She told him the whole truth

"the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came in fear and trembling, fell down before Jesus, and told him the whole truth."  Mark 5.33



It is a story about a desperate woman.  There are a lot of stories about desperate women in the Bible; they parallel the plethora of stories about desperate women filling our news cycle.

This story is about a woman who had been bleeding for 12 years.  Beyond the natural discomfort and annoyance, her continual bleeding left her in an untenable situation with the community.  She was unwelcome until the bleeding stopped and she had ritually purified her body.  She was separated from others, and I would guess, a wee bit suspect.  Twelve years?

But she'd heard about Jesus, and sliding up behind him in a crowd she touched the hem of his garment, believing that in this way the power of healing would come to her.  It did.  Jesus noticed and he insisted on knowing who it was who touched him.

Thus the scene above.  She knelt and told him the whole truth.  The whole truth.

I wonder what she said, don't you?

To speak the truth is to confess.  We find confession uncomfortable because the truth that we are telling is generally something embarrassing or dishonorable or just plain wrong.  The truth we tell is this:  we are not perfect human beings and our actions at times cause pain and suffering to others.

We tell this truth to God not because God doesn't already know about our reality, but because there comes a point in every life when our masks need to fall away and we must own ourselves.  We fear this moment.  We fear that those who hear our truth will reject us, mock or vilify us.  I think we are afraid that we won't like ourselves very much either.  So we seek out a large enough bush to hide behind, just like Adam and Eve who said, "I was afraid because I was naked and I hid myself"  Gen 3.10

She told Jesus the whole truth.  I am not sure I would know where to begin, but in the end, where I begin is less important than the very beginning of the thing itself.

Discovering ourselves in all our nakedness is not the worst thing that could happen to us.  Spending a lifetime hiding from ourselves just might be.



The whole story of this woman can be found in Mark 5.21-43