises us to life as well.

The healing of the woman with the flow of blood is a very impressive miracle. The point is not even that, according to the rules, she was not supposed to touch anyone, yet dared to do so. In any case, we should not always use this example to justify our disregard for rules. This is not why the evangelist records the story, nor is this what Christ approves in her actions. What contrasts most sharply with the behavior familiar to us is that she truly needs the Lord desperately. All her hope is concentrated in Him, and all the strength of her spirit is directed toward attaining this touch. She truly can no longer live unless she touches the Lord Jesus.

It was precisely this need for God that earned the Lord’s praise. Compared with it, much in our “religious practice” will seem weak and, to use the term from Revelation, lukewarm. Perhaps what matters to the Lord above all is the strength and all-embracing nature of this need, burning within an ordinary person just like each of us.

A striking feature of the Gospel in many different languages is the use of perfective verbs (though in some languages this is expressed by other verb forms). What matters is that in a number of cases the Lord speaks of accomplished facts. "Your faith has saved you" (Matt 9:22). "The one who hears My word has passed from death into life" (John 5:24). "All of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ" (Gal 3:27). In meaning, though not grammatically, this same series includes: "the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it" (Matt 16:18).

The fact that all these things are already accomplished facts is striking and beautiful. This is what gives firmness to life in faith. This is the source of Christian joy, a joy completely incomprehensible to the unbelieving world. If this were not so, life would be a very frightening and, in essence, hopeless undertaking. But, thankfully, the salvation offered by Jesus Christ - healing, liberation, resurrection - happens. Et salva facta est, as the Latin version of Matt 9:22 says. There is a key moment, a turning point in the history of the world and in the personal biography of every human being, when all this is accomplished, when it becomes fact. This moment is the source of our life. "It is finished," Jesus says as He dies on the Cross (John 19:30). It is precisely as an accomplished fact that the Church in all her life has recourse to salvation.

Another "series" of Jesus' miracles. It is striking how different these four healings are. The case of the woman with the flow of blood is especially revealing: Jesus does nothing special here; the healing happens as a result of the meeting between her bold faith (the bleeding makes a person unclean, and she has no right to touch other people) and the power abiding in Jesus, as the Gospel according to Luke tells it, opening for us a glimpse into the mystery of the Lord's miracles.

The description of each of the other healings ends by mentioning how people respond to it. Of course, word about Jesus spreads; of course, those healed by Him prove unable to obey Him even out of gratitude; and of course, Christ's miracles, like His preaching, draw some people to Him and repel others. Jesus will answer the accusations that He is working with the prince of demons later (this will be discussed in chapter 12).

Every time a healing takes place in the Gospel, a miracle occurs. It is not merely a miracle of a medical or psychological nature; rather, it is a miracle of revelation about God, showing that He is not as we imagined Him. In nearly all the healings described, Christ truly acts by destroying existing religious notions: He touches the uncleanness of illness and death, He accepts outcasts and the disabled, and He makes not a person's righteousness but their faith the condition for the miracle... Therefore Jesus' Good News concerns not only what God does, healing, forgiving, and raising the dead, but, more importantly, what He is like. For on the path of faith and hope in God, what most often stands in our way are our distorted notions about Him: that He will not rummage in our earthly filth, that He will not want to deal with people like us, and that if He does, He will act according to our ideas of good and evil. Yet we have Good News: there is hope that He is different.