Mark 5

²¹ And when Jesus had crossed again in the boat to the other side, a great crowd gathered about him, and he was beside the sea. ²² Then came one of the rulers of the synagogue, Jairus by name, and seeing him, he fell at his feet ²³ and implored him earnestly, saying, “My little daughter is at the point of death. Come and lay your hands on her, so that she may be made well and live.” ²⁴ And he went with him.

³⁵ While he was still speaking, there came from the ruler’s house some who said, “Your daughter is dead. Why trouble the Teacher any further?” ³⁶ But overhearing what they said, Jesus said to the ruler of the synagogue, “Do not fear, only believe.” ³⁷ And he allowed no one to follow him except Peter and James and John the brother of James. ³⁸ They came to the house of the ruler of the synagogue, and Jesus saw a commotion, people weeping and wailing loudly. ³⁹ And when he had entered, he said to them, “Why are you making a commotion and weeping? The child is not dead but sleeping.” ⁴⁰ And they laughed at him. But he put them all outside and took the child’s father and mother and those who were with him and went in where the child was. ⁴¹ Taking her by the hand he said to her, “Talitha cumi,” which means, “Little girl, I say to you, arise.” ⁴² And immediately the girl got up and began walking (for she was twelve years of age), and they were immediately overcome with amazement. ⁴³ And he strictly charged them that no one should know this, and told them to give her something to eat.

Nothing is quite as exciting as watching your child take his or her first step. I remember well our daughter’s first steps. The first phase of the process was the “Just Drag Her Across the Floor” phase. After seemingly countless times of holding her up and guiding her across the floor, her little toes pointed in terror and confusion downward and barely brushing the floor, we moved to the “This is How You Bend Your Legs” phase. In this phase we held her up while one of us took hold of her little legs and helped her feel what a step would feel like, flexing her legs for her, guiding one foot forward and then another. Then we went to the “Woah…WOAH!!!” phase of holding her up with our hands up under her arms trying to steady her as she leaned back into us whenever we attempted to withdraw our hands in an effort to help her come to terms with her own equilibrium. Next was the “Begging” phase. One of us held her up with each of her little hands white knuckling our fingers while the other knelt in front, just some distance away, begging, pleading, urging her to take a step. And, of course, this might also be called the “We Sound Like Blithering Idiots” stage because the one kneeling in front with arms outstretched just a couple of steps away would affect the most optimistic, exaggerated baby talk one can imagine: “COOOOME ON!!! YOU CAN DO IT!!! COME TO DADDY!!! COME ON!!!” In this stage the child stares with a mixture of awe, amusement, confusion, and terror at the pleading parent.

And then, seemingly out of the blue, it happens: that magical first step. In an effort to get us to stop talking like that, our children finally say, “Well…ok!” And they take that step! Tentative, uncertain, profoundly wobbly, and unbelievably awesome, they step! The final stage is what we might call the “Disproportionate Screaming With Joy” stage wherein the parents explode with riotous cheering and crying and weeping. And, of course, we should perhaps add the “Let Us Take 10,000 Pictures and Call Everybody” stage as an addendum.

It is an awesome thing. After all, taking those first steps is crucial to life, one of the first of many critical rites of passage the child will have to go through on the way to a full life. For the child, of course, all of this is flabbergasting and terrifying. Why? Because before that first step his or her life has been one of utter and complete dependence. They have been carried, cuddled, coddled, wrapped, picked up, put down, and placed here and there. Just imagine: you go from the warmth and safety of the womb to the confusing but still dependent status of being a dependent baby, to, finally, that exhilarating but horrifying moment when, for the briefest of moments, you are standing on your own between two weeping giants who have been begging you to do this strange thing.

Walking is scary, but we must learn to walk. We must.

We must learn to walk with our physical bodies. We must also learn to walk in the kingdom of God. When we first accept Jesus, we are babies. For a while, we exult in the comfort of the womb, the peace that comes with the saving knowledge of Jesus. But unless we are to remain babies, we must learn to walk with Jesus. That means learning to step where He steps and walk as He walks.   This is scary, but, if we do not do so, we remain babies. This image of Christians who are still babies but should be walking is an image evoked by Paul in his condemnation of the Corinthian Christians for their immaturity in 1 Corinthians 3.

¹ But I, brothers, could not address you as spiritual people, but as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ. ² I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for it. And even now you are not yet ready, ³ for you are still of the flesh. For while there is jealousy and strife among you, are you not of the flesh and behaving only in a human way?

Fortunately, like a good parent, the Lord Jesus teaches us to walk. He gives us first His example. We watch Him walk and He calls us to follow. Furthermore, He gives us the internal encouragement of the Holy Spirit who urges us on: “You can do this! You can do this! One step at a time! One foot in front of another!” He also gives us the gift of a Christian family, the Church. Here, those who have learned to take their first steps can come alongside us. They can help us feel what it feels like to flex our spiritual legs, to put one foot in front of the other, and to take steps.

A good bit of Mark’s gospel thus far has been focused on Jesus demonstrating and revealing what life in His kingdom looks like. We have seen that Jesus invites us to be a part of His kingdom and that it is a kingdom of life, of forgiveness, of victory over sin, death, and hell, and of deliverance from evil forces that seek to destroy us. It is a strange kingdom, one that is alien to us at first. It is a kingdom whose ways and mores and standards and language and customs we have to learn. We are used to the kingdom of the world, this collapsing and decaying kingdom that is fading away. But the kingdom of God? Well, we have to learn our baby steps in the kingdom of God.

It is hard work. It is scary work. But we must take our first steps.

I believe that one of the most important things that is happening in the amazing story of the raising of Jairus’ daughter from the dead is that Jesus was helping Jairus, his family, and us learn how to take our first steps. He is helping us here to get our equilibrium in the exhilarating life of the kingdom into which He has secured us a place through His blood. In particular, Jesus outlines the first two steps we must take to understand what the kingdom of God is and how it operates.

The first step of the Kingdom: “Do not fear, only believe.”

The occasion for Jesus’ lesson on the first steps of the kingdom was a family tragedy. Having just returned from the dramatic deliverance of the demon possessed man in Gerasa, Jesus steps off the boat back on the Jewish side of the Sea of Galilee only to be met by a frantic and frightened father.

²¹ And when Jesus had crossed again in the boat to the other side, a great crowd gathered about him, and he was beside the sea. ²² Then came one of the rulers of the synagogue, Jairus by name, and seeing him, he fell at his feet ²³ and implored him earnestly, saying, “My little daughter is at the point of death. Come and lay your hands on her, so that she may be made well and live.” ²⁴ And he went with him.

Immediately we can see that this is not just any frightened father. This frightened father was a religious leader of the Jews, “one of the rulers of the synagogue” Mark tells us. This should quickly pique our interest because, after all, Jesus’ relationship with the synagogues and their rulers had gone profoundly south. It was therefore noteworthy that a ruler of the synagogue approached him.

Ronald Kernaghan observes that Jairus is called an archisynagogos which means that Jairus “was a man of considerable prominence in his community. In addition to his standing in the community as a whole, he would also have been the person who conducted worship and maintained the building.” This means, Kernaghan says, “It is unlikely that Jairus’s approach to Jesus would have increased his standing in the synagogue.”[1]

What are we to make of this? Why would one of the leaders of a religious establishment that, in large part, had come to resent Jesus and His movement have now (a) come to Jesus, (b) fallen at the feet of Jesus, and (c) “implored” Jesus “earnestly”? The answer is simple enough: lots of our assumptions, reservations, and grudges simply melt away when the lives of our children are at stake. To be sure, we do not know if this particular synagogue ruler personally opposed Jesus, but his coming to Jesus and his coming in this manner was and is eyebrow-raising nonetheless.

Yet he came. He came out of desperation. He came in great need. He came because if Jesus could not help him, nobody could.

He came, in other words, exactly the way that you and I should come: in desperation, in great need, and with a sense that if Jesus cannot help us, nobody can. This is what faith looks like.

Jesus responded by setting off with him towards his house. A short ways into their journey, however, a party from the house arrives with bad news.

³⁵ While he was still speaking, there came from the ruler’s house some who said, “Your daughter is dead. Why trouble the Teacher any further?”

This is bad news and we might also note that it is badly delivered.

“Your daughter is dead.”

The world stops.

At this point I want to acknowledge that this story will be painful for some of you in ways I cannot imagine. There are people who have lost children in our midst. They will read that verse in a way that those of us who have not walked that road never could. The blunt finality of the statement is devastating in its traumatic effect: “You daughter is dead.”

Their follow-up statement is profoundly logical given their foundational assumptions: “Why trouble the Teacher any further?”

Translation: “What is the point of having this Jesus come to the house? It is over. She is gone.”

Here we begin to feel and to sense how the kingdom of the world and the kingdom of God differ. In the world, of course, this is logical and right. She is dead. Let this guy go about his business. There is nothing to do here.

Some have suggested that their efforts to keep Jesus from the house are an acknowledgement of the bad reputation Jesus had among the observant Jews of the area and, likely, the Jews who lived in this household. Maybe that is so. Maybe they are revealing their prejudices and true feelings about Jesus. “We do not want Him here!”

Regardless of whether or not they are revealing their prejudices, they are certainly revealing the operative assumptions of the world: when little girls die, it is over. There is nothing else to be done.

Here, however, we realize that Jesus came to show us that there is a kingdom above this one, a kingdom whose ways are not like the ways we have learned in this fallen kingdom. In the kingdom of the world, the dead stay dead. However, Jesus’ response reveals the stark difference, and the difference is the first step we must take to learn to walk.

³⁶ But overhearing what they said, Jesus said to the ruler of the synagogue, “Do not fear, only believe.”

Behold the first step of life in the kingdom: “Do not fear, only believe.”

The first step of the kingdom is casting off fear in favor of belief, refusing to submit to the idea that what you see is really all there is.

“Do not fear, only believe.”

It sounds like two commands but, in reality, it is part of one great movement of faith. To believe, to have faith, is to refuse to allow fear to win. The Christian is the one who refuses to be crippled by fear. C.S. Lewis helpfully outlines five types of “fear” in his essay, “On Stories.” They are worthy of consideration.

• “A fear which is twin sister to awe, as a man in wartime feels when he first comes within sound of the guns”

• “A fear which is twin sister to disgust, such as a man feels on finding a snake or a scorpion in his bedroom”

• “Taut, quivering fears that a man may feel on a dangerous horse or a dangerous sea”

• “Dead, squashed, flattened, numbing fears as when we think we have cancer or cholera”

• “Fears not of danger at all: like the fear of some large and hideous, though innocuous, insect or fear of a ghost”[2]

Do any of these sound familiar to you? Perhaps one does. Perhaps they all do. Regardless, fear is endemic to the human condition. But Jesus says we must not fear. We must only believe. You will perhaps recall that at the end of Mark 4 He makes essentially the same statement to his frightened disciples on the Sea of Galilee.

³⁵ On that day, when evening had come, he said to them, “Let us go across to the other side.” ³⁶ And leaving the crowd, they took him with them in the boat, just as he was. And other boats were with him. ³⁷ And a great windstorm arose, and the waves were breaking into the boat, so that the boat was already filling. ³⁸ But he was in the stern, asleep on the cushion. And they woke him and said to him, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” ³⁹ And he awoke and rebuked the wind and said to the sea, “Peace! Be still!” And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm. ⁴⁰ He said to them, “Why are you so afraid? Have you still no faith?” ⁴¹ And they were filled with great fear and said to one another, “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”

To embrace faith we must reject fear. Fear is the crippling sense that we are stuck in a closed system without God, without hope, without life. Fear is the terrifying thought that this is all there is, but the first step of life with Jesus is to recognize that God is at work all around us, that what we see is not all that there is, and that we cannot define reality by the limited constraints of our own eyes and minds.

Life in the kingdom of God means that we are now freed from the tyranny of the merely present, the merely visible, the merely touchable, and the merely perceivable. But in order to believe this, we must reject the lie that reality is defined only by sense perception and that the rules of the world are the only rules that matter. In other words, we must reject fear. Perhaps nobody has said this quite as beautifully as the great Charles Spurgeon.

Get rid of fear, because fear is painful. How it torments the spirit! When the Christian trusts, he is happy; when he doubts, he is miserable. When the believer looks to his Master and relies upon him, he can sing; when he doubts his Master, he can only groan. What miserable wretches the most faithful Christians are when they once begin doubting and fearing! It is a trade I never like to meddle with, because it never pays the expenses, and never brings in any profit —the trade of doubting. Why, the soul is broken in pieces, lanced, pricked with knives, dissolved, racked, pained. It knoweth not how to exist when it gives way to fear. Up, Christian! Thou art of a sorrowful countenance; up, and chase thy fears. Why wouldst thou be for ever groaning in thy dungeon? Why should the Giant Despair forever beat thee with his crabtree cudgel? Up! Drive him away! Touch the key of the promises; be of good cheer! Fear never helped thee yet, and it never will.[3]

In the kingdom of God, the people of Jesus dare to believe that God knows what God is doing even when the most readily available evidence says otherwise. Notice the difference in the way the worldly mind thinks and the way the mind of Christ thinks.

First, the worldly mind:

^35b “Your daughter is dead. Why trouble the Teacher any further?”

Next, the mind of Christ:

^36b “Do not fear, only believe.”

Do you see? Hear the whisper of Jesus: “Do not listen to them. Do not believe that all is merely as it seems. Do not give up hope. Do not accept the lifeless assumptions of a world that can barely see much less understand that which is right under its nose. Do not fear! Only believe!”

A mind that has not been enlightened by Christ is a mind doomed to see the earth as a cold and cruel arena of pain and nothingness, but a mind that has been enlightened by Christ dares to cast off fear and believe! The believing mind is open to the exhilarating thrill of divine possibility. The unbelieving mind sees no need for Jesus to come into the house. What a great chasm there is between these two!

The second step of the Kingdom: “Arise!”

There is a second step but it is only available to those who take the first step. We pick up the story again with Jesus arriving at the house. He has been told that the little girl is dead. When he arrives the funerary customs of the place and time are in full effect.

³⁷ And he allowed no one to follow him except Peter and James and John the brother of James. ³⁸ They came to the house of the ruler of the synagogue, and Jesus saw a commotion, people weeping and wailing loudly. ³⁹ And when he had entered, he said to them, “Why are you making a commotion and weeping? The child is not dead but sleeping.” ⁴⁰ And they laughed at him. But he put them all outside and took the child’s father and mother and those who were with him and went in where the child was.

First, Jesus takes His inner circle: Peter, James, and John. When he arrived, there was a great commotion. Again, this was in keeping with the mourning habits and even protocols of the time. “The Mishna,” James Brooks informs us, “quotes Rabbi Judah that for a burial ‘even the poorest in Israel should hire not less than two flutes and one wailing woman.’”[4] When Jesus sees this, he asks a question that, on the face of it, is absurd: “Why are you making a commotion and weeping? The child is not dead but sleeping.”

Some have taken this to mean that Jesus is actually saying the child did not die but was rather simply in a deep sleep or a comma. I believe that is a misreading. I agree with Lamar Williamson that Jesus’ words, “The child is not dead but sleeping,” “are not to be taken in such a way as to suppose that the girl only appeared to be dead. The text intends to affirm that in the presence of Jesus and under his authority death itself, real death, is but sleep.”[5] The miracle of this story is not that Jesus cleared up a misunderstanding and helped the people have a more accurate understanding of physical death. The miracle is that Jesus raised a dead girl to life.

See the beautiful tenderness of Jesus.

⁴¹ Taking her by the hand he said to her, “Talitha cumi,” which means, “Little girl, I say to you, arise.” ⁴² And immediately the girl got up and began walking (for she was twelve years of age), and they were immediately overcome with amazement. ⁴³ And he strictly charged them that no one should know this, and told them to give her something to eat.

It has been observed that the name “Jairus” means “Yah awakens” (yah ‘ur). The name may also have “an etymology that connects ‘-rus’ with the verb ‘to give light’ – ‘Yah illumines.’”[6]

God awakens! God illumines! Rise and shine!

Arise! This is the second step of the kingdom. Cast off fear and believe and you will rise again. In this instance, it was a miraculous and instantaneous rising. But whether Christ heals you now or waits to heal you ultimately at the point of death, all of us will hear this command: “Arise!”

In the kingdom of God, death does not get the last word. Death does not get to keep our children. Death does not get to keep us. And this is only because death could not keep Jesus! Here is how Paul put it in Philippians 3:

⁷ But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. ⁸ Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ ⁹ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith— ¹⁰ that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, ¹¹ that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead.

We want to know the power of the resurrection of Jesus, and, in Christ, we will! In 2 Timothy 2, Paul wrote:

¹¹ The saying is trustworthy, for: If we have died with him, we will also live with him.

Again, in Romans 6:

⁵ For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. ⁶ We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. ⁷ For one who has died has been set free from sin. ⁸ Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him.

Here is the gospel: believe and rise! If you die with Christ you will also live with him. Cast off fear and doubt and despair. Take up belief and faith and trust. Embrace the King, enter His kingdom, and learn the true path of life from Him.

Jesus is life. Death cannot conquer Him. Death trembles at His approach. Death gives up its captives when the Lord of life but whispers a word: Arise! Arise! Arise!

It is the word that this little girl heard and it brought us back to life. It is the word that all who are in Christ will likewise hear.

Believe!

Arise!

 

[1] Ronald J. Kernaghan, Mark. The IVP New Testament Commentary Series. Ed., Grant R. Osborne. Vol.2 (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2007), p.108.

[2] C.S. Lewis, Of Other Worlds. New York: A Harvest Book, 1966.

[3] Charles Spurgeon, “Fear Not” https://www.biblebb.com/files/ spurgeon/0156.htm

[4] James A. Brooks, Mark. The New American Commentary. Gen. Ed., David S. Dockery. Vol.23 (Nashville, TN: Broadman Press, 1991), p.94.

[5] Lamar Williamson, Jr., Mark. Interpretation. (Louisville, KY: John Knox Press, 1983), p.109.

[6] https://www.firstthings.com/blogs/leithart/2014/03/awakening