21 Jesus crossed the lake again, and on the other side a large crowd gathered around him on the shore. 22 Jairus, one of the synagogue leaders, came forward. When he saw Jesus, he fell at his feet 23 and pleaded with him, “My daughter is about to die. Please, come and place your hands on her so that she can be healed and live.” 24 So Jesus went with him. A swarm of people were following Jesus, crowding in on him. (Common English Bible)
“I Say to You, Arise: The Gospels’ Least-Known
Resurrection Story,” Week One
The voice
on the other end of the phone was a mixture of pure disbelief and sorrow. It was the 3 am phone call that nobody ever
wants to get, and that night, my family was receiving one from a family friend
whose son—a year younger than me and coincidentally also named Eric—died in a
car wreck. He wasn’t wearing a seat
belt, the crash was head-on, and he died almost instantly.
We got
that phone call just over ten years ago to the day. It was the pivotal moment of the most emotionally
and spiritually trying weekend of my life, one that began with me looking
forward to competing at the Kansas state speech championships and then
awkwardly dancing the night away at my senior prom, and ended with me preaching
at my childhood congregation on Sunday morning on grief and loss, only to have my
microphone die (does that ever happen here?
No…); but then my very first God experience took place when the sunlight
struck my tired body through the sanctuary skylights. My body temperature erupted, my energy
returned, and in spite of an uncooperative microphone, I made myself loud
enough for all to hear...and hopefully understand.
It
reminded me of the Pentecost story in Acts 2, when the flame of the Holy Spirit
comes down upon the disciples. But what
has also stuck with me through the years was the sound of my buddy’s father on
the telephone at 3 am that night. The
grief, the shock, the sheer unbelief of a parent who lost their child long
before they thought they ever would…the memory of that will likely stay with me
for eternity. Seeing and hearing how
much it hurts a parent who would move heaven and earth for their child to
instead see their child die and to feel absolutely helpless to it happening,
that has to be one of life’s worst moments.
And in the fifth chapter of the Gospel of Mark, it is a moment that is about
to come for a man and a father called Jairus.
Easter is
not just a day on the calendar for the church—it is a season on the calendar. After all, according to Luke in Acts of the
Apostles, Jesus walked the earth for forty days after His resurrection. All forty of those days were about the
victory of God over death, not just the first day. And so the church traditionally has kept
those 40 (to 50) days after Easter as a season called, appropriately enough,
Eastertide. And so as part of our
ongoing celebration of Easter and of the empty tomb, I typically elect to
create a sermon series for those Sundays specific to the themes of resurrection
and new life. Two years ago, if you’ll
recall, we went through probably the second most-famous resurrection (after
that of Jesus Himself) in the Gospels—the raising of Lazarus as depicted in
John 11. One year ago, we spent a Sunday
apiece on the reactions to the news of the empty tomb by the different disciples—Mary
Magdalene, Peter, Thomas, and so on.
This year, we’re returning more to the mold of two years ago in that we
are going through another resurrection story, except this one is probably the
least renowned of them all: the raising of Jairus’s daughter in Mark 5. Why that is probably has to do with a variety
of reasons, but we’ll be trying to increase our knowledge, appreciation, and love
of this story as we go through it verse-by-verse through the month of May (and
Sunday, June 1).
Today, we
simply begin with what appears on the surface to be only exposition—only scene-setting. But Mark includes for us a few important
details that paint the picture of Jairus’s relationship with his daughter, as
well as of the nature of Jesus’ ministry and of how He was viewed by others at
that particular point in time of His ministry.
The first
detail is this: that Jairus is a leader of the local synagogue, which would
identify him as a man of exceptional means.
Remember that there was almost no middle class in Biblical Israel—you were
either part of the very small and powerful wealthy minority, or part of the
vast impoverished peasant minority.
Jesus was a member of the latter, but most religious leaders—likely
including Jairus—were a part of the former (so, clearly, I got into this line
of work in the wrong millennium. Wait,
that came out wrong…).
Why does
this matter? Well, for two reasons. One is that Jairus quite literally gets down
on bended knees to beg Jesus to heal his daughter. It is a scene of profound humility. Simply getting down on your knees to beg to
anyone is potentially humiliating unless you have a diamond ring in your hand
and a particular question about marriage in your head, and even then, those
situations can still end up humiliating if you’ve completely misread your
audience. But this is likely a rich man
(or at least a man better off than the vast majority of the citizenry) falling
down on his knees before a poor man. In
the rigid hierarchy of ancient Near Eastern society, well, that was practically
unheard of.
Of
course, we know now that Jesus was and is far more than simply a man, but at
this point in Mark’s Gospel, there’s no indication that Jairus would have known
that. Up until this point, the only
people to recognize Jesus’ true nature as the Son of God are, ironically
enough, demons whom He exorcises.
Seriously. Flip through the first
four-and-a-half chapters of Mark’s Gospel, and it’s true. Nobody except the personifications of evil
seems to have picked up on this yet.
So what
Jairus is most likely doing is flinging himself at Jesus’ feet is signaling his
abject desperation in his quest to save his daughter. Because of his means, he has most likely
already tried all of the conventional channels for treating a sick family
member—taking them to a Greco-Roman phyisician, taking them to the synagogue or
temple healers in Israel, and probably lots and lots of prayers and sacrifices
to God.
But none
of the traditional methods of treatment have worked. So, when Jairus hears (presumably simply by
word of mouth) of this itinerant Galilean peasant who travels the country
performing miracles, he probably thought to himself, “What do I have to lose?” And aside from any social sensibilities he
may have had about class, the answer to that question is, “Not a lot.”
And that
part of his decision-making calculus is perfectly fine, completely
understandable, even. But for him to
have gotten this desperate still likely would have required him to exhaust more
orthodox remedies for whatever was ailing his daughter—after all, desperation often
doesn’t tend to set in until after you have tried that which you have been
taught to do in a situation.
In other
words, Jairus’ one misstep in his parental devotion to his daughter doesn’t
come in presenting himself to Jesus, or even in casting himself down at Jesus’
feet. No, it’s that Jairus likely came
to Jesus as a last resort, not a first resort.
Jesus wasn’t the first-down play for Jairus, He was the fourth-down Hail
Mary pass (“Jeez, Pastor Eric, talk about mixing religious idioms here…”). Jairus is more than willing to completely
cast aside his social standing and his dignity for the sake of his daughter,
and for that, we can and should hear in his voice here the anguish and pain of
a parent losing their child to death’s clutches. As New Testament scholar Ralph Martin concisely
put it about this passage: “Death is still the number one issue in many people’s
minds and secret fears.” And one of the
things I learned from that terrible night in my youth when my friend Eric died
was that this fear is doubly, triply, infinitely true for parents when they
think about their children.
On that
night, my buddy’s father’s worst fears came to pass. And here, in this passage, Jairus is
terrified of his own worst fear coming to pass.
This is a child he has raised against a lot of odds—infant mortality was
obscenely high in ancient times, and the mortality rate for girls was even
higher than it was for boys. Jairus is
not about to give up on this girl, nor should he ever.
This
impulse means that Jairus eventually does do the right thing for his daughter
in coming before Jesus and asking Him to heal her. But are we, too, like Jairus? Not only in our commitment to our family—I would
hope that all of us could be like Jairus in that regard—but in our reluctance
to not always go straight to Jesus first when we are most in need. Put differently: do we go to Jesus first with
our greatest needs, or do we look elsewhere for solace and strength and then
only later turn to God when those other avenues don’t pan out?
Because
there really are a great many avenues out there for us to channel our
desperation into if we are searching for comfort and consolation. Money can corrupt us, addictions can warp us,
and exploiting and abusing others to make ourselves feel better by comparison
is only destructive. We turn to other
people not to fall at their feet and be humble towards them, but to expect them
to be subservient and secondary to ourselves, and all for what? That sort of status doesn’t help Jairus one
lick when the chips are down, and he casts it aside if he thinks that it will
help his child.
We cannot
hear the anguish in his voice as he beseeches Jesus. All we have are the words on a page. But we can probably imagine that
anguish. We might have even been there
ourselves once upon a time. And if you
have, you know that all the desire, all the desperate longing in the world
cannot erase the feeling of helplessness when death comes to do its thing.
But in
God, and in Christ, we need not feel that desperation. We need not hurt the way that Jairus is
hurting now. He would move heaven and
earth to save his daughter, and Jesus, despite probably not being the first
asked to help, shows His own humbleness in return and decides to help anyways.
So it is
with God. Even if you did not ask God
for help first once upon a time, God will still hear you when you pray to Him
now. And I love how Mark’s exposition of
the scene ends in verse 24: So Jesus went with Him.
Simply
because Jairus asked Him to.
God is
ready to go with you anywhere. God is
ready to walk with you, alongside you, around you.
Today,
three of our beloved church members asked God to do precisely that by choosing
baptism.
Will you
follow their lead and example? Are you
humble enough, brave enough, and dare I say it desperate enough to ask Jesus if
He will walk with you as well?
Because
if you are, I can tell you this: if your heart is sincere, the answer to that
question will always be a resounding YES.
Thanks be
to God. Amen.
Rev. Eric
Atcheson
Longview,
Washington
May 4,
2014
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