Mark 5:21-43 - Jesus heals the bleeding woman

A large crowd followed and pressed round him. And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years. She had suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors and had spent all she had, yet instead of getting better she grew worse. When she heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, because she thought, ‘If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed.’ Immediately her bleeding stopped and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering.
At once Jesus realised that power had gone out from him. He turned round in the crowd and asked, ‘Who touched my clothes?’
‘You see the people crowding against you,’ his disciples answered, ‘and yet you can ask, “Who touched me?”’
But Jesus kept looking around to see who had done it. Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell at his feet and, trembling with fear, told him the whole truth. He said to her, ‘Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.’

 - Mark 5:24b-34

I used my own hand as the model for the picture. I could have copied images from the internet, but I wanted to make this personal. I need healing from certain things just as much as that woman did, so I need to reach out to Jesus too.

Other pictures I've seen of this verse show the woman holding on to Jesus' robe, but the passage doesn't say she grabbed Him, just that she touched the edge of His clothes. I imagine that the crowd was so busy that she couldn't get close enough to grab hold of anything. Her faith was so strong that she didn't feel she needed to get any closer than just a touch to be healed.

Digressing slightly, there is a danger of reading this passage and falling into the trap of thinking that anyone will be healed if their faith is strong enough, or conversely, that people who aren't healed don't believe enough. I think this is a dangerous theology to hold. Sometimes people aren't healed for reasons that God only knows. Sometimes this can lead to much greater things - look at the ministry of Joni Eareckson Tada if you want an example of this. (An excellent interview with Joni is here - I highly recommend reading it.)

In the margin of the Bible page I picked out some key phrases from the passage and wrote them out, underlining them in the text as well.

I used my watercolour pencils for the image, and the lettering was done with Pitt Artist pens.