“If only I may touch His clothes, I shall be made well.”  Mark 5:28

“As Jesus went, the people pressed around Him.  And there was a woman who had had a discharge of blood for twelve years, and though she had spent all her living on physicians, she could not be healed by anyone.  She came up behind Him and touched the fringe of His garment, and immediately her discharge of blood ceased.”   Luke 8:42b-44.  Mark’s gospel tells us the woman said, “If only I may touch His clothes, I shall be made well.”  This was said by a broken outcast woman who was looking to Jesus for healing.  Because of her bleeding, she was not allowed to worship in the Temple, nor allowed to touch another person.  She was cut off from God and man.  The doctors offered her no hope, she only got worse, until Jesus came to town!  She believed if she could just touch the fringe of His robe, she might be healed!  She did touch Jesus that day, and He touched her!  Mark records, “Immediately her bleeding stopped and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering” (Mark 5:29). 

Blood is symbolic of “life” in the scriptures.  “For the life of the flesh is in the blood…..”  Leviticus 17:11.  This woman was likely anemic and weak from loss of blood.  It took great effort to push through the large crowd surrounding Jesus that day.  He felt that tug of a heart and knew someone had reached out to Him in faith.  Jesus “realized power had gone out from Him” (Mark 5:30).  Jesus looked around to see who had done it and would not allow the woman to fade into the crowd without assuring her she was permanently healed.  The woman came trembling before him and gave testimony that she had been healed.  Her public confession was rewarded with a public commendation of her faith.  No one ever touches Jesus by faith without His knowing it, and without receiving a blessing.  No one ever confesses Him openly without being strengthened in their assurance of salvation!  “If you confess with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.  For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved.”  Romans 10: 9-10.

Eusebius, the church historian born just a hundred years after the apostles, gives details about the woman who touched Christ’s robe in Luke 8, Mark 5 and Matthew 9.  According to his sources, she was a Gentile from Caesarea Philippi, a town in the far north of Israel at the headwaters of the Jordan River.  After she returned home from her meeting with Jesus, the grateful townspeople commissioned a statue of Jesus – the only lifelike image of Jesus ever crafted.  Eusebius wrote, “Her house was pointed out in the city, and amazing memorials of the Savior’s benefit of her were still there.  On a high stone base at the gates of her home stood a bronze statue of a woman on bent knee, stretching out her hands.  Opposite to this was a standing figure of a man clothed in a double cloak and reaching his hand out to the woman.  This statue, they said, resembled the features of Jesus and was still in existence in my own time.  I saw it with my own eyes when I stayed in the city.”  (Eusebius, 265-339 AD)

We don’t know what became of the statue, but we can still touch the hem of His garment!  “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.”  Matthew 11:28.

Your friend, Jean