Blessed is He Who Has Healed All - Jacob of Sarug on the Afflicted Woman

Hans Schäufelein (c. 1480–c. 1540), “Christ and the Woman Issuing Blood,” from Das Plenarium (1517). New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In this Woman our Lord demonstrated in actual fact
that all the unclean who touch Him are made clean in Him.
The whole of creation was depicted in that sick Woman,
for the flux of wrongdoing, with its inanity, renders it unclean.
Our Lord gave her, not his coat, but his (very) body;
she touched it as she grasped, and she who had been loathsome was made clean.
Sin in the human race is like a fountain of infected blood:
it has taken control and the whole world has become contaminated with it.
Along came Christ, laying down His Body for us as a medicament:
The flux which was contaminating every generation was stemmed.
The Peoples, like an unclean body, approached Him
and He cleansed them from the flux of unbelief.
In that Woman whose blood had burst forth over all her limbs
He depicted an image for the whole of creation when He healed her.
Her fount of blood was stemmed by the edge of the garment she grasped,
just as (when) creation takes hold of the Body, its wickedness ceases.
For this reason He granted victory to Faith
in order that everyone should approach the Body in faith.
Creation with its wickedness He depicted in the Woman with the flow of blood when He healed her;
the one He purified, for the other He made atonement by His hidden power.
He gave healing to the menstruous Woman who approached Him,
and He showed how the flux of disbelief might cease.
Our Lord has healed creation and the Woman, both of which were sick;
denial and illnesses that had burst out have been brought to an end in Him –
the one grasped Christ in His garment, the other in His Body;
to both He has given healing, since they were in a broken state.
All of creation was indicated in that diseased Woman,
and for this reason her illness was drawn out, so as to be a type:
her bad condition grew worse, and creation too was depicted in her:
the affliction of wrongdoing for a great length of time tormented it.
The prophets – in the type of physicians – had visited creation,
but they had not healed humankind of the illnesses of wrongdoing;
until (creation) took hold of the Body of our Lord it was not healed,
like that Woman who, but for His garment, would not have found relief.
The priests with their sacrifices were like carers with their medicaments:
they patched up creation, but the flux of wrongdoing was not stemmed.
Along came Christ, and without the sacrifices, He effected atonement,
just as He had provided healing for the Woman, without any medicaments.
It was not by patching up that He healed the Woman, that Woman of illnesses,
nor was it by sacrifices that He has brought propitiation to the earth when it has approached Him.
He has given healing to the one and to the other, by His garment and (His) Body,
for He is entirely a (source of) wealth to anyone who approaches Him. Blessed is He who has healed all!

Jacob of Sarug, Homily 170.510–551, “On the Afflicted Woman,” translated by Sebastian P. Brock in Jacob of Sarug’s Homilies on Women Whom Jesus Met, Gorgias Press, 2016.