The Expositor's Bible: The Gospel According to St. MarkChadwick, G. A. (George Alexander)
Religion
The Expositor's Bible: The Gospel According to St. Mark
Chadwick, G. A. (George Alexander)
Bible. Mark -- Commentaries
as well as the revelation of God in flesh. It is therefore noteworthy that
we have many examples of His grace and goodness amid such trying scenes,
as when He spoke to Zacchæus, and called Bartimæus to Him to be healed.
Jesus could be wrathful but He was never irritated. Of these examples one
of the most beautiful is here recorded, for as He went with Jairus, amidst
the rude and violent thronging of the crowds, moving alone (as men often
are in sympathy and in heart alone amid seething thoroughfares), He
suddenly became aware of a touch, the timid and stealthy touch of a
broken-hearted woman, pale and wasted with disease, but borne through the
crowd by the last effort of despair and the first energy of a newborn
hope. She ought not to have come thither, since her touch spread
ceremonial uncleanness far and wide. Nor ought she to have stolen a
blessing instead of praying for it. And if we seek to blame her still
further, we may condemn the superstitious notion that Christ’s gifts of
healing were not conscious and loving actions, but a mere contagion of
health, by which one might profit unfelt and undiscovered. It is urged
indeed that hers was not a faith thus clouded, but so majestic as to
believe that Christ would know and respond to the silent hint of a gentle
touch. And is it supposed that Jesus would have dragged into publicity
such a perfect lily of the vale as this? and what means her trembling
confession, and the discovery that she could not be hid? But when our
keener intellects have criticised her errors, and our clearer ethics have
frowned upon her misconduct, one fact remains. She is the only woman upon
whom Jesus is recorded to have bestowed any epithet but a formal one. Her
misery and her faith drew from His guarded lips, the tender and yet lofty
word Daughter.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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