The image represents the moment when the girl restored to life by Jesus was able to have a meal again, fulfilling his instruction that her parents give her something to eat. In the Gospels, her story is intertwined with that of the woman who had suffered from chronic hemorrhaging for twelve years, inviting readers to reflect on both miracles as a shared story of healing, dignity, and restored life. Click here to read the full texts: Mark 5:21-43, Luke 8:40-56, and Matthew 9:18-26

The story of Jesus healing a woman suffering from chronic bleeding while on his way to revive the daughter of a synagogue ruler appears in every Synoptic Gospel. Each tells it through a narrative “sandwich” that embeds one miracle within another to create a fuller meaning. Despite several differences among the accounts—most notably Mark’s greater length compared with Luke’s, and Matthew’s silence regarding the father’s name, the girl’s age, Jesus’ command that she rise and be fed, and the public attention given to the woman’s touch—the pair of stories is clearly the same. As such, here I will draw upon the combined details of all three accounts, and I will refer to the twelve-year-old girl as Talitha, the Aramaic word by which Jesus addresses her in Mark. As for the bleeding woman, I will call her Veronica, following the Christian tradition that identifies her with the woman who later wiped Jesus’ face on the road to Calvary. In my imagination, their stories form a shared narrative, as follows.

About twelve years before the start of Jesus’ public ministry, in Capernaum on the north-western shore of lake Galilee, there lived two young women. One married Jairus, the ruler of the local synagogue, and became Talitha’s mother. The other was Veronica, who perhaps also married and hoped for children. Yet while Jairus’ family was blessed with status and a child, hers was burdened by the implications of her chronic health condition.

The aspect of the story we can easily miss, if we do not spend much time thinking about women’s physiology, is that even today chronic bleeding dramatically reduces the likelihood of conceiving a child, either because it indicates anovulation or because it creates an environment unsuitable for implantation. Veronica’s physiological challenge was compounded by religious practice, since Jewish law, to this day, prohibits marital relations during menstruation and for seven days thereafter, for a minimum separation of twelve days. If she bled more often than that, she would rarely, if ever, have had the opportunity to attempt conception. The poem I chose for this Sunday bulletin makes her barrenness explicit and central, but its beautiful closing suggests that caring for Jesus in his final hours did ultimately make Veronica a “mother”. Click here to read the poem.

Although modern Judaism retains these regulations governing intimate relations, accidental contact with a menstruating woman no longer carries the ritual implications it did when the Temple still stood and the Torah taught that even accidental contact with a bleeding woman rendered a person unable to enter it until evening. One can easily imagine Veronica becoming increasingly isolated, possibly even divorced and therefore poor. Even moving through a crowd would have required courage. Where Talitha at least had her father to plead on her behalf, Veronica had to slip through the crowd and dared to touch not even Jesus himself, but merely the hem of his garment. The irony is striking—as though by her touch Veronica could somehow make God himself ritually impure!

But as the years passed, the trajectories of the two families converged. Veronica had lost the opportunity to give life and, in the process, much of her own. And now Talitha’s parents, too, stood on the verge of losing a child. One imagines Talitha wondering what she had done wrong to have a grave illness end her life before it had truly begun, and her mother asking herself what she could have done differently. Jesus steps into the exact centre of this shared timeline. While Veronica does not receive the child she longed for, she does receive a new life of dignity, inclusion, and belonging. Jesus halts the literal draining away of her life, blood itself being a symbol of life, while Talitha receives back a future she was about to lose. In this way, Jesus reveals himself as the source of new birth for the dead and for those who live as though they are dead.

Unlike Veronica, whose healing is immediate, Jairus is required to wait to see his daughter made well again. One can only imagine his frustration, as every moment Jesus spends speaking with Veronica places his daughter in greater danger—except in Matthew’s account, where she is already dead from the beginning. We all know what it is like to feel that our concerns are urgent yet somehow delayed or overlooked. As a leader in his community, this may have been a situation Jairus found particularly difficult to tolerate. Nevertheless, Jesus refuses to hurry past Veronica. He stops to care for her and, according to Christian tradition, later stops to receive her care. Mark tells us that at this point she told him “the whole truth.”

It is a powerful phrase, because “the whole truth” includes far more than a diagnosis. While Jairus’ daughter learned to walk and speak and celebrated one birthday after another, Veronica moved fruitlessly from physician to physician, enduring shame, misunderstanding, and disappointment while exhausting both her savings and her hope. Others interpreted her condition, perhaps in a manner we would now colloquially describe as “mansplaining,” proposed remedies, and subjected her to treatment, yet according to Mark she only grew worse. Luke, himself a physician, notably softens that detail. Nevertheless, her story is that of countless women whose pain has been examined, displayed, explained away, sexualized, moralized, and controlled.

One of the books I recommend on this subject is Elinor Cleghorn’s Unwell Women (2021), which traces the past two thousand years of the history of women’s medicine. Cleghorn argues that women were repeatedly harmed, dismissed, or misunderstood not merely because physicians were ignorant or cruel, but because medicine inevitably interprets illness through a cultural lens. For centuries, women’s bodies were treated as deviations from the male norm even as many of their symptoms were attributed to reproductive organs. Menstrual and pelvic pain tended to be normalized, while women’s testimony regarding any pain was often regarded as less reliable than that of men. Conditions primarily affecting women received less funding and attention, while race and class further compounded these inequalities. Throughout its history, women’s medicine has oscillated between treating women’s bodies as reproductive problems to be controlled, and treating women’s suffering as emotional excess to be dismissed.

Ancient Greek medicine, which likely informed Veronica’s physicians, attributed a wide range of symptoms to the uterus itself. In Veronica’s case, such attention to the reproductive system would at least have been directed toward the site of her actual symptoms. At the time, however, physicians also maintained that the uterus could wander throughout the body, causing all manner of physical and psychological distress. While that theory was profoundly misguided, it contained a faint echo of a truth uncovered much later: that endometrial tissue can indeed grow beyond the uterus, producing the condition known as endometriosis. Associated with chronic bleeding, infertility, and severe pain, endometriosis remains notoriously difficult to diagnose. Even today, women might wait nine to fourteen years for answers, making Veronica’s twelve years of suffering without answers feel entirely plausible.

The emphasis on the reproductive system shifted somewhat during the medieval period, when women’s suffering increasingly came to be interpreted through spiritual categories and became entangled with accusations of witchcraft, moral weakness, and social nonconformity. By the nineteenth century, however, women’s bodies became objectified as scientific specimens in the wake of the Enlightenment. One particularly degrading example is the story of Sarah Baartman, known by the offensive title “the Hottentot Venus.” Born in southern Africa, she was taken to Europe and exhibited in London and Paris between 1810 and 1815 as a curiosity because of her body shape. She was incessantly examined and measured during her life, and parts of her remains remained on display in France until the 1970s, only being returned to South Africa in 2002. She became a symbol of the intersection of racism, colonialism, and the objectification of women’s bodies in the name of science. 

During the same period, the ancient term hysteria, derived from the Greek word for uterus, became a catch-all diagnosis for everything from anxiety to gender nonconformity. An influential neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot worked in Paris where he put women on display before audiences and to be photographed in much the same manner as Baartman had been. But ironically, a condition once attributed to the wandering uterus became a psychiatric rather than a gynecological diagnosis, leading to the institutionalization of thousands of women under the assumption that they were irrational. Charcot’s approach was eventually challenged as some physicians, most notably Sigmund Freud, began noticing that many women diagnosed with hysteria shared histories of sexual abuse. Yet Freud knew that such conclusions would not be received within respectable society and, ultimately, they did not fit within his theories of psychological development and repression. In effect, he relocated the source of suffering from external trauma to something presumed to be occurring within the women, almost as their fault.

This creates a striking contrast with the treatment of traumatized men in the same era. When soldiers returned from war, their suffering was linked to what they had endured, leading to concepts such as shell shock and eventually post-traumatic stress disorder. Women, by contrast, were often told that their suffering stemmed from excessive emotion, nervous instability, weakness of character, female biology, or moral deficiency. Even today, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders retains Histrionic Personality Disorder, which many regard as a direct descendant of hysteria and with which women are diagnosed approximately four times more frequently than men.

Modern medicine and psychiatry have made great advances, yet studies continue to demonstrate delays in diagnosis and treatment for women compared with men in conditions ranging from autoimmune disorders to chronic pain. Women’s underrepresentation in medical research is complicated by the legacy of the exploitation of poor women, coercive sterilization programs, eugenic policies, and unethical research. Birth control was criminalized or restricted in ways that took away the middle- and upper-class women’s choice, while poor, minority, and disabled women were targeted by population-control policies. The 1950s Puerto Rico pill trials, for example, did not provide the women with properly informed consent, while in the United States women of colour and those with psychiatric illnesses were already encouraged to use birth control even before it was made safe to do so long-term.

In light of this history, Cleghorn’s central observation is that women have to persuade others that their suffering is real, only to be told in return what they ought to be experiencing. What distinguishes Jesus from both ancient and modern systems is that the woman who has spent years being examined was finally heard. I particularly appreciate the way Matthew tells the story. In his account, Jesus neither publicly identifies Veronica nor draws the crowd’s attention to her. He does not blame her condition on her, nor does he suggest that she has somehow drained his power or appropriated healing without his consent. Whereas the accusation we hear in other gospels has a familiar ring. As represented in Genesis, where Adam blames Eve for making him eat the forbidden fruit, women are still being held responsible for violence inflicted upon them and circumstances beyond their control.

In striking contrast to this, Jesus does not speak until Veronica has spoken. Nor does he address her as a patient, a problem, or a curiosity. Instead, Jesus calls her “Daughter,” the only occasion in the Gospels on which he addresses a woman by that title. I do not hear this as a paternalistic reference. Rather, it is a narrative device that immediately links Veronica with Talitha. In Veronica, Jairus sees an interruption, physicians see a condition, and society sees ritual impurity. In Talitha, everyone sees only a corpse. What Jesus sees in both is a child lost to her family. As the biological daughter is restored to her family, the social outcast is restored to the family of God. The symbolism becomes even richer when we remember that Jairus, as ruler of the synagogue, functions not only as a father within a household but also as a head of the worshipping community, which is important within a Gospel deeply concerned with belonging, religion, and the fulfilment of Israel’s story.

The bottom line is that Jesus refuses to allow either suffering or death to have the final word. He restores dignity to those who have been reduced to labels, diagnoses, categories, and assumptions. The Christian tradition surrounding Veronica expresses a profound truth: once we have been truly seen, we become capable of seeing others. The first time Veronica reached out to touch Jesus was because she needed compassion. The second time, according to Christian tradition, she reached out because Jesus needed care. The recipient of mercy became a giver of mercy. Having been seen, she learned to see. Having received tenderness, she became capable of offering it. Perhaps that is the deepest miracle in the story, and perhaps it is where this Gospel leaves us today. Thanks be to God.