For the same amount of time that the woman’s life was beset by an embarrassing and physically depleting illness that kept her from corporate worship, Jairus and his wife would have enjoyed life with their daughter. It’s also possible that their daughter had been ill most of her life, and she is finally succumbing to her illness. Luke doesn’t say. What’s most important is the fact that, after twelve years, God’s providence has brought them both the woman and Jairus to a place of total desperation. The woman, in her great need, had reached out to Jesus and received healing.

Desperation.

It’s not a place to which we naturally drift. No one I know is actively striving to get to a place of desperation. No, we prefer to have everything we need at our fingertips; to be comfortable, at ease, and self-sufficient.

The problem is that this natural tendency away from desperation toward self-sufficiency hinders faith in Christ. You can also say it this way: faith in Christ is born out of desperation. The Gospels attest to this important truth. Those who are enabled to believe in Christ’s power to save them are those who have come to the end of themselves and have nowhere else to turn. In a word, they are desperate, and that desperation leads them to trust in Christ alone for help.

Luke illustrates this truth repeatedly throughout his account of Jesus’ life. The leper pleaded with Jesus for healing, believing that Christ had the power to do so (Luke 5:12-14). The paralytic, unable to do anything for himself, trusted in Christ for healing, and he received both physical and spiritual deliverance (Luke 5:17-26). The centurion needed Christ to heal his servant, so he humbled himself before the Lord, declared his unworthiness, and received his request (Luke 7:1-10). The prostitute’s burden of sin compelled her to seek Jesus for forgiveness, and it was granted to her (7:36-50).

But Luke seems to make a special effort to highlight the connection between desperation and faith in his account of Jairus and the woman with a hemorrhage. In this account, we have two different people, from two very different circumstances, brought together by God’s providence to a common place of desperation.

Jairus’s Desperation

Jairus was one of the religious leaders in Israel and a ruler of the synagogue (Luke 8:41). This title meant that Jairus oversaw the logistics and organization of synagogue services. When he sees Jesus, however, his response is entirely unlikethe typical response of Israel’s religious leaders.

Up to this point in Luke’s gospel, the Pharisees and scribes have made it clear they do not approve of Jesus’ ministry. It was at the commencement of Jesus’ ministry that they sought to kill him for preaching on divine election during a synagogue service (Luke 4:16-30). Jesus’ public proclamation of the paralytic’s forgiveness drew accusations of blasphemy from the Pharisees (Luke 5:17-26). Immediately after Jesus healed a man’s hand in a synagogue on the Sabbath, Luke reports that the religious leaders in attendance “were filled with fury and discussed with one another what they might do to Jesus” (Luke 6:11). One does not need to speculate to know that murder was on the table as a possible solution to their problem.

Jairus’ response to Jesus is the opposite of his fellow leaders. Luke says that “falling at Jesus’ feet, he implored him to come to his house” (Luke 8:41). Throwing oneself before Jesus was a risky, if not outright dangerous, move for this man. To go against the grain of the prevailing attitude toward Jesus was likely to upend his reputation with his fellow Jewish leaders and put his livelihood in jeopardy. Given the Pharisees’ willingness to kill itinerant rabbis, Jairus may have also been hazarding his own life. Why take such a risk? Luke tells us why: “For he had an only daughter, about twelve years of age, and she was dying” (Luke 8:42). Jairus was a desperate man, and Jesus was the only one in the nation of Israel who was healing the sick and raising the dead. Jairus was desperate, so he saw that Jesus was the only one who could help him. Faith was beginning to emerge in this unlikely man.

The Woman’s Desperation

Happily, Jesus yields to Jairus’ request and starts to make his way to his house, along with the crowd who had welcomed him back from the country of the Gerasenes (Luke 8:26, 40). On the way to Jairus’s house, however, we are introduced to another important character in the story. A woman who had a “discharge of blood” who had spent “all her living on physicians” was still in misery because no one could heal her (Luke 8:43).

Her bleeding was likely a uterine hemorrhage. This kind of ailment would have essentially curtailed her social life and disabled her from having children. Most importantly, her condition made her perpetually ceremonially unclean (Lev 15:19-30).

Luke’s note that she had spent all her living on physicians and was still afflicted by this debilitating ailment underscores her desperation. She has nowhere else to turn. While she still had money to pay another physician, there was a fragment of hope she could cling to. Now that the money is gone, hope has vanished. Her expectation for earthly joy has evaporated. She is utterly desperate.

Nevertheless, she believed that all she needed to do was touch Jesus’ garments and she would be made well (Mark 4:28). And that’s exactly what happened. The moment she touched Jesus, she was instantly healed: “She came up to behind him and touched the fringe of his garment, and immediately her discharge of blood ceased” (Luke 8:44). Without a word, restorative power flowed from Jesus to the woman and healed her hemorrhage.

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