Jairus’s Daughter and the Woman with Chronic Bleeding

Mark For Everyone

MARK 5.21–34
Jairus’s Daughter and the Woman with Chronic Bleeding...

...We really should take this passage with the next one, since in Mark’s mind they are all part of the same story. But both are so full of interest that it’s worth holding them apart for the moment, provided we remember how closely they belong together.

What Mark has done is to place one tale inside the other, in what is sometimes called a Markan sandwich. (We’ll see him do this again in, for example, 11.12–25.) The flavour of the outer story adds zest to the inner one; the taste of the inner one is meant in turn to permeate the outer one. The outer story is about Jairus, one of the local synagogue presidents, and particularly his 12-year-old daughter; the inner story is about a much older woman, who for the same twelve years has suffered severe internal bleeding...

Taken from Mark for Everyone by Tom Wright