The operation was on Wednesday, I think, and I pretty much completely forgot about it until that morning when an email was sent around. I didn't even read the email, I just thought that it was a reminder to pray for the girl's surgery. Later, Josiah called me and asked if I had read the email, and I admitted that I hadn't. Well, to my surprise, the email actually said that she had gone in for the surgery and the doctor who had been seeing her all along said that the problem was gone!!
Ok, so your choices here are to say that it was coincidence that her eyes were changed, or that God did a miracle. Personally, it was miracle, and miracles happen more often than we think they do. Often, they are the little things that we say, "ok, that was cool," and then go on our way and forget about.
Jesus healed many people in the Bible. And you can try to go into all the medical explanations of why "this person wasn't really sick so Jesus didn't really heal them," but then you are trying to deny the real power that God really has in our world.
"A woman in the crowd had suffered for twelve years with constant bleeding. She had suffered a great deal from many doctors, and over the years she had spent everything she had to pay them, but she had gotten no better. In fact, she had gotten worse. She had heard about Jesus, so she came up behind him through the crowd and touched his robe. For she thought to herself, “If I can just touch his robe, I will be healed.” Immediately the bleeding stopped, and she could feel in her body that she had been healed of her terrible condition. Jesus realized at once that healing power had gone out from him, so he turned around in the crowd and asked, “Who touched my robe?”
His disciples said to him, “Look at this crowd pressing around you. How can you ask, ‘Who touched me?’”
But he kept on looking around to see who had done it. Then the frightened woman, trembling at the realization of what had happened to her, came and fell to her knees in front of him and told him what she had done. And he said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well. Go in peace. Your suffering is over.” ~Mark 5:25-34
I can't imagine having a chronic illness like this for 12 years. This woman was desperate, alone, and taken advantage of many times from doctors who, it sounds like, just wanted her money. To spend all that money just to get worse must have been devastating.
So when she heard about Jesus, she must have thought that it couldn't hurt to give it a try, it was free to touch his robe anyway.
And she was taking a big risk. The people in that town might not know of her illness, but if they found out, she would have been humiliated, because she was "unclean." Anyone or anything that she touched would also become "unclean" for a certain period of time, that was the custom. So to touch Jesus was to make him "unclean" as well. And I'm sure that she knew that.
I wonder if she was surprised when her risk paid off and she was healed. I could imagine that she was, and then even more surprised that Jesus knew that someone who touched him had been healed.
Then she realized that she needed to come forward and confess what she had done. I think that is a part of the healing. She couldn't just keep what happened to herself, I think if she had, she would not have been emotionally whole. She might have felt guilty for the rest of her life. And Jesus would not have had the opportunity to respond to her faith with his reassurance of love.
Something that strikes me about Jesus in this passage, is that he could heal without even actively doing anything. Someone with faith could just touch him and be healed, it's amazing!
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