A Sermon on Matthew 9: 18–26
7th June 2026
Not everyone moves through the world the same way. That is not a controversial observation. It is simply what is true.
I carry a British passport, which means I can enter over a hundred and fifty countries without a visa. No forms, no bank statements, no officer deciding whether my reasons for travelling are convincing enough. The door, on paper, is open.
But I have learned that the passport and the body carrying it are not always read as the same thing. I have been stopped where my white British counterpart was waved through. I have been asked where I am really from, which is not a question about my nationality. It is a question about whether I truly belong to the country whose passport I hold. That gap, between what the document grants and what the body is permitted, is where a great deal of quiet injustice lives.
And then there are those for whom no document helps at all. People who have fled violence and persecution and now wait, sometimes for years, in a system that treats their presence as a problem to be managed rather than a life to be received. Over a hundred million people are forcibly displaced in the world today. For them, arrival is not a right but a negotiation, and often a denial.
I have also watched the reverse. Western visitors arriving in countries that were once colonised, received with a speed and deference that tells you exactly whose arrival a system was designed to celebrate. The colonial imagination has not left the airport. It has simply put on a lanyard and learned to smile.
This is what privilege looks like in practice. Not cruelty. Often just the uninterrupted walk through. The quiet assumption, never tested and therefore never noticed, that the system was built for you. Those who carry it do not have to perform belonging. They step forward. They are believed. Whereas the marginalised, the racialised, the asylum seeker at the border, must fight every single time for rights that were already theirs. Already theirs, and still they must fight for them.
This is the world the Gospel is speaking into this morning. And I want to invite you to sit with that for a moment before we open the text together.
Matthew chapter 9 gives us two people, placed side by side on purpose. Two figures. A twelve-year-old girl, daughter of a synagogue leader, saved from death’s grip by a word. And a woman who has been bleeding for twelve years, twelve years of ritual impurity, twelve years of social quarantine, twelve years of untouchability, who steals a healing from the hem of a garment in the pressing crowd. Matthew compresses what Mark and Luke tell at length. He gives us barely fourteen verses. But in that compression, something blazes.
Notice how the passage is structured, because the structure itself is the argument. Jairus comes to Jesus publicly, falls at his feet, and makes his request in the language of someone who knows how to make requests: “My daughter has just died; but come and lay your hand on her, and she will live” (Matthew 9:18). He is a named man. A leader of the synagogue. He has social capital, religious standing, public access. He can walk up to Jesus in broad daylight, in front of everyone, and ask. The crowd parts for him, or at least does not obstruct him. His daughter’s healing is the frame narrative of the passage. It begins here and it closes the passage. He is not blamed for any of this. He is a father in agony, and his anguish is real and his love is real. But his position is also real. His access to Jesus is a function of who he is in the social world this passage inhabits.
But the woman cannot do what Jairus does. She cannot walk up in broad daylight and ask. The purity codes of Leviticus 15 have seen to that. Twelve years of haemorrhaging have placed her outside the boundaries of what the religious and social world considers touchable. She cannot enter the synagogue Jairus leads. She cannot move freely in public space without the risk of making others impure by contact. She is, in the language of postcolonial thought, the subaltern, the one whose voice has no legitimate channel, whose need has no recognised form, whose body has been written out of the common life of the community. She cannot speak from within the system because the system has no place for her to stand.
And so she does not ask. She reaches.
“She said to herself, ‘If I only touch his cloak, I will be made well’” (Matthew 9:21). This inner speech is extraordinary. She does not put the petition. She does not present herself. She does not wait to be called. In a crowd that dense she would have touched others before she reached him, each contact a transgression the purity codes would have registered, each step forward an act of risk. And still she presses on, until her hand finds the hem of his garment, the tasselled border that marked its wearer as one bound to the covenant, one who belonged to God and to the community she had been excluded from. She, the one declared untouchable, reaches for the very sign of belonging.
This is not a passive healing. This is an act of rebellious faith.
We should be honest about what the purity system was doing. The Levitical codes around menstruation and bodily discharge were not simply hygiene protocols. They encoded a deep anxiety about female bodies as sources of contamination, rendering women’s ordinary biological lives occasions for exclusion from the cult, from community, from the full life of Israel. Twelve years of this. Twelve years in which this woman’s body was not simply unwell but, under the logic of the system, dangerous. Polluting. To be kept at a distance. The system did not only exclude her from the temple. It excluded her from the ordinary feels of human belonging, from touch, from proximity, from the kind of public life that Jairus inhabits without a second thought.
This is the decolonial insight the text presses upon us. The question is not simply one of illness and healing. It is a question of who is permitted to occupy public space, whose body is considered a legitimate presence in the common life of the community, and who must approach from behind, in secret, without announcement. Jairus walks toward Jesus through the front of the crowd. The woman moves toward him through the back of it. Both are desperate. But only one of them has been granted the social permission to be desperate in public.
Liberation theology has long insisted that God’s presence is discerned most clearly from the underside of history, from the position of those the dominant order has reduced marginal. This passage gives us a vision of that with almost uncomfortable precision. The one with access gets his request heard and granted. The one without access takes what she cannot officially receive. And it is her act, her reaching, her faith, that stops Jesus in his tracks in the middle of someone else’s miracle.
When Jesus turns, “Jesus turned, and seeing her” (Matthew 9:22), this seeing is itself a theological pause. To be seen by the one the crowd surrounds, to be drawn out of anonymity and named, called daughter, the same relational word that will move around Jairus’s restored child, is to have the logic of the system overturned. She came to take something unnoticed. She is instead publicly acknowledged. And Jesus does not say the power of God has healed her. He says “your faith has made you well” (Matthew 9:22). Her agency is named before the crowd that would have excluded her from that very crowd. She is not healed despite herself. She is healed because of herself.
Meanwhile Jairus’s daughter lies dead. The professional mourners have arrived. The flute players, the wailing women, all ready for action. When Jesus says she is not dead but sleeping, they laugh at him. That laughter is the sound of settled certainty. She is dead. This is what dead looks like. We know dead. What Jesus does next, putting them all outside before he enters and takes the girl’s hand, is quietly remarkable. The miracle does not happen in front of the crowd. It does not happen for the benefit of those who already know the categories and have already laughed at the suggestion that the categories might be wrong. The settled world is excluded from the room in which the new thing occurs.
The girl rises. She is unnamed. She speaks no words in Matthew’s account. But she and the unnamed woman form a pair that Matthew has placed with great care. Two females, one at the threshold of womanhood, one trapped for twelve years in the biological marker of womanhood made impure by the system, both restored to life and community in a single compressed passage. Twelve years of bleeding. A twelve-year-old girl. The number is not for attraction to the story. Matthew is thinking about time, about bodies, about what it means to be locked out of your own life by the logic of a world that has decided what you are.
The church has not always been ignorant of that logic. It has at times been precisely the institution that decides who is clean enough, documented enough, respectable enough, to receive what it has to offer. It has replicated the structure of this passage without its subversion, giving access to those who already have it and requiring the excluded to approach from behind, if they approach at all. The woman reaching for the hem is a rebuke to every such arrangement, not because disorder is holy but because her reach was faith, and Jesus named it so, publicly, before anyone had the chance to manage the situation.
There is a moment at the close of this passage I keep returning to. After the girl is raised, Matthew writes simply: “And the report of this spread throughout that district” (Matthew 9:26). The news travels. Matthew does not say who carries it. Perhaps the family. Perhaps those who had been put outside and are now witnesses to what they were excluded from seeing. Perhaps the unnamed woman, who came in silence from behind and was sent away named, seen, publicly restored, is herself among those who now carry the word forward.
She came from behind. She was named daughter. She left as witness.
That is the movement the Gospel offers. Not from the margins to the centre, as if the centre’s logic remains unchanged and the excluded are simply admitted to it on the centre’s terms. But something more unsettling than that: the margins interrupting the centre, stopping its procession, compelling it to turn and see the margins, and in that turning, revealing something about where God has been all along.
And that movement is not only in the biblical text. It is happening now, and it is naming us.
We do not have to look far to find the woman in the crowd. She is the asylum seeker housed in a hotel in our town, navigating a system designed at every turn to exhaust and deter, who cannot access mental health support because her immigration status places her outside what the institution considers entitled. She is the disabled person who arrives at the church door to find that the architecture itself made a prior decision about whose presence was anticipated. The step at the entrance, the narrow aisle, the absence of a hearing loop, the order of service never available in large print: none of these are acts of malice. But they are acts of exclusion, encoded in stone and practice and habit, telling a story about who this building was built for. She is the person from a Global Majority background welcomed warmly into this congregation and then, in the same breath, asked where they are really from, as if presence requires explanation, as if belonging must be earned by those who do not look like the assumed default.
All of them are pressing through the crowd from behind. All of them are reaching. And the question the text puts to us this morning is the question it has always put to communities who claim this Gospel: do we see them? Not as projects, not as needs to be managed, not as agenda items. But as daughters, sons and siblings of God, whose faith is already active, whose reaching is already happening, and in whose lives Jesus may already be turning toward them while we are still organising the procession.
This is where the Gospel becomes genuinely costly. It is easy to celebrate the miracle. It is harder to interrogate the system that made the miracle necessary. It is easy to name the woman’s faith as beautiful, which it is. It is harder to ask why that faith required such extraordinary courage simply to access what Jairus received as a matter of course. The church that takes this passage seriously must be willing to sit with that discomfort, not as an exercise in guilt, but as a form of truthfulness that discipleship requires. Repentance in the New Testament is not primarily a feeling. It is a turning. A reorienting of the body toward what it had been facing away from. It is, in fact, exactly what Jesus does in verse 22. He turns. And in turning, everything changes.
So that is the invitation this Sunday. Not to feel bad about the processions we have led or the access we have assumed. But to turn. To develop the practice of turning, slowly and deliberately, toward those approaching from behind. To ask who is in this crowd that we have not yet seen. To build communities where the first thing a person encounters is not a system to be navigated but a people already turning toward them, already looking, already ready to say: daughter, son, sibling, beloved, your faith is real, you are seen, you are well, and you belong here, at the front, with the rest of us, in the full light of day.
That is the church this Gospel calls us to be.
And it is the church, by the grace of God, that we can still become. Amen
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