The woman was desperate.
She was a social outcast, kind of like the community’s tolerated resident leper or fool.
Sometimes the blood leaked, you know. Everywhere she went, if she went.
She had to stay home now for twelve years, her life staining her clothing, her bed, her floor.
Getting more isolated, if that were possible. Her house’s walls didn’t get thicker. She just thinned out.
What did she have to lose, she thought, more than the town-shame she already felt? Could it get worse?
This day she puts her bony elbows out in front of her and pushes through a crowd.
“Little me, I’ll just stoop,” she thinks, “just reach out for those tassels that peek beneath His cloak.”
Then it does get worse.
Jesus stops cold and turns around, the choking crowd piling up against each other and her.
He booms out the voice that spoke galaxies into existence.
Every fiber of that sound seems to point at her cowering self, now more alone in a crowd than she had been in the twilights of her own swept hovel.
Who touched Me?
Suddenly she understands that this last hope for healing is not only gone but she will be publicly humiliated among her own people once again.
Could she know that the impossible is His playground? That the last outpost fence of hope was one He could leap over and drag the fabric of reward right back in?
But she must have known, or she wouldn’t have come.
His disciples look at each other, annoyed, petulant, and most unbearable of all, interrupted. This was a touchfest, for Peter’s sake.
Unbeknownst to anyone except Jesus, she had grabbed hold—just for a moment, just as they whispered past her -- of the tassels of his prayer shawl. Something akin in our culture to caressing the necktie of a strange man in public.
Only a family member could touch a man’s tallit. The woman trembles.
She knows. He knows.
And not only that, a tangible commodity has bolted from Him to her. Dunamis. Power.
There is so little of her wasted, stained person to fall down in front of Him. She waits for the rebuke for the famili-arity.
But He’s the Overturner of tables and times.
He just adopts her.
“Daughter, you are healed,” he said.
Her body changes. Her status changes. Her people changes forever.
We see the divine mechanism, don’t we?
We dare, He diverts.
We stoop, He stops.
We touch, He transforms.
Go in peace, son, daughter, He tells us, your faith makes you whole.