6. The Raising of Jairus' Daughter
The Raising of Jairus' Daughter Matt. 9:18, 19, 23-26; Mark 5:22, 24, 35-43; Luke 8:41, 42, 49-56
The present miracle is, connected by St. Mark and St. Luke immediately with, our Lord's return from that eastern side of the lake, which He had left at the urgent entreaty of its inhabitants. In St. Matthew other events, the curing of the paralytic, his own calling, and some discourses with the Pharisees, are inserted between. Yet of these only the latter (ix. 10-17) the best harmonists find really to have here their proper place. The two later Evangelists tell us also the name of the father of the child"; St. Matthew, who has his eye only on the main fact, and passes over every thing that is not absolutely necessary for that; speaks of him more generally as ''a certain ruler;" they again designating what kind of a ruler, namely that he was, one of the prefects of the synagogue. This, we can hardly doubt, was the synagogue of Capernaum, where now Jesus was (Matt. 9:1); the man therefore most probably made afterwards a part of that deputation which came to the Lord pleading for the heathen centurion (Luke 7:3); '" the elders of the Jews" there being identical with, the "rulers of the synagogue" here.
He who on that later occasion may have appeared pleading for another, presents himself now before the Lord, touched by a yet nearer: calamity; for he comes saying, "My daughter is even now dead; but come and lay thy hand upon her, and she shall live" Thus St. Matthew records his words, but the others with an important variation: "My little daughter lieth at the point of death" (Mark 5:23): "He had one only daughter, about twelve years of age, and she lay a dying" (Luke 8:42). Thus they make him speak of her as dying when he came, which the latter facts of the history show to have been the more exact, St. Matthew as already dead. Yet these differences are not hard to adjust; he left her at the last gasp; he knew not whether to regard her as alive or dead; he only knew that life was ebbing so fast when he quitted her side, that she could scarcely be living now; and yet, having no certain notices of her death, he was perplexed whether to speak of her as departed or not, and thus at one moment expressed himself in one language, at the next in another. It is singular enough that a circumstance like this, so taken from the life, so testifying of the reality of the things recorded, should have been advanced by some as a contradiction between one Gospel and another.
That Lord, upon whose ear the tidings of woe might never fall in vain, at once "arose and followed him, and so did his disciples" The crowd who had been listening to his teaching, followed also, curious and eager to see the end. The miracle of the healing of the woman with the issue of blood found place upon the way, but it will naturally be better treated apart; being, as it is, entirely separable from this history, though not altogether without its bearing upon it; for the delay, the words which passed between the Lord and his disciples, and then between Him and the woman, must all have been a sore trial to the agonized father, now when every moment was precious, when death was shaking the last few sands in the hour-glass of his daughter's life,—a trial in its kind similar to that with which the sisters of Lazarus were tried, when they beheld their beloved brother drawing ever nigher to death, and the Lord tarried notwithstanding. But sore as the trial must have been, we detect no signs of impatience on his part, and this no doubt was laid to his account. While the Lord was yet speaking to the woman, "there came from the ruler of the synagogue's house certain which said, Thy daughter is dead: why troublest thou the Master any further?" St. Luke mentions but one, probably that one who was especially charged with the message, whom others went along with, as it is common for men in their thirst for excitement to have a kind of pleasure in being the bearers even of evil tidings. Their hope had now perished. They who, perhaps, had faith enough to believe that Christ could fan the last expiring spark of life into a flame, yet had not the stronger faith to anticipate the harder thing, that He could rekindle that spark of life, after it had been quenched altogether. Perhaps the father's hope would have perished too; and thus no room would have been left for this miracle, when faith, the necessary condition, was wanting; if a gracious Lord had not seen the danger, and prevented his rising unbelief. "As soon as Jesus heard the word that was spoken, He saith to the ruler of the synagogue, Be not afraid, only believe." There is something very gracious in that "as soon." The Lord spake upon the instant, leaving no room for a thought of unbelief to insinuate itself into the father's mind, much less to utter itself from his lips, but preoccupying him at once with words of encouragement and hope.
And now He takes with Him three of his Apostles, three only, the same three who were allowed, on more than one later occasion, to be witnesses of things concealed from the others. This, however, is the first time that we read of any such election within the election, and the fact of such now finding place would mark, especially when we remember the solemn significance of the other seasons of a like selection (Matt. 17:1, 2; 26:37), that this was a new era in the life of the Lord. That which He was about to do was so great and holy that those three only, the flower and the crown of the apostolic band, were its fitting witnesses. The parents were present on grounds altogether different. With those, and these, and none other, "He cometh to the house of the ruler of the synagogue, and seeth the tumult and them that wept and wailed greatly." There, as every where else, He appears calming and pacifying: "(He saith unto them, Why make ye this ado, and weep? the damsel is not dead, but sleepeth."
Some, and those not unbelievers, nor yet timid half believers, who have learned to regard miracles as so much perilous ware, from which it is always an advantage when the Gospels can be a little lightened,—Olshausen, for instance, who manifests no wish to explain away the wonderful works of our Lord,—have yet considered his words, repeated by all narrators of this miracle, "The maid is not dead, but sleepeth," to be so explicit and distinct a declaration that death had not absolutely taken place, that in obedience, as they believe, to the Lord's own words, they refuse to number this among the actual raisings from the dead. They will count it only a raising from a death-like swoon; though one, it may have been, from which the maiden would never have been recalled but for that- life-giving touch and voice. Had this, however, been the case, Christ's word to the father would clearly have been different, when the tidings came that the spirit of the child was actually fled. The consolation must have clothed itself in another language. He might have brought out his own omniscience, and bidden the father to dismiss his fear, for He knew that there was yet life in the child. But that "Be not afraid, only believe," points another way; it is an evident summoning him to a trust in the all-might of Him, to whose help he had appealed. And as regards the Lord's declaration, that the maiden was not dead, but slept, He uses exactly the same language concerning Lazarus, "Our friend Lazarus sleepeth" (John 11:11); and when to this obvious objection Olshausen replies, that Christ explains there distinctly that He meant the sleep of death, adding presently, "Lazarus is dead," it is enough to answer that He only does so after his disciples have plainly misunderstood his words: He would have left those words as He had spoken them, but for their error in supposing that He had spoken of natural sleep; it was only then that "Jesus said unto them plainly, Lazarus is dead." But as Lazarus did but sleep, because Jesus was about to "awake him out of sleep," so was this maiden only sleeping, because her awakening in like manner was so near. Beside this, to speak of death as a sleep, is an image common to all languages and nations. Thereby the reality of the death is not denied, but only the fact implicitly assumed, that death will be followed by a resurrection, as sleep is by an awakening. Nor is it hard to perceive why the Lord should have used this language here. First, for the father's sake. The words are for the establishing of his trembling faith, which at the spectacle of all these signs of mourning, of these evidences that all was finished, might easily have given way altogether; they are a saying over again, "Be not afraid, only believe." He, the Lord of life, takes away that word of fear, "She is dead," and substitutes that milder word which contains the pledge of an awakening, "She sleepeth." And then in regard of the multitude, according to that holy humility which makes Him ever withdraw his miracles as much as possible from observation, He will by this word of a double signification cast a veil over that which He is about to accomplish.
And now, having thus spoken, He expelled from the house the crowd of turbulent mourners; and this for two reasons. Their presence, in the first place, Was inappropriate and superfluous there; they were mourners for the dead, and she was not dead; or, at all events, death in her was so soon to give place to returning life, that it did not deserve the name; it was but as a sleep and an awakening. Here was reason enough. But more than this, the boisterous and tumultuous grief of some, with the hired lamentations of others, gave no promise of the tone and temper of spirit, which became the witnesses of so holy and awful a mystery, a mystery from which even Apostles themselves were eluded—to say nothing of the profane and scornful spirit with which they had received the Lord's assurance, that the child should presently revive--"they laughed Him to scorn" Such scorners shall not witness the holy act: the pearls should not be cast before them. Compare 2 Kin. 4:33.
The house was now solitary and still. Two souls, believing and hoping, stand like funeral tapers beside the couch of the dead maiden—the father and the mother. The Church is represented in the three chief of its Apostles. And now the solemn awakening finds place, and this without an effort on his part, who is absolute Lord of quick and dead. "He took the damsel''—she was no more than a child, being "of the age of twelve years" (Mark 5:42)—" by the hand, and called, saying, Maid, arise." St. Mark preserves for us, probably from the lips of Peter, the very words which the Lord spake in the very language wherein He uttered them, "Talitha Cumi," as he does the "Ephphatha" on another occasion (vii. 34 ). And at that word, and at the touch of that hand, "her spirit came again, and she arose straightway (Luke 8:55),, and walked" (Mark 5:42). Hereupon, at once to strengthen that life which was come back to her, and to prove that she was indeed no ghost, but had returned to the realities of a mortal existence (Luke 24:41; John 21:5; Acts 10:41), "He commanded to give her meat;" a precaution the more necessary, as the parents in that ecstatic moment might easily have forgotten it.
These miracles of raising from the dead, whereof we have just considered the first, have always been regarded as the mightiest outcomings of the power of Christ; and with justice. They are those, also, at which unbelief is readiest to stumble, standing as they do in a yet more striking contrast than any of the other, to all that experience has known. The line between health and sickness is not definitely fixed; the two conditions melt one into the other, and the transition from this to that is frequent. In like manner storms alternate with calms; the fiercest tumult of the elements allays itself at last; and Christ's word which stilled the tempest, did but anticipate and effect in a moment, what the very conditions of nature must have effected in the end. Even the transmutation from water to wine, and the multiplication of the bread, are not without their analogies, however remote; and thus too is it with most of the other miracles. But between being, and the negation of being, the opposition is not relative, but absolute; between death and life a gulf lies, which no fact which our experience furnishes, can help us even in imagination to bridge over. It is nothing wonderful therefore that miracles of this class are signs more spoken against than any other among the mighty works which the Lord accomplished.
The present will be a fitting moment to say something concerning them, and the relations of difficulty in which the three recorded in the Gospels stand, if not to the other miracles, yet to one another. For they are not exactly the same miracle repeated three times over, but may be contemplated as in an ever ascending scale of difficulty, each a more marvellous outcoming of the power of Christ than the preceding. For as the body of one freshly dead, from which life has but just departed, is very different from a mummy or a skeleton, so is it, though not in so great a degree, different from a corpse, whence for some days the breath of life has fled. There is, so to speak, a fresh-trodden way between the body, and the soul which just has forsaken it, and which lingers for a season near the tabernacle where it has dwelt so long, as knowing that the links which united them have not even now been divided for ever. Even science itself has arrived at the conjecture, that the last echoes of life ring in the body much longer than is commonly supposed; that for a while it is full of the reminiscences of life. Out of this we may explain how it so frequently comes to pass, that air which marked the death-struggle passes presently away, and the true image of the departed, the image it may be of years long before, reappears in perfect calmness and in almost ideal beauty. Which things being so, we shall at once recognize in the quickening of him that had been four days dead (John 11:17), a yet mightier wonder than in the raising of the young man who was borne out to his burial (Luke 7:12); since that burial, according to Jewish custom, would have followed death by an interval, at most, of a single day; and again in that miracle a greater outcoming of Christ's power than in the present, wherein life's flame, like some newly-extinguished taper, was still more easily re-kindled, being brought in contact with Him who was the fountain-flame of all life. Immeasurably more stupendous also than all these wonders, will be the wonder of that hour, when all the dead of old, who have lain, some of them for many thousand years, in the dust of death, shall be summoned from and shall leave their graves at the same quickening voice (John 5:28, 29).
Notes on the Miracles of Our Lord.
The present miracle is, connected by St. Mark and St. Luke immediately with, our Lord's return from that eastern side of the lake, which He had left at the urgent entreaty of its inhabitants. In St. Matthew other events, the curing of the paralytic, his own calling, and some discourses with the Pharisees, are inserted between. Yet of these only the latter (ix. 10-17) the best harmonists find really to have here their proper place. The two later Evangelists tell us also the name of the father of the child"; St. Matthew, who has his eye only on the main fact, and passes over every thing that is not absolutely necessary for that; speaks of him more generally as ''a certain ruler;" they again designating what kind of a ruler, namely that he was, one of the prefects of the synagogue. This, we can hardly doubt, was the synagogue of Capernaum, where now Jesus was (Matt. 9:1); the man therefore most probably made afterwards a part of that deputation which came to the Lord pleading for the heathen centurion (Luke 7:3); '" the elders of the Jews" there being identical with, the "rulers of the synagogue" here.
He who on that later occasion may have appeared pleading for another, presents himself now before the Lord, touched by a yet nearer: calamity; for he comes saying, "My daughter is even now dead; but come and lay thy hand upon her, and she shall live" Thus St. Matthew records his words, but the others with an important variation: "My little daughter lieth at the point of death" (Mark 5:23): "He had one only daughter, about twelve years of age, and she lay a dying" (Luke 8:42). Thus they make him speak of her as dying when he came, which the latter facts of the history show to have been the more exact, St. Matthew as already dead. Yet these differences are not hard to adjust; he left her at the last gasp; he knew not whether to regard her as alive or dead; he only knew that life was ebbing so fast when he quitted her side, that she could scarcely be living now; and yet, having no certain notices of her death, he was perplexed whether to speak of her as departed or not, and thus at one moment expressed himself in one language, at the next in another. It is singular enough that a circumstance like this, so taken from the life, so testifying of the reality of the things recorded, should have been advanced by some as a contradiction between one Gospel and another.
That Lord, upon whose ear the tidings of woe might never fall in vain, at once "arose and followed him, and so did his disciples" The crowd who had been listening to his teaching, followed also, curious and eager to see the end. The miracle of the healing of the woman with the issue of blood found place upon the way, but it will naturally be better treated apart; being, as it is, entirely separable from this history, though not altogether without its bearing upon it; for the delay, the words which passed between the Lord and his disciples, and then between Him and the woman, must all have been a sore trial to the agonized father, now when every moment was precious, when death was shaking the last few sands in the hour-glass of his daughter's life,—a trial in its kind similar to that with which the sisters of Lazarus were tried, when they beheld their beloved brother drawing ever nigher to death, and the Lord tarried notwithstanding. But sore as the trial must have been, we detect no signs of impatience on his part, and this no doubt was laid to his account. While the Lord was yet speaking to the woman, "there came from the ruler of the synagogue's house certain which said, Thy daughter is dead: why troublest thou the Master any further?" St. Luke mentions but one, probably that one who was especially charged with the message, whom others went along with, as it is common for men in their thirst for excitement to have a kind of pleasure in being the bearers even of evil tidings. Their hope had now perished. They who, perhaps, had faith enough to believe that Christ could fan the last expiring spark of life into a flame, yet had not the stronger faith to anticipate the harder thing, that He could rekindle that spark of life, after it had been quenched altogether. Perhaps the father's hope would have perished too; and thus no room would have been left for this miracle, when faith, the necessary condition, was wanting; if a gracious Lord had not seen the danger, and prevented his rising unbelief. "As soon as Jesus heard the word that was spoken, He saith to the ruler of the synagogue, Be not afraid, only believe." There is something very gracious in that "as soon." The Lord spake upon the instant, leaving no room for a thought of unbelief to insinuate itself into the father's mind, much less to utter itself from his lips, but preoccupying him at once with words of encouragement and hope.
And now He takes with Him three of his Apostles, three only, the same three who were allowed, on more than one later occasion, to be witnesses of things concealed from the others. This, however, is the first time that we read of any such election within the election, and the fact of such now finding place would mark, especially when we remember the solemn significance of the other seasons of a like selection (Matt. 17:1, 2; 26:37), that this was a new era in the life of the Lord. That which He was about to do was so great and holy that those three only, the flower and the crown of the apostolic band, were its fitting witnesses. The parents were present on grounds altogether different. With those, and these, and none other, "He cometh to the house of the ruler of the synagogue, and seeth the tumult and them that wept and wailed greatly." There, as every where else, He appears calming and pacifying: "(He saith unto them, Why make ye this ado, and weep? the damsel is not dead, but sleepeth."
Some, and those not unbelievers, nor yet timid half believers, who have learned to regard miracles as so much perilous ware, from which it is always an advantage when the Gospels can be a little lightened,—Olshausen, for instance, who manifests no wish to explain away the wonderful works of our Lord,—have yet considered his words, repeated by all narrators of this miracle, "The maid is not dead, but sleepeth," to be so explicit and distinct a declaration that death had not absolutely taken place, that in obedience, as they believe, to the Lord's own words, they refuse to number this among the actual raisings from the dead. They will count it only a raising from a death-like swoon; though one, it may have been, from which the maiden would never have been recalled but for that- life-giving touch and voice. Had this, however, been the case, Christ's word to the father would clearly have been different, when the tidings came that the spirit of the child was actually fled. The consolation must have clothed itself in another language. He might have brought out his own omniscience, and bidden the father to dismiss his fear, for He knew that there was yet life in the child. But that "Be not afraid, only believe," points another way; it is an evident summoning him to a trust in the all-might of Him, to whose help he had appealed. And as regards the Lord's declaration, that the maiden was not dead, but slept, He uses exactly the same language concerning Lazarus, "Our friend Lazarus sleepeth" (John 11:11); and when to this obvious objection Olshausen replies, that Christ explains there distinctly that He meant the sleep of death, adding presently, "Lazarus is dead," it is enough to answer that He only does so after his disciples have plainly misunderstood his words: He would have left those words as He had spoken them, but for their error in supposing that He had spoken of natural sleep; it was only then that "Jesus said unto them plainly, Lazarus is dead." But as Lazarus did but sleep, because Jesus was about to "awake him out of sleep," so was this maiden only sleeping, because her awakening in like manner was so near. Beside this, to speak of death as a sleep, is an image common to all languages and nations. Thereby the reality of the death is not denied, but only the fact implicitly assumed, that death will be followed by a resurrection, as sleep is by an awakening. Nor is it hard to perceive why the Lord should have used this language here. First, for the father's sake. The words are for the establishing of his trembling faith, which at the spectacle of all these signs of mourning, of these evidences that all was finished, might easily have given way altogether; they are a saying over again, "Be not afraid, only believe." He, the Lord of life, takes away that word of fear, "She is dead," and substitutes that milder word which contains the pledge of an awakening, "She sleepeth." And then in regard of the multitude, according to that holy humility which makes Him ever withdraw his miracles as much as possible from observation, He will by this word of a double signification cast a veil over that which He is about to accomplish.
And now, having thus spoken, He expelled from the house the crowd of turbulent mourners; and this for two reasons. Their presence, in the first place, Was inappropriate and superfluous there; they were mourners for the dead, and she was not dead; or, at all events, death in her was so soon to give place to returning life, that it did not deserve the name; it was but as a sleep and an awakening. Here was reason enough. But more than this, the boisterous and tumultuous grief of some, with the hired lamentations of others, gave no promise of the tone and temper of spirit, which became the witnesses of so holy and awful a mystery, a mystery from which even Apostles themselves were eluded—to say nothing of the profane and scornful spirit with which they had received the Lord's assurance, that the child should presently revive--"they laughed Him to scorn" Such scorners shall not witness the holy act: the pearls should not be cast before them. Compare 2 Kin. 4:33.
The house was now solitary and still. Two souls, believing and hoping, stand like funeral tapers beside the couch of the dead maiden—the father and the mother. The Church is represented in the three chief of its Apostles. And now the solemn awakening finds place, and this without an effort on his part, who is absolute Lord of quick and dead. "He took the damsel''—she was no more than a child, being "of the age of twelve years" (Mark 5:42)—" by the hand, and called, saying, Maid, arise." St. Mark preserves for us, probably from the lips of Peter, the very words which the Lord spake in the very language wherein He uttered them, "Talitha Cumi," as he does the "Ephphatha" on another occasion (vii. 34 ). And at that word, and at the touch of that hand, "her spirit came again, and she arose straightway (Luke 8:55),, and walked" (Mark 5:42). Hereupon, at once to strengthen that life which was come back to her, and to prove that she was indeed no ghost, but had returned to the realities of a mortal existence (Luke 24:41; John 21:5; Acts 10:41), "He commanded to give her meat;" a precaution the more necessary, as the parents in that ecstatic moment might easily have forgotten it.
These miracles of raising from the dead, whereof we have just considered the first, have always been regarded as the mightiest outcomings of the power of Christ; and with justice. They are those, also, at which unbelief is readiest to stumble, standing as they do in a yet more striking contrast than any of the other, to all that experience has known. The line between health and sickness is not definitely fixed; the two conditions melt one into the other, and the transition from this to that is frequent. In like manner storms alternate with calms; the fiercest tumult of the elements allays itself at last; and Christ's word which stilled the tempest, did but anticipate and effect in a moment, what the very conditions of nature must have effected in the end. Even the transmutation from water to wine, and the multiplication of the bread, are not without their analogies, however remote; and thus too is it with most of the other miracles. But between being, and the negation of being, the opposition is not relative, but absolute; between death and life a gulf lies, which no fact which our experience furnishes, can help us even in imagination to bridge over. It is nothing wonderful therefore that miracles of this class are signs more spoken against than any other among the mighty works which the Lord accomplished.
The present will be a fitting moment to say something concerning them, and the relations of difficulty in which the three recorded in the Gospels stand, if not to the other miracles, yet to one another. For they are not exactly the same miracle repeated three times over, but may be contemplated as in an ever ascending scale of difficulty, each a more marvellous outcoming of the power of Christ than the preceding. For as the body of one freshly dead, from which life has but just departed, is very different from a mummy or a skeleton, so is it, though not in so great a degree, different from a corpse, whence for some days the breath of life has fled. There is, so to speak, a fresh-trodden way between the body, and the soul which just has forsaken it, and which lingers for a season near the tabernacle where it has dwelt so long, as knowing that the links which united them have not even now been divided for ever. Even science itself has arrived at the conjecture, that the last echoes of life ring in the body much longer than is commonly supposed; that for a while it is full of the reminiscences of life. Out of this we may explain how it so frequently comes to pass, that air which marked the death-struggle passes presently away, and the true image of the departed, the image it may be of years long before, reappears in perfect calmness and in almost ideal beauty. Which things being so, we shall at once recognize in the quickening of him that had been four days dead (John 11:17), a yet mightier wonder than in the raising of the young man who was borne out to his burial (Luke 7:12); since that burial, according to Jewish custom, would have followed death by an interval, at most, of a single day; and again in that miracle a greater outcoming of Christ's power than in the present, wherein life's flame, like some newly-extinguished taper, was still more easily re-kindled, being brought in contact with Him who was the fountain-flame of all life. Immeasurably more stupendous also than all these wonders, will be the wonder of that hour, when all the dead of old, who have lain, some of them for many thousand years, in the dust of death, shall be summoned from and shall leave their graves at the same quickening voice (John 5:28, 29).
Notes on the Miracles of Our Lord.