Mark 5:21-43
The story of the woman with the issue of blood is a story of empowerment for women. It’s a story that says, despite the patriarchal mandate for women to obey, submit, and behave, that women can and should take ownership of their lives and advocate for their needs—taking what they need, if necessary—and that this initiative is blessed by Jesus. The hemorrhaging woman, who lives in a society that won’t even give her the dignity of a name, nevertheless takes her life, her health, and her faith into her own hands. Through a feminist analysis of the narrative of Mark 5:21-48, this essay examines some of the patriarchal challenges faced by the woman and her defiant answers to those challenges. Ultimately, this text empowers women to lay claim to and take charge of their bodies and their lives.
Context
The pericope of the hemorrhaging woman is sandwiched between two parts of a larger story involving the healing of another woman. In the larger story, a synagogue leader, Jairus, entreats Jesus to heal his daughter. Jesus agrees to go with Jairus, and it is on his way to Jairus’s house that he is encountered by the bleeding woman. After the hemorrhaging woman is healed, someone reports that Jairus’s daughter has died, but Jesus insists on seeing her anyway, and commanding her to get up, which she does. This larger narrative, though hinging on a female character, is still taking place in a man’s world. The patriarchal environment is evidenced by the girl’s complete passivity—indeed, she is dead—and lack of agency or action. The narrative purpose of her existence seems to be solely so that Jesus can display his healing powers. She says no words, she has no name (and neither does her mother, though we know her father is named Jairus), and the only action she takes herself—to stand up and walk about—she does at the behest of the man Jesus. This story paints a plain picture of the patriarchal setting in which the story of the hemorrhaging woman takes place. The fact that the larger story shares similarities with the smaller one—that it is also a healing narrative and that it also involves a woman—makes the smaller story of the hemorrhaging woman stand out even more as unique for the ways the woman defies gender challenges and expectations.
Impure
Leviticus 19 discusses purity laws regarding bodily discharge.[1] For women experiencing the discharge of blood, whether in normal menstruation or otherwise, they are considered unclean for as long as it occurs. Verses 21 and 26, talking about menstruation and other discharge respectively, say that everything the woman sits or lies on becomes unclean, and verses 22 and 27 say that anyone who touches these things becomes unclean. For the woman experiencing a discharge of blood at a time other than normal menstruation, she would have to wait an additional seven days after it had ceased to be considered clean.
By this law, even a normal healthy woman would be considered unclean upwards of 25% of her life. The woman in Mark 5 had been suffering from hemorrhages, or a discharge of blood, for twelve years. Further, since she was certainly not experiencing the discharge of typical menstruation, she was perpetually seven days away from being “clean” again. In addition to the discomfort and inconvenience of her ongoing malady, her hope of returning to normalcy was continually deferred even beyond the hemorrhage’s ceasing. Not only was she enduring physical pain and discomfort, but also the psychic stress of knowing she was in danger of ritually contaminating other things and people she came into contact with. She couldn’t share a bed with a lover or a family member; she couldn’t participate in worship. The patriarchal tie of women’s blood to ritual and legal “uncleanness” is fascinating because elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible blood is highly sacralized. Life is in the blood, and blood is a key element in atonement, healing, and reconciliation for God’s people. And yet when it comes from a woman, blood is an agent of uncleanness.
The bleeding woman’s defiant answer to the patriarchal challenge of her uncleanness is to reach out and touch Jesus anyway. Whereas, presumably, the expectation would be for her to keep her unclean hands to herself and not jeopardize the cleanness of a man, she nevertheless touches Jesus’s cloak, certain that it will be the key to her healing. Indeed, it seems that rather than the woman’s uncleanness transferring to Jesus, Jesus’s power, his holiness, his wholeness, perhaps, actually transfers to the woman. Verse 30 says that Jesus was “aware that power had gone forth from him.” There is no mention of his being tainted or receiving any curse, but rather his own power flows outward. The woman sneakily takes this power from him for her own ends, perhaps embracing the patriarchal caricature of the wily woman thief, but Jesus is not angry with her. He affirms the faith that empowered her to do it.
Incurable
A second patriarchal challenge we see in this passage is that the woman “had endured much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had; and she was no better, but rather grew worse.”[2] It is somewhat suspicious, if not surprising, that many (most likely male) physicians could not help the bleeding woman. A 2001 study in the Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics concluded that women are “more likely to have their pain reports discounted as ‘emotional’ or ‘psychogenic’ and, therefore ‘not real,’” and that men “generally receive a more aggressive response by health-care providers.”[3] It is, of course, an anachronism to apply work regarding the modern health care system to that of the Ancient Near East. However, given that we still live in a patriarchal society in which women have difficulty receiving the healing they need, the similarities may be worth noting.
The bleeding woman has been forced to seek second, and third (and perhaps fourth and fifth) opinions about her issue, for years and years, but has not been made better. The text does not say whether the physicians were unable or unwilling to heal her. Just that they didn’t. Despite this lack of healing, the woman still “endured much,” and the type and extent of this possible abuse is left to the imagination of the reader. A 2015 piece in the Atlantic chronicles a man’s experience accompanying his wife to the emergency room when she was experiencing intense pain that turned out to be ovarian torsion—“a true surgical emergency” that, if not treated in a timely manner can result in “ovarian loss, intra-abdominal infection, sepsis, and even death.”[4] By the time the woman went into surgery, she had been in the E.R. for 14 hours, because no one had taken her pain seriously.[5] Just as the doctors and nurses were dismissive and condescending to the author’s wife, one can imagine the physicians responding to the hemorrhaging woman with a shrug: “Sorry about the blood. It’s a woman thing. You’ll just have to deal with it.”
The woman’s defiant answer to the challenge of the inattentive or inept doctors she had encountered was to continue advocating fiercely for her own needs, and to find an alternative healer who would actually do something. She had heard about Jesus, but she went beyond simply requesting an appointment or a face-to-face meeting to tell him about her problem or to hear more advice from yet another man. She just needed to touch him. She marched right up to him in the crowd and reached out her hand. She knew what she needed, and she made that happen. Indeed, in the end, Jesus tells the woman that it was her faith that had made her well. This is not simply the woman’s willing herself to health—surely she would have done so sooner—but it does display the woman’s own participation in her healing, perhaps by the intuition that touching Jesus would make her well, or by her dogged determination to continue to advocate for herself rather than succumb to despair and helplessness.
Inactive
A third patriarchal challenge the woman faced in this story is the expectation of her passivity. In patriarchal societies, men are the active gender, while women are passive: Men dominate, penetrate, conquer, and rule, while women submit, receive, surrender, and obey. This is true in the world of the text as it is today. In the text, Jairus’s daughter exemplifies the role of the appropriately passive woman. As mentioned above, Jairus’s daughter is dead. The most passive one could be. Perhaps the ideal woman. She has no name, she does not speak, and she obeys every word of Jesus, the active male savior. The expectation of passivity is something the hemorrhaging woman cannot afford to observe.
The bleeding woman’s defiant answer to the expectation of passivity is to turn it on its head. This portion of the story is a clear distinction and departure from the overarching male/female, passive/active framework. In verses 25-34, the bleeding woman is the active agent, and Jesus the male savior is the passive object. In this section, the woman is the subject of seven clauses and the object of three, whereas Jesus is the subject of four clauses and the object of eleven. In the rest of Mark, and indeed most of much of the Gospel accounts, Jesus is the one doing things—traveling, healing, speaking. He is the savior and the main character, after all. To interrupt the androcentric Jesus narrative with a story centering a woman is no small thing. What’s more, it is not simply that the story centers the woman as an active agent, but also that Jesus occupies the passive role of the recipient. This counter-cultural swap pushes against the patriarchal assumption of women as inactive objects, and it is affirmed and solidified (rather than written off as a fluke) by Jesus’s response to the woman once she explains to him the truth behind what she has done.
Jesus’s inactivity during much of this narrative serves as a foil to highlight the agency of the woman. Jesus is the object, rather than the subject, of several clauses: the woman heard about him, and came up behind him, and touched him. Power had gone forth from him. The woman falls down before him and tells him what happened. In all, Jesus (or his clothing) is the object of six prepositions and five verbs in these ten verses. Jesus is only the subject four times. The only things Jesus does as a subject in this section of narrative is turn about, ask a question, look around, and speak to the woman. On the other hand, the woman is the subject seven times, and is only the object in three clauses.
Characterizing the woman as the active agent of the unit rather than Jesus makes Jesus out to be less of a forceful wielder of power, and more the source of empowerment for others that the book of Mark as a whole points to. Rather than calling on Jesus to exercise the strength and power expected of a Messiah, the woman’s faith in Jesus empowers her to enact her own healing. This empowerment reminds readers that Jesus the Messiah is not the strongman Messiah but rather the Messiah who gives up his power, letting it flow out of him to others. Mark’s Jesus is the Messiah who dies and then vanishes from his tomb, leaving the gospel work to his frightened and scattered followers.
Conclusions
At the conclusion of this pericope, after the hemorrhaging woman has confronted and defied the patriarchal challenges of being unclean, overlooked, and supposedly passive, Jesus offers her a blessing: “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.”[6] Rather than condemnation for resisting the norms of patriarchal society, the woman receives congratulations for the strength of her faith. Rather than punishment for her audacity, the woman receives praise. Ultimately it is her faith that drives her to disregard the conventions and expectations of society in favor of taking responsibility and ownership of her own body and doing what she knew she had to do to be made well. The faith that Jesus praises is not a faith that submits to patriarchy, but one that resists it.
To read the story of the hemorrhaging woman through a feminist lens that resists patriarchy and celebrates women’s agency is to read a story of female empowerment and affirmation of that empowerment by the Divine. It is to recognize that the oppression of women—that which keeps them marginalized and keeps them sick and suffering—is not compatible with the message and mission of Jesus, that is, peace and health. What is compatible with the message and mission of Jesus is faith, as exemplified by the hemorrhaging woman. The faith of the hemorrhaging woman empowers her to seek out Jesus, whatever the cost, rather than heed the ways of the world. The faith of the hemorrhaging woman empowers her to take control of her own destiny rather than have it dictated to her. The faith of the hemorrhaging woman empowers her to assert her agency in her life rather than remain a passive recipient. It is this faith that empowers the woman, and that same faith may empower the readers of the text, who may then find themselves blessed, at peace, and healed.
[1] It’s worth noting that Leviticus 19 includes laws and guidelines for both men and women. However, the timeline for going from unclean to clean for a man could be as short as a couple of hours, whereas the timeline for a woman who is menstruating would be three to five days at the least. Furthermore, the male discharge would typically be in some way voluntary, whereas the female discharge would be involuntary.
[2] Mark 5:26, NRSV.
[3] Hoffman, Diane E. and Anita J. Tarzian, “The Girl Who Cried Pain: A Bias Against Women in the Treatment of Pain,” Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics, Vol. 29, 2001, p. 27.
[4] Ryan, Matthew F. and Bobby K. Desai, “Ovarian Torsion in a 5-Year Old: A Case Report and Review,” Case Reports in Emergency Medicine, 2012.
[5] Fassler, Joe, “How Doctors Take Women’s Pain Less Seriously,” The Atlantic, 15 October 2015. http://theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/10/emergency-room-wait-times-sexism/410515
[6] Mark 5:34