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Back when I was in seminary I did some hospital chaplaincy intern work and our instructors told us to be aware that people of different cultural and ethnic backgrounds handle the news of death quite differently than what we are accustomed to. For example, one of my colleagues at the hospital was with a family from a different background than him when they got the news of death. It was about twenty members of a big extended family packed into this small little family waiting room outside the Emergency Room. The doctor stepped into the room and as soon as he said, “I’m sorry…” they all started screaming and most of them just fell to the floor and literally rolled around wailing loudly and then the whole thing spilled over into the hallway. My colleague had no idea what to do.
Myself, I was once with a young woman of a different ethnic background than me in the surgical waiting room when she got the news that her father had just died in surgery. Sadly, they had only recently begun to mend years of estrangement. As soon as the doctor walked in, she saw the bad news in his face and started screaming “No. No. No.” Then, she literally started bouncing against the walls. She was big; well over 6’ tall and had to be pushing probably 230lbs. A sizable orderly managed to get himself between her and the wall to keep her from busting her shoulder. Those folks don’t get paid enough. It took over half an hour for a well-experienced nurse (not me the chaplain) to talk her back from the world of delirious shock.
Looking here at our passage, if you can imagine most of the people in a small village caught up in grief in a way similar to what I’ve just described (loud and physical), well then that’s the situation we’re talking about Jesus walking into. Mark calls it a commotion, a commotion of people weeping and wailing loudly, throwing themselves about, pounding their chests and heads. The Greek word for commotion is pretty potent. It means a great disturbance, like a riot.
These people were very broke up over the death of this child…as they should be. A little twelve-year-old girl had died. Children aren’t supposed to die. She was also the daughter of a well-respected leader of the synagogue. That’s just not supposed to happen either. Spiritual leaders are supposed to be blessed with every blessing, aren’t they? (A huge bit of sarcasm there.) This was a terribly unfair, unjust thing to happen that forces us not simply to question God but to challenge the steadfast love and faithfulness of God. We should fully expect there to be a “commotion”.
Jesus arrived on the scene and he aced the pastoral care exam (yes, that’s more sarcasm.). Jesus said to the people, “Why are you making such a commotion and weeping? The child is not dead but sleeping.” One thing that you don’t do when rolling into a situation like this is say something that denies the reality of the overwhelming tragedy that’s happened. It’s like saying, “Everything’s going to be OK” when in reality it’s not going to be OK for a very long time if ever; or saying “God has his reasons and he loves you and works all things to the good” when in reality God is the first person a person would want to punch in a situation like this because God let it happen. And absolutely don’t say “How are you?” There’s a time and a place for those questions and comments, just not when the bomb has just dropped. It’s best to just be there in the midst of the commotion and not say anything at all but give hugs to those who want them.
Anyway, I’m sure these people would have loved to believe Jesus that the girl was only sleeping. But instead, they mocked Jesus. This was just not the time or the place to be hoping against hope. They knew that child was dead and it was so wrong, unfair, and unjust! Even though they knew he had done some pretty remarkable things, they couldn’t imagine that he had power over death.
I wonder what the disciples were thinking about all this. It might be helpful to place it into the context of what they had seen Jesus do in the last few days. They had been watching Jesus do stuff that only God could do. A few days before they had been on a boat with Jesus, getting swamped by waves during a windstorm that seemed to be personally out to get them. They had to awaken Jesus from a sleepful repose from which he raised up and rebuked the wind and…it stopped and there was a great calm, not a ripple on the water. When that happened Mark says they “were afeared with a great fear”. They were filled with fearful awe not because they had just almost died in the storm, but because Jesus spoke and calmed it. Only God can do that. Were they in the presence of God? That’s some scary, mind-blowing stuff.
Immediately after that, they arrived in Gentile country on the other side of the lake where there was a strong Roman military presence. They watched Jesus cast 1,000 demons (the equivalent of a Roman military Legion) out of a man and restore him to his right mind. The townspeople were afraid and amazed because previously the man could not be bound, not even with chains. He would break them. He lived among the tombs and would run along the hillsides howling and screaming and hurting himself with stones. Jesus delivered the man from that. Jesus was stronger than the strongest of demons just as God is. There’s also an underlying message there about Jesus being more powerful than the evil that undergirded the Roman Empire, but that’s a sermon for another day. Again, Jesus had done something only God can do.
Just minutes before this commotion, the disciples were leading Jesus through a crowd of people when a woman simply touched his cloak and was healed of a menstrual haemorrhage that she had suffered for twelve years wasting everything she had on useless doctors. He gave her life back to her. That’s salvation. I should mention that because of this haemorrhage people considered her to be “unclean” and refused to touch her or come near her for fear of becoming unclean themselves. They even believed she wasn’t welcome in God’s presence because she was embodying.
People back then believed that the blood was the life of a person or animal. She was bleeding out her life from where she was supposed to be giving life and was thus bringing forth death. They believed that no one brings anything that appears to be death-like into God’s presence for it offended God to bring death before the presence of the one who gives life. Thusly, they believed God would strike an unclean person dead or even plague the whole village or some other version of all hell breaking loose, if someone unclean came into God’s presence. But Jesus, this Jesus who had been doing things that only God can do, let her touch him. In essence, he took her uncleanness to himself, became unclean because of her, and yet, surprisingly contact with him healed her instead of all hell breaking loose. It stopped her leaking death and made her able return to human community free of those death stigmas.
Then, it was at just that moment when Jesus healed this woman, that people from the house of Jairus came with the news of death. “Your daughter is dead. Why still bother the Teacher?” Uncanny timing, don’t you think? For the disciples, Jesus had proven more powerful than chaos, evil, and incurable disease. How would he now fair against death?
Looking at what Jesus said to Jairus upon hearing the news that his young daughter had died, I once again say that Jesus aced the pastoral care exam, “Do not fear, only believe.” Faith? Believe? Believe what? Jesus had just told a woman that her faith or rather her faithfulness had made her well from twelve years of suffering; the faithfulness she demonstrated by sneaking up on Jesus to touch his clothes in a desperate attempt to be healed. Jairus had also made his last chance, desperate attempt at faithfulness by coming to Jesus. And remember that Jairus was a synagogue leader, a religious authority and the religious authorities typically had it in for Jesus…but what was there left for Jairus to do?
Let me take a brief excursion and again talk about faith for a minute. Biblical faith isn’t just the mental act of believing something or the emotional act of trusting someone. Faith is our active participation in the reality where the hidden reign of God is becoming manifest in and around us. Remember how I’ve said it’s like taking a glass of pond water and letting it sit. The water will seem clear but after a while there will be sedimentation in the bottom of the glass. Hidden stuff you couldn’t see before has become visible. Sometimes, if you let pond water sit long enough, little living things will start to appear. Faith is being a part of what God is doing to manifest his hidden reign and bring new life into this corrupted creation that is threatened by chaos, evil, disease, and death.
Jesus told Jairus, “Don’t be afraid only be faithful.” All Jairus has to do to be faithful is keep walking Jesus to his house, take him in, and let Jesus be God. That’s so powerful. All Jesus has to do is keep walking Jesus to his house, take him in, and let Jesus be God. Even though everybody else has given in to the harsh reality of death. Jairus just has to keep walking Jesus to his house; keep walking according to God’s reality rather than the reality that death creates.
So, against the reality of his peoples’ advice, Jairus takes Jesus to his house. Jesus clears the house and takes Jairus, his wife, and Peter, James, and John to the little girl’s room. Mark says they “went in where the child was.” In the New Testament Greek, what we translate here in English as “went in” does not accurately reflect what’s there in the Greek. The Greek word is one that gets used for when people metaphorically talk about taking that journey into death, like crossing the River Styx. “Going in” to where the little girl was here means Jesus entered into her death, the realm of death where she was and gave her the command, “Little girl, get up.” The command to “get up” is the command to get up from the dead. It’s resurrection language. I like how Mark ends this. A literal translation would read, “They were immediately overcome with great ecstasy (of the experience of God kind).” A death riot turns to spiritual ecstasy, that’s what happens when Jesus comes against death.
So, what to say about all this? Jesus, great winds and stormy seas obey him, evil flees before him, incurable disease turns to restored life, death is undone. He turns the disillusionment and grief of chaos into great calm, amazement, sanity, salvation, spiritual ecstasy – and he does it all by touching people whom the religious authorities labelled unclean and unwelcome in the presence of God. Jesus goes to the root of everything that’s twisted and diseased in God’s good creation and sets it right.
So, what about us when it seems life is personally out to get us, or when evil has beset us, or incurable disease strikes us, or death turns our lives upside down, or when our little churches are facing the challenge of believing in the midst of this soul-crushing pandemic? Jesus’ command to Jairus – “Don’t be afraid, only be faithful” – may not top the list of best things to say in a pastoral care crisis such as this, but that’s what we’re talking about. In all things we must not let fear rule us, but instead we got to keep walking Jesus into our houses, let him into our lives, and let him be God and in time the hidden reign of God will become evident. In time there will be calm, amazement, sanity, new vitality, new life, and that ecstatic peace we get from being in the presence of God.
Just a helpful hint, practically speaking, on how to do that. When we were children, our parents likely taught us that to pray we needed to kneel at the bedside, bow our heads, close our eyes, and make prayer hands. And they also probably gave us an image of God, that he was an old man sitting on a throne way, way, way, way, far away. It might help if we change our method and our image of God. I have found that it truly helps to throw all the formality out the window and talk to God as you would to somebody sitting in the chair next to you…and get it all off your chest…all of it. It’s ok and quite healing to let God know you feel like he’s hung you out to dry and that you’re hurt and angry. God really is like Jesus. He cares, he listens, he heals the heart. Amen.
