She had endured much under many physicians and had spent all that she had; and she was no better but rather grew worse.

May I speak in the name of the Wounded and Risen Christ, who breaks every boundary and makes holiness dwell in breaking flesh. Amen.

Tonight, in our readings we have heard two stories unfold slowly in the shadows of suffering and hope. In Genesis, a servant waits beside a well. In Mark, a haemorrhaging woman reaches out after twelve long years of pain. Both are stories of seeking, of navigating vulnerability in a world where power hides behind certainty.

But what if we read the woman’s story not as a miracle proving Jesus’ divinity, but as a direct confrontation with every theology and practice that has ever named some bodies unworthy or unclean?

For through this lens this woman is already whole before she is healed. Her bleeding body is not a problem for Jesus to fix but a body made sacred by its endurance, holy by its reaching and powerful by its protest. Mark tells us she had suffered under many physicians, spent everything, and only grew worse. This then is more than a medical issue, it is structural. This woman’s body has been managed but not honoured, treated but not healed, consumed but not understood.

Under Jewish purity law, she is deemed unclean. Not just ritually but symbolically. Not only is she barred from the temple, but she also dares to press through the crowd as an unclean woman and touch the hem of Jesus’ garment, from below, in trepidation. In that moment, the story turns everything that we think we know about holiness and the body upside down.

Nancy Eiesland, in The Disabled God, writes that in the resurrected Christ, disability is neither cured nor erased; it becomes part of God’s own embodied reality. ¹ The risen Christ still bears wounds, not as flaws but as testimony. Christ is recognised, not despite the wounds, but because of them and that changes everything.

The Church still reads stories like this one through the lens of restoration, as if divine love is about returning people to a so-called normal. But Jesus, in his resurrection, is not restored to Greco-Roman perfection. He is risen, wounded, scarred. Our Christian anthropology is not the imperial perfect body of Rome; it is the risen body of Christ.

Thus, Jesus’s recognition of the woman is the high point of her healing. Her healing is that Jesus sees her. But the healing does not end there. The crowd is also healed of their prejudice through witnessing Jesus’s recognition of her.

For Jesus stops and Jesus sees. “Who touched me?” is not asked from ignorance but from invitation. He wants the crowd to turn. He wants the invisible to become visible. He wants to dismantle a culture of purity and perform a moment of profound mutual recognition.

And he calls her “Daughter.” Not sentimentally but politically. That word places her right back where she belongs, back within the covenant community. It declares that her body, with all its history of bleeding, belongs fully within the Body of Christ.

The theologian Deborah Beth Creamer calls for us to resist the “limits-as-problems” paradigm, the view that limitations are deficits to overcome. ² In this encounter, Jesus doesn’t solve her life. He interrupts the world that deems her unworthy. Her healing comes through the delay, through the fragile pause, through the risk of being seen.

And when she steps forward, she becomes prophetic, not because she is fixed, but because she testifies.

So too with Christ. The risen body of Jesus is not idealised but made prophetic, scarred, resistant to sanitising.

And in response we must ask: how often does the Church sanitise the gospel by demanding conformity? How often is inclusion reduced to physical access, rather than a reformation of theology?

The risen Christ haunts our churches not as perfection, but as a scandal of grace. Not idealised flesh, but the wounded body of God.

To live as Christ’s Body therefore is to be seen, re-membered, not as a uniform whole, but a gathered, storied, scarred community. Each body, each story, each wound becomes part of the testimony.

The theologian Thomas Reynolds puts it this way: the Church must be a place where “belonging precedes conformity.”³ That reverses the purity logic that exiled this woman. She belongs not because she is cured, she belongs because she is seen.

And in a world obsessed with perfection, being seen in one’s difference is holy ground.

So, who are the bleeding ones in our midst? Who dares to reach from below, in trepidation, only to be met with silence?

What would it mean for the Church to be interruptible like Jesus, to pause its liturgies and agendas for the voices long unheard?

Would we recognise the touch of the one who presses through our ableist theology, our sanitised icons, our inaccessible pews?

Would we recognise Christ when he bleeds?

Would we recognise resurrection, not as restoration to an idealised normal, but as a public display of scars, as the holiness of a life interrupted?

Because resurrection doesn’t return us to what was. It does not erase our woundedness. Resurrection re-members us into something new.

Not perfect. Not polished. But risen. And the wounds remain. Amen.