NOTES for Luk 8:45
A strange reaction at first glance: on the one hand, a multitude of people pressing from every side, yet this pressure is as if not noticed; on the other, the touch of one woman longing for healing, which becomes noticeable immediately. Meanwhile, if one thinks about it, there is nothing strange here. It has long been observed that a person is nowhere so lonely as in a large crowd. Even when this crowd is quite dense. It would seem that everyone is pressed against one another and closeness is extreme, but it turns out that the closeness is only physical, and there is no other kind. Jesus apparently experiences the same thing in a tight crowd.
Only unlike us, accidental touches caused by the density of the crowd are entirely unimportant to Him. It is as if He does not feel them at all; they are as if nonexistent for Him. This is understandable: what matters to Him first of all is personal relations with those who are near, and when there are no such relations, there is nothing to talk about and nothing to feel either, even if there is a pressing crowd all around.
Jesus probably perceived it as an impersonal mass in which an individual person cannot be discerned, because the person in a crowd usually does not see himself either, unless, of course, he makes a special effort to do so. And although outwardly the crowd's interest was connected precisely with Him, with Jesus, in essence there was no one in this crowd to be interested in Him.
Excited expectation of a miracle does not count: by itself it does not yet make a person a self-aware person. The woman longing for help, for healing, and therefore for personal communion, is a different matter. She does not merge with the crowd. She remembers and, at least partly, is aware of herself. Even if through the negative, through a problem, through an illness that until now had been incurable, she is aware.
Alas, in the fallen world it is often precisely through the negative that a person begins to become aware of himself; many cannot be awakened otherwise. And when someone touches Jesus consciously, striving for personal and completely concrete relations with Him, understanding what he wants from Him, He senses the one touching Him precisely as a person, not as part of the crowd. Then healing is possible; then that divine power which Jesus constantly senses in Himself begins to act, and He feels this power acting through Him. And the one seeking healing receives what he sought, for he has found the One who can heal him.