From Tim's sermon on 6/6/2010: 'Money and the Woes of Jesus'
Mark 5:30: "At once Jesus realized that power had gone out from him. He turned around in the crowd and asked, "Who touched my clothes?""
Tim's explanation:I love all the places where Jesus heals people and makes them whole by losing strength, by losing power. Remember that place in Mark 5, verse 30, where the woman with the hemorrhage touches him...he's just going through the crowd and she just walks goes over and touches him and she's healed, and he says "Power has gone out from me, who touched me?". It's pointing to the cross! The way we get whole is that Jesus gets broken. The way we get strength is that he gets weak. The way we get power is that he loses power. In other words, Jesus Christ, all these woes fell upon him. You know, he was perfectly rich, but he became poor so that we might become rich. He was perfectly happy and he became a man of sorrows so we could have eternal joy. He was perfectly in and loved and he became an outcast. He was persecuted, he was destroyed so that we could be brought into the family of god forever. That's how we know, that's how we can be certain.
My question: Tim's interpretation of this passage is very interesting...I suppose it has implications for the doctrine that Jesus was fully God and fully man. If Jesus can 'lose power', then even his miraculous healing ability has a human component. But does the text give us good reason to think that Jesus really lost something when the power left him?
I take the power to be the Holy Spirit. The power of the Holy Spirit explains all of his healings. Note that Luke makes this point explicitly after Jesus returns from the wilderness time of temptation. But the humanity of Jesus is obvious in the passage under consideration: He doesn't know who touched him! Just as when (even the risen) Jesus tells the disciples that he doesn't know when he will return--only God (Acts 1).
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