My daughter has just died.
Normally death was the end of the story. The daughter of Jairus had apparently gone past what would normally be considered the point of no return. But her father somehow came to the conclusion that, for Jesus, it was not necessarily too late, his daughter not too far gone to be saved. Did it stem from profound faith in the power of Jesus? Or was it rather more an assertion of what he wished were true because of his desperation? In this case the motivations probably coincided enough to merge into a single petition to Jesus. We might think that confidence that Jesus could even reverse death would give him the patience to wait while Jesus dealt with interruptions along the way. But it could not have been easy. We can imagine that if he knew how long the woman whom Jesus cured along the way had waited for this healing he might of thought that she could wait a little longer. But Jesus knew how long she had waited, and precisely for that reason decided that she had waited long enough.
She said to herself, ""If only I can touch his cloak, I shall be cured.""
Jesus turned around and saw her, and said,
""Courage, daughter! Your faith has saved you.""
And from that hour the woman was cured.
Her faith made her bold to transgress the prohibition that would make those whom she touched ritually unclean. She sensed that the direction of influence would actually be the opposite. Rather than making Jesus unclean she believed that the slightest contact with him would be enough cause her to be healed. And if she was healed she couldn't make anyone unclean. Jesus sensed that the faith of the woman had caused power to go out from him when she touched him. Even though the woman had basically tried to covertly steal this cure from Jesus without asking him for it, since he might have refused as far as she knew, he praised her for the faith that made her do it. When the crowd was too dense, the barriers too great, and Jesus too busy to establish a relationship or work through the standard protocol, her faith was able to reveal a way where there was no way and a possibility for what seemed impossible.
Go away! The girl is not dead but sleeping.
To Jesus there was not a great difference between sleep and death since he could just as easily rouse the dead to life as others could wake people from their slumber. The death of the body was not a permanent thing worthy of a crowd and commotion. This girl would rise, either that day, or, if not, on the last day at the general resurrection. What mattered more was the life of the soul. That was the thing the death of which might truly be permanent, the only death really worthy of the name. That was why in another place Jesus taught not to be afraid of those who could kill the body but only "him who can destroy both soul and body in hell" (see Matthew 10:28). Jesus was the Lord of life and death, and the one appointed to judge the living and the dead (see Acts 10:42).
And they ridiculed him.
Without faith in Jesus it is easy to end up ridiculing him rather than simply dismissing or ignoring him. The claims he makes about what our priorities ought to be only make sense in the light of the certainty of the immortality of the soul and the corresponding resurrection to judgment on the last day. But it is not only Jesus that becomes incoherent if we don't believe this. It is life itself. If death is the end morality quickly becomes a mere mask for self-interested hedonistic pursuits. We mourn things that we can't possibly keep because we lose sight of a greater good that, when possessed, we can't possibly lose.
When the crowd was put out, he came and took her by the hand,
and the little girl arose.
If we've been living primarily in the world of death, fearing the phantasm of loss as though it were something ultimate, Jesus wants to wake us up to life again. It is just as easy for him to do this as it was for him to raise the daughter of Jairus, like a normal person waking a light sleeper by calling her name. Because it is easy for him we ought not to doubt, either that he can, or that he would. He wants to do so and he will, if we but ask.
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