The Raising of Jairus’s Daughter

Mark For Everyone

MARK 5.35–43The Raising of Jairus’s Daughter...

...Right on cue, as the suspense heightens, messengers come to tell Jairus that his daughter has now died. He shouldn’t bother Jesus any longer. Telling Jairus not to be afraid, and just to believe, in that setting must have sounded like telling someone to paddle across the Pacific in a canoe. (Today’s newspaper tells me that someone has just done something rather like that. But most of us wouldn’t even dream of trying.) But so many extraordinary things were happening in Capernaum just then that Jairus, numb with grief and horror as he must have been, may also have discovered a spark of faith which enabled him to walk with Jesus the short distance (Capernaum was only a small town) to his own front door.

They would soon know they were getting near. As in many countries of the world to this day, particularly where grief is a regular visitor to the average house in the absence of modern Western medicine, there were well-established rituals for beginning the grieving process. Professional mourners would come in weeping and wailing, sometimes with flute accompaniment (Matthew mentions the latter at this point). They made it possible for family members to give vent to their feelings with- out restraint or embarrassment. As we know today, bottling up grief is extremely unhealthy; better to get on with it, to let it come...

Taken from Mark for Everyone by Tom Wright