Mark 5:21 – 43 Jairus’ two women

We are now back on the Jewish side, beside the sea, with the great crowd gathered around him. Things are much as we left them in 4:1 but since then we have seen two mighty works and are now about to see two more involving the miraculous healing of two Jewish women, on Jewish soil, beside the sea.

The two stories are inseparably woven together; the older woman’s story is slotted into that of the younger woman, while they are on route to Jairus’ house. The linkage may go much deeper. The younger woman is twelve years old, has reached the age of menstruation; the older woman has been suffering for twelve years from some sort of vaginal bleeding. Are we encouraged to see them as mother and daughter? The older woman will have been excluded from the community because of her “uncleanness” and has exhausted her funds on doctors. Such middle class behavior implied a middle class husband somewhere. The younger woman’s father, Jairus, is such a middle class candidate because of his position as one of the synagogue leaders. Following her healing, her restoration into Jewish society, the younger woman’s story continues and, in 5:40 both father and mother now appear in the story. What had happened at the birth of this young woman that is now going to be put right? What a tease that Mark is!

We also note some of the color of the story(s). (i) At age 12, the younger woman is doing exceedingly well in the “staying alive stakes. Malina, p. 211, notes that by mid-teens, 60% of those “who had survived child birth would now have died. (ii) Jairus’ falling to the ground, the behavior of a supplicant, is similar to the demoniac’s posture of worship on spotting Jesus. (iii) The older woman “is physically ill, ritually unclean, and near impoverishment: (Donahue, p. 174). (iv) Her singular focus on Jesus, her “faith”, parallels that of the Syrophoenician woman in Mk 7:25. (v) The bleeding is not a hemorrhage; a 12 year hemorrhage would have long since been fatal. (vi) Verses 27 – 30 are the work of the omniscient narrator — he sees all and shares it with us, his readers. (vii) The actions of the older woman touching Jesus’ cloak and that of Jesus touching the younger woman’s corpse would have been sources of contamination in this clean-unclean world. The healing of Jairus’ two women and the restoration of their family carried a huge risk.