You have known – so hold to that

A large crowd followed and pressed around 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 realized that power had gone out from him. He turned around 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 5:24-34, NIV

Here is a well known passage; so have you spotted what is odd, yet?

It is odd in the English of the NIV, but says something different in the Greek. The end of verse 34 has Jesus saying “be freed from your suffering.” And yet the woman already knows she is completely healed. It says it twice – once when it happens and once when Jesus insists on the person who touched Him owning up. So why would Jesus say such an atypical thing. If it was you or me, it would be us taking the credit for someone else’s faith. That doesn’t sound like Jesus.

And actually, the Greek is deliberately ambiguous.

καὶ ἴσθι ὑγιὴς ἀπὸ τῆς μάστιγός σου could mean “you are are healed (literally healthy) from your torment or scourge”; but in the context, we are clearly meant to read ἴσθι as 2nd person singular perfect imperative active of οἶδα, “to know”.

Jesus uses the same unusual construction – perfect imperative – a few verses earlier when He tells the sea “you have already been muzzled, so act like it (implied)”.

The perfect tense is different from the simple past of the aorist. The aorist is like “he woke up” – it is a fact that happened somewhere in the past, whether a moment ago or last month. The perfect would be “he has awoken” – something that happened in the past few and which has relevance right now. Something like, “we were going to sneak out of his lair, but he has awoken (so we can’t).”

So what is Jesus saying. He is not speaking an anodyne blessing over something the woman already worked out for herself. “Be well.“ No, He is telling her something important. “You have known that you are healed – so hold fast to that.”

Because, unlike most of us, Jesus knows that Satan will try to come back and convince you that you weren’t actually healed. Here is a woman who all by herself has had faith for healing. That is a precious resource and Jesus intends that she can hold onto that ground she took, hence His very actionable advice.