The noise and the shouting has to be heard to be believed. His “minders”, the disciples, are not too keen on all this celebrity hysteria, and they try to shield Jesus from being jostled on all sides by the crowds. So when Jesus suddenly turns round and says “who touched me?”, the disciples retort, “what a stupid question, Lord. It could be any one of hundreds of people”.

But the woman suffering from bleeding from the womb knows who he is talking to. He is talking to her, and so she comes forward, “in fear and trembling”, and owns up.  

She had had these haemorrhages for twelve years; all her money had gone on doctors’ bills (no social security, remember, and no scientific medicine either).  She was desperate now, she was willing to try anything, and so she thought that perhaps the great man, the man everyone was talking about, perhaps he could do something. But she was scared, and embarrassed, and ashamed of her condition, so she didn’t dare to come up to him openly, she tried to just touch him without being noticed.

The trouble was that her problem wasn’t only a health problem. It was also a social problem and a religious problem because the Law of Moses said that her condition made her unclean, ritually unclean. What’s more, the Book of Leviticus says that it made anyone who touched her unclean too. Being unclean meant that she couldn’t take part in worship, she was cut off from God. And because her uncleanness was contagious, because it infected anyone who touched her or even her clothes, it meant that she couldn’t take part in normal social life either. So she was cut off from God, and she was cut off from society.

No wonder she was desperate; no wonder she tried to touch Jesus without being noticed. But Jesus did notice. And as a good rabbi, he should have shied away from her to avoid the taint of uncleanness himself.

But he doesn’t. On the contrary, he comes to her in compassion, and talks to her in a completely natural and friendly way. He praises her for her faith and as a result she is released from the grip of the disease that has kept her imprisoned for so long.

And so we see that Jesus has no patience with the kind of religious rules that place quite unnecessary restrictions on people, that burden them down with guilt and shame when there is no need to feel guilty and ashamed. The kind of rules that exclude people and force them to the margins of society. Rules like that amount to cruelty in the name of God, and Jesus simply cuts through this kind of thing and treats people, all people, any people, equally as human beings.

In particular, as we see in this story, that he treats women as equal human beings, and that is important because it is so often women in particular who are the victims of these kind of burdensome religious restrictions - burdensome religious restrictions imposed, of course, by men. 

In our society, of course, the woman in the story would simply be seen as someone with a health problem. Her condition would not be seen as something shameful, she would not be socially or religiously marginalised. For that we can give thanks.

But before we rush to congratulate ourselves on our more enlightened, indeed our more Christian, attitudes, let’s not gloss over the fact that there are all sorts of people whom our society regards with fear or distaste, people whom most of us try and avoid contact with if possible. I mean people like HIV/AIDS sufferers, homeless people, people who sit on the pavements and ask for our help, or again religious minorities like Muslims or ethnic minorities like Roma Gypsies, marginalised youth, victims of trafficking and prostitution, and the list goes on.

Most of the time, our natural reaction to people like this is to try not to get involved. We try not to get involved because we’re afraid we won’t be able to cope; we are embarrassed by people who don’t fit into what we think of as normal, respectable society.

What do we mean when we say we are embarrassed? We mean, I think, that we feel guilty, we feel inadequate, we feel out of our depth, we are afraid we won’t be able to cope, we are lacking in self-confidence.

Now it seems to me that Jesus was never embarrassed. We never see him in a situation where he seems to be out of his depth, where he doesn’t quite know how to react to someone.

Jesus simply gets alongside the person, without any hint of condescension, and he engages openly and honestly with them. He sees the other person as they are. He is not blind to their failings and their weaknesses, but he sees them all as children of his heavenly Father, and he never fails to treat them with compassion and understanding.

And that is how the Church, the people who continue Jesus’s work, ought to be too. The Church ought to be the place where no one ever feels looked down upon, where no one feels inadequate or unwelcome, where everyone can feel at home, even people whom society as a whole is very doubtful about. In a word, the Church ought to be the place where no one ought ever to feel embarrassed.

Reverend John Murray, Strasbourg Anglican Chaplaincy                 28 June 2009, Year B, Proper 8          Gospel: Mark 5.21-43