Most of us never experience healings as definite and intense as those in today’s Gospel. Like the hemorrhaging woman, who for twelve years would have been excluded from the temple grounds because of her bleeding, we are often excluded from an easy knowledge of our sacred place in God’s world.

We go through long stretches of time barely conscious of our sacrificial liturgies: tending children, keeping homes, managing work, sustaining relationships. Our work and suffering and love is always held within the work and suffering and love of Christ, but that doesn’t mean we are conscious of, or feel in our bodies the effects of, being held. 

We all know the women in this story.

There is the twelve-year-old child’s mother, whose monthly liturgy of menstruation—building, waiting, bleeding— one month blossomed forth with a baby girl, who grew from the speck of a two-cell star to a wondrous child.

We have all been the girl, and many have raised girls: chasing friends and tracking swallows in the sky. She is twelve years old and just on the flower cusp of a new way of being in her body, but still able to twirl with arms outstretched, feeling God’s good earth beneath her bare feet.

We have ourselves been or have loved the bleeding woman, whom a dozen doctors could not cure, whose body is marked with the trauma of medical interventions. She is exhausted and dizzy from anemia and low blood pressure, excluded from the little joys of daily life because the management of pain and blood is all-consuming. Two thousand years later, we have more complex names for the vascular and hormonal pathology she suffered, but it is still so little understood that often the only solution is a hysterectomy.

What binds these three women together? Their female bodies, their beauty, and their suffering. Blood. To me, what stands out most today is this: at moments when they are deep in the world of suffering—one bleeding to death, one dead, and one wailing in grief—Jesus, having entered into human flesh because of and for exactly such moments as these, makes them aware of the extent to which they are held within and interact with his own embodied story of work and suffering and love.

We see that embodied reciprocity in the Gospel today: fingers reaching, power flowing, blood stopping, Jesus turning. He has such a visceral connection to the hemorrhaging woman, that he felt the power leave his body and move into hers, where she could then feel in her body that she was healed. And then again with the girl, while Jesus still feels the mark of the last healing in his body: hands covering hands, words calling forth, the body rising.

That little girl, rising from the bed, was once hidden in the tabernacle of her mother’s uterus. She was fed by blood flowing from dozens of arteries and veins into her placenta, where an exquisite, networked interchange occurred that is explainable by medical terminology, but is profound, nevertheless.

Like you, who are held and grow within Christ, the baby had limited consciousness of these networked miracles, this wonderous nexus of growth. She did not even know she would enter into a new world, or what joy and suffering would be hers. But you do know, as through a glass darkly, that you are living within Christ’s life. And sometimes when the lamps glow more brightly, as they do in the Gospel healings today, you can see more clearly your relationship to Christ and how all of this life- and yours and mine—is sewn into the hem of his cloak.