Opérer une brèche dans les règles de pureté en vue d'être sauvée. Le cas de la femme qui souffrait d'hémorragie (Mc 5:24-34)

Focant, Camille
(2014) The Woman with the Blood Flow (Mk 5:24-34): Narrative, Iconic and Anthropological Spaces — ISBN: [978-90-429-2964-7], p. 35-50, published

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In recent exegesis, this story has primarily been studied as offering answers to two questions. The first of these is, how are we to interpret the magical aspects of this healing ? The second is, should we make anything of the woman suffering from an issue of blood being in a state of impurity, even though the narrator does not explicitly mention this ? This article argues the case that, in each of these two cases, the story is in some sense subversive. Although it opens in an undeniably magical atmosphere, its conclusion lies in the logic of an entirely different personal relationship. It is therefore possible that rather than reject all forms of magical thinking outright, the story takes them into account, not to apply the logic of the magical but to subvert it. In similar fashion the traditional Jewish system of ritual purity, even though it goes unmentioned, is subverted by Jesus not rebuking the impure touch, to the extent that this attitude of acceptance towards the impure is offensive. In the healing of the woman with an issue of blood a subversion takes place which makes apparent that the observance of the system of purity then current was by no means something that Jesus regarded as binding. The purity that interested him, according to Mark, was not codified in a series of specific exterior constraints. It could not be preserved by surveillance of the body’s orifices. It was, rather, closely linked to the heart : “Can’t you see that nothing that goes into someone from outside can make that person unclean, because it goes not into the heart but into the stomach and passes into the sewer ? (…) For it is from within, from the heart, that evil intentions emerge “ (Mk 7 :19.21). The part of the body to be controlled is the heart, but as an internal organ this is not subject to the same sort of social control as are the entrances to the body. It is no longer a case of standing guard over the gates of the body, but of monitoring an internal, and hence invisible, aspect of the human person. In this logic, the love of God and of neighbour becomes the dual keystone of the hierarchy of values (Mk 12 :28-34). It is on the basis of this love that everything becomes clear and the relative weight of the various precepts can be evaluated. It is, furthermore, entirely comprehensible that a woman plagued by a chronic ailment for twelve years, thoughts of purity would be pushed to the background, while a personal exchange of words would truly be paramount. This personal relationship that Jesus calls “faith” has a salvific effect : it subverts at one and the same time both the mechanical logic of the magical and the exclusionary logic of a system of clean and unclean.
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Focant, C. (2014). Opérer une brèche dans les règles de pureté en vue d’être sauvée. Le cas de la femme qui souffrait d’hémorragie (Mc 5:24-34). In Barbara Baert (dir) (ed.), The Woman with the Blood Flow (Mk 5:24-34): Narrative, Iconic and Anthropological Spaces (p. p. 35-50). Peeters. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/194594