Touched by Luke 8

Before the whole kitten thing, I started to write a post on Luke 8 - the Dead Girl and the Sick Woman. I have been working on this passage for bible study tonight. It's the first time I have led biblestudy, and in our group we prepare our own questions.

Most of the difficulty I'm having with the passage, is that I keep crying and have to stop.

There are a number of things in this passage that make me weep:

First the sick woman

• The state of the woman - whatever her condition she had clearly exhausted all medical efforts to gain healing, spending all she had on doctors (Mark 5:26)
• She was 'unclean'. This means she would have been shunned by her community. For if anyone touched her, they too would have been made unclean.
• Because of her 'unclean' status, she would not have been able to worship in the Synagogue. Even her relationship with God was somehow cut off.
• Then, with trembling hands, she reaches out to touch Jesus' garments - a tiny act of faith. She believes and is instantly healed.
• Here's the most beautiful part of the story for me.... Jesus calls her daughter. Apparently this tender address is used nowhere else in Jesus' recorded words. Oh what an amazing thing for Jesus to address her as daughter.
• And of course, rather than Jesus being made unclean by her, she is made clean by his touch.
• She is physically healed and spiritually freed. Alleluia!!!

Then Jairus and his daughter

• I can understand that allowing the daughter to die, provided Jesus with the opportunity to resurrect her. And it may have shown Jairus of the need for a patient, trusting faith, but the pain Jairus and his family must have gone through in those moments, is indescribable.

What did I learn

• That God is sovereign and Jesus has power over all things including sickness and death
• That I am not in the driver's seat (no matter how much I wish that were so).
• Ultimately trusting God means accepting his timing for events (and his sovereign outcomes).
• My faith must be vibrant and active in my day to day life but also patient. I must wait on the Lord, my Father, who knows best.