Who takes out your garbage?

The Bleeding Woman

Matthew 9:20-22, Mark 5:25-34 and Luke 8:43-44

*Note: this is part of a series on how living in Eurasia affected my understanding of the Bible. Please head over to my post “Birthday Cake for Chickens“ to catch my explanation and disclaimer there if you haven’t yet. 

Just then a woman who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years came up behind him and touched the edge of his cloak. She said to herself, “If I only touch his cloak, I will be healed.” Jesus turned and saw her. “Take heart, daughter,” he said, “your faith has healed you.” And the woman was healed at that moment. 

Matthew 9:20-22

Two aspects of Eurasian culture have enriched my understanding of this brief healing account. First, people don’t have much privacy or anonymity; and second, calling a woman “daughter” is a kind and platonic expression of honor. 

Let’s start with privacy. First of all, in a culture like the one I lived in (a Muslim country in Eurasia), menstruation isn’t a fun topic. I found that in the context where I lived, it was never discussed in front of men, and any statements women needed to make about the subject in mixed company were expressed in euphemisms. “I’m sick” without further explanation means “I’m on my period.” Men are expected to just understand the unspokens. You can ask if a woman is pregnant just by saying “How is she? … Is there anything?”  

Nevertheless, when a woman is menstruating, it can be pretty obvious to everyone in her household and beyond. For one thing, women on their periods are considered unclean. This culture still has a working concept of clean/unclean very much like the Biblical idea of ceremonial cleanness in Leviticus. (I’ll talk more about that in a separate blog post, in the context of Jesus’s comments on it in Mark 7/ Matthew 15.) For now I’ll just list the implications.

When a woman is unclean, she can’t pray namaz (the five daily prayers). Not that many women regularly keep up that discipline, but for the ones who do, it’s obvious to those around them that their daily pattern has been broken when they skip their prayer. Women also can’t fast when they are on their periods, so it’s obvious during Ramadan who is fasting and who is eating (again, this only applies to the women who were keeping the fast in the first place, which is far from everyone). 

They’re also not allowed to visit “holy places,” like the mountaintops and famous grave sites where people go to sacrifice sheep as an act of worship. Usually when the family goes to visit one of those sites, there is at least one female cousin who has to stay home (because, of course, she’s “sick”). 

Another piece of background that’s a little bit harder for us to understand as Americans is how much people are in each other’s faces all the time. There’s not much privacy. For one thing, it’s much more common in a communal culture for people to share bedrooms and closets. There’s just not as much demand for personal space. In one family I know, the mom sleeps in a twin bed and her college-aged son sleeps in another twin bed in the same room, even though there’s another open bedroom in the house. In another family next door, four college-aged cousins (two boys and two girls) sleep in one room with a curtain down the middle for lack of space. Out in the mountain village when it gets cold, the house is heated with a wood stove, so the whole family and any guests who happen to be staying with them sleep in a single room. I visited one village family who had a single room with four or five twin beds like an old-school dormitory (that’s common because many village families have lots of kids), but the whole family of four was sleeping in two of the beds. 

There’s not as much privacy about using the bathroom either. Many homes in villages don’t have running water inside. It’s obvious when someone goes out during the night to use the outhouse (where there’s often not any toilet paper, so people rinse off with water from a long-necked pitcher that looks a bit like a watering can). It’s even more obvious when someone fills up that watering can with hot water from the tea kettle (which sits inside, on the wood stove) before he or she goes out to the outhouse. People who take warm water along to the bathroom have some serious cleanup to do. (See my post on “What to do when there is no toilet paper” for more!) If a woman does that every time she goes to the bathroom for several days at a time, it’s a safe bet she’s on her period. 

There’s also less privacy surrounding garbage. (I’m sorry for getting so nitty-gritty here, but I want to help you see a picture of what everyday life is really like for people who don’t have all the conveniences and impersonal touches of America.) Women using pads in the village can drop them in the outhouse, which looks like a wooden floor with a hole in it that people squat over. If you look in, you can see everything at the bottom. If they throw pads in the garbage, they’re out in the open again when the garbage gets taken outside to be burned. 

Women in the city can wrap them up in toilet paper and put them in a trash can, but the garbage disposal systems are also more personal:  instead of throwing trash bags into a big can in the driveway and letting the garbage man take them away once a week like we do in the States, people hand carry their own garbage out to neighborhood dumpsters (which for many people are a block or more away from home). Some people also take their trash bags to the dumpster in a wheelbarrow, but it’s easiest for the family to send frequent small loads of garbage out to the dumpster so it doesn’t pile up and become a bigger chore to remove. I suppose big black plastic garbage bags are available for sale somewhere, but since we sent small loads of garbage out just about every day, it was easier and cheaper to fill up our leftover grocery bags (usually small white or clear plastic produce bags that someone was hand-carrying for a block or two). Are you getting the picture? Garbage isn’t such a private affair. 

I realize that the culture I lived in is centuries away from the one Jesus walked in, but I still think it’s a fair statement that the woman who suffered from bleeding for years on end probably didn’t have enough privacy to keep people from knowing about her issue.

Luke tells us this woman was also under the care of many doctors, which means not only her family but also her community would have known. In Eurasian society, people support one another when they are ill. It’s rare that someone go to the doctor alone. People sit in waiting rooms in little huddled groups. They also go along to support people who are having surgeries. When a woman in my host family had a hysterectomy, I remember counting over a dozen relatives who sat in the hospital waiting room for hours until they were told the surgery had been successfully completed and she was in recovery. 

People operate as a collective when they discuss problems, make decisions about what to do, gather money to pay for big expenses, and psychologically process traumatic experiences like medical intervention. Everyone knew that the Eurasian woman was about to have a hysterectomy. They knew that she had made God a promise to sacrifice a sheep if it was successful, and many relatives accompanied her to a mountaintop to make that sacrifice several months later. Everyone knows everything. 

It makes sense, then, that Jesus wanted to make sure that woman’s healing was publicly known among all the people who knew she was sick. In the middle of the crowd, he called her out and commended her for her faith. Who knows how big the crowd was– but based on my experience, especially in the village regions, there’s no anonymity. Someone may have been with the woman who knew her. Some neighbor saw her, or some fellow villager heard the story from another person who was there, and the word spread. 

Gossip travels fast in a shame/honor culture, partly because it’s one of the ways the community regulates ethics and labels people as safe or unsafe to have dealings or a relationship with. People trust what they hear from people they know; they prefer to receive news from acquaintances rather than impersonal media sources because those sources are all controlled by the government, and they have been trained not to trust the motives of the people in power. People talk to each other about what they see and hear. 

If everyone knew the woman was dealing with this type of embarrassing issue, then it was fitting for everyone to know she had been healed. 

The other thing about that passage that struck me is how Jesus calls the woman “daughter.” I don’t know the connotations of that in the first-century Jewish context, but in Eurasia, it’s an expression of honor and safety. People speak to complete strangers (like salesmen, ladies on the bus you’re trying to give up your seat for, random people on the street who have dropped something and you need to get their attention, etc.) with relational terms (like uncle, aunt, son or daughter) as a way to express respect and foster trust. 

A second reason a man calls a woman “daughter” is to demonstrate that he is not sexually interested in her. For several years I was puzzled about why my good friend’s husband, who is only a couple years older than me, called me “daughter.” Finally I challenged whether he was old enough to call me that, and he was forced to explain that he wants everyone to understand he views me purely, like a sister. It dawned on me that our relationship could look like a high-risk one in that context. I was often in and out of their house; I had spent the night there with the family; I frequently took care of his sons; I had been alone with him several times in the car and in the grocery store. So his decision to call me “daughter” was a way to express to me, and to the rest of the family, that he viewed our relationship as a platonic, familial one. 

From that perspective, I feel like it’s comforting that Jesus calls this woman “daughter.” He has just healed her of an embarrassing female problem; she probably also realizes that he has this intimate information about her. Now she’s standing before him, probably feeling ashamed because she has dared to touch him while she’s unclean, he knows something happened, and she definitely doesn’t want to have to talk about the issue in front of all these people.

I feel like his word “daughter” puts her back in a place of security. He knows her, yes, but he’s not looking to take advantage of what he knows, and he’s not looking at her as a doctor or a neighbor or as a disinterested stranger. He’s looking at her as a father who cares about her and wants her to be honored.

How does this passage strike you? (Scroll down to leave comments!)