Jesus made many miracles occur, as is seen throughout the Gospels. Some of the most memorable ones are in Mark 5. The first miracle is that of the possessed man being completely healed by Jesus after he drove all the demons afflicting the man into a herd of pigs. As important as that miracle is, it is a good idea to pay good focus to the latter miracles described in the chapter, as well as why they are written about as they are.
First, a synagogue leader named Jairus begged Jesus to heal his dying daughter. Jesus ascents and follows Jairus to his house. Before he can get there, however, a woman described as bleeding for twelve years touched Jesus’s cloak with faith she would be healed and immediately the bleeding stopped. Jesus noticed that someone touched his garment and, when the woman confessed to it, he blessed her and declared that her faith healed her. By that time Jairus’s daughter had died, but Jesus went to Jairus’s house anyways. Jesus stated that the girl was not dead but asleep and was laughed at by the mourners. Jesus then healed Jairus’s daughter.
It is clear that Jesus performed many miracles, often in close sequence. But these two miracles that happened one after the other needed to be recorded in order to reveal a little about how God works. The first thing of note is that God is no respecter of persons, and the reasons why he shows favor have nothing to do with human standards. Galatians 3:28 says of believers, “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Faith in Christ Jesus is the qualifier for being in Christ Jesus. We see two vastly different people approaching Christ in faith. The first is Jairus, a leader of the synagogue. He was a man and of great religious authority. He would have been perceived as spiritually superior to most in the community. The second person is a woman, typically deemed inferior in both ancient Jewish culture and the Roman Empire. On top of it, she suffered from a health condition that was presumably constant menstrual bleeding when a female was considered unclean when she simply had her period. She would have been considered constantly unclean. She also became broke seeking ineffective medical treatments in a time when women lacked means of supporting themselves. Both Jairus and the bleeding woman had faith in Jesus. There was nothing against either Jairus as a powerful individual or the woman who bled as an outcast, nor were these features what commended them in the sight of Jesus. Their faith made them equally blessed in the eyes of God.
We also see something important in terms of timing. Jesus certainly knew that he would heal both the woman who bled and Jairus’s daughter, but in the time that Jesus healed the bleeding woman, Jairus’s daughter died. The woman who bled would have seemed impossible to heal already, and Jesus’s power had to be displayed through this seeming impossibility. Jairus’s daughter was supposed to be healed once she was deemed impossible to heal. The most important thing was that it needed to be obvious that Jesus was responsible for the miracles by working in time frames that served as ultimate signs of faith on the part of those who believed in him.
The woman who bled suffered twelve years of a brutal health condition and was healed. The daughter of Jairus was twelve years old- she was at the cusp of womanhood in her time in history- and died. These miracles occurred back to back to display the variety of believers in Christ Jesus and the different and equally valid ways and timetables God chooses to work miracles for those who love him. But as proven by these acts of Christ Jesus, as well as others recorded in the Bible, God is fond of working miracles at the cross section of the unlikelihood or seeming impossibility of the situation and absolute faith in Christ Jesus.