They wanted to touch him. People came to Jesus in great numbers, for he had healed so many, Mark says, that everyone who was sick pushed forward so that they could touch him.[1] They wanted to lay their hands on him to connect to the power that was in him. Mark paints a scene of people being drawn to Jesus from every direction, bodies everywhere.
Among them a man who somehow makes his way to Jesus and throws himself at his feet. He’s a synagogue official of some kind, an important man, which is possibly why the crowd gave way and let him through; his name is Jairus, Mark tells us. But Jairus doesn’t behave like an important man. He’s on his knees, with his forehead touching the ground; he can smell the dirt, he can feel the grit of sand and gravel against his palms and the tips of his fingers. He behaves like a desperate man, a man on the verge of losing it.
His daughter is at the point of death, only he doesn’t say “my daughter,” he says, “my little daughter,” the little girl he has known since he first held her on the day she was born when she was barely bigger than his hand. “She’s dying,” is what he’s there to tell the man from Nazareth, she’s dying. Nothing else matters for him anymore; he doesn’t waste a thought on propriety or social conventions: his little girl is at the point of death. Jairus is an important man, a man with a name, and love has made him a beggar.
She is dying—he says it repeatedly, “my little daughter, she’s at the point of death— and he says, “Come and lay your hands on her.” Come and touch her like you have touched others with healing power. Lay your hands on her, he says, perhaps he’s seen it done, perhaps he’s done it himself, kneeling by her bedside, willing to let his own life flow out through his hands so it would be hers, if that was what it took — only he couldn’t give her what he so desperately wanted to give her.
“Lay your hands on her, so she may be made well, and live,” he says to Jesus. He remembers when she was little, how, in the middle of the night when the house was too quiet, he used to get up to make sure she was breathing. He never told anybody; men, let alone men of importance, didn’t do such things, but he is no longer afraid to show his love and helplessness in front of the whole town. “My little daughter is at the point of death. Come and lay your hands on her, so that she may be made well, and live,” Jairus begged, and Jesus went with him, Mark tells us.
Surrounded by people on every side, bodies everywhere, Jesus suddenly stopped and turned about and said, “Who touched my clothes?” The disciples were like, “You’re kidding, right? All this humanity pressing in on you — how can you say, ‘Who touched me?’” They didn’t know what had just happened. They didn’t know who or what had created this sudden interruption of a life-saving mission.
The way our translations seek to render the text in proper English narrative style obscure the dramatic way the scene is described; in a single sentence, one long string of participles builds up like a stack of pages from a diary, before finally culminating in the interrupting action. A woman—having been bleeding for twelve years, and having suffered greatly from many physicians, and having spent all she had, and having benefited not one bit but rather having gone from bad to worse, having heard about Jesus, having come in the crowd from behind—touched his cloak.
Nobody in the crowd knew that a single phrase, a single intention had been on her mind, for who knows how long: “If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well.” That was her faith, a mixture of desperation and magical thinking, fed by long years of disappointed hope.
She’s the second desperate character entering the scene, only she remains unnamed and unseen. She was determined to touch his clothes and she did. And immediately she felt that she was healed. Immediately she felt that life was no longer slowly draining from her, but filling her. And she alone knew it was so. No one else in the crowd had any idea. Not the disciples, not Jairus - try and imagine what this delay was like for him! - and not even Jesus himself.
When he turned around and asked, “Who touched my clothes?” she didn’t just say, “I did.” She fell at his feet and told him the whole truth. She told him of the twelve years of her suffering and poverty; she told him of her loneliness, her shame and isolation – how her life had slowly dripped away.
And Jesus heard her out and said, “Daughter, your faith has made you well.” This curious blend of desperation and magical thinking, this unbending determination to touch him, Jesus called her faith. We should also note that he called her “daughter” as if to remind her and all of us that she was not some woman in the crowd, anonymous and impoverished, but a member of God’s family. And calling her “daughter,” Jesus also reminds us that the divine parent’s love for her is reflected and shared in the love of Jairus for his little daughter.
And suddenly we remember the urgency with which he had begged and pleaded, “Come and lay your hands on her, so that she may be made well, and live.” And isn’t that the hope we all bring to Jesus, that he may come and lay his hands on all who long to be made well, all who long for life to be made complete? Isn’t that the hope we all bring to Jesus, because we believe that life is his to give, and restore, and fulfill?
And now the people from the synagogue leader’s house come and they tell him, “Your daughter is dead.” Nothing anybody can do about it now; too late. End of story. “Why trouble the teacher any further?” they say to Jairus.
But Jesus says to him, “Do not fear, only believe.” Believe what? What is a man to believe after a gut punch like that? What might give him the strength to get up and keep on living? We notice that Jairus doesn’t ask any questions like that, and so we refrain from cobbling together quick answers, and do what he does: see what Jesus is up to.
At the house, the funeral is already underway with people weeping and wailing, and when Jesus says, “The child is not dead but sleeping,” they laugh. It’s not happy laughter, though, rising like a lark from the house to the clouds. It’s the bitter, knowing laughter of experience.
Jesus sends them all away, and he takes the parents and three of the disciples into the room with him. It’s quiet there.
And Jesus doesn’t speak to comfort the grieving parents, nor does he speak to teach the disciples who have no clue what he meant by “not dead but sleeping,” — no, Jesus takes her by the hand and says to her with great tenderness, “Talitha cum.”
Mark translates the Aramaic for us so we don’t think Jesus is using some kind of magic spell or secret incantation, but the church remembered the words in Jesus’ native tongue, taking us a little closer to the sound of his voice, “Talitha cum — little girl, get up!”
And she did.
Wherever Jesus went, Mark tells us—villages, cities, or farming communities—they would place the sick in the marketplaces and beg him to allow them to touch even the hem of his clothing; and all who touched him were healed.[2] That is one side of this wondrous pair of stories we heard this morning. It is about our desire to touch Jesus, our deep, persistent desire to touch the giver of life and live, to touch the fount of every blessing and be blessed.
And the other side is about God’s deep and persistent desire to touch us with life and blessing. Perhaps you identify with the woman who persisted in pushing through the crowd to get close to Jesus. Perhaps you identify with the dad who threw himself at Jesus’ feet, abandoning all sense of propriety and decorum for his daughter’s sake. But when you’re in the place where hope has withered and you can’t find the courage to persist, or you don’t know how to get up, let alone imagine what it might mean to believe: remember Jesus who went into the room where the child was. And dare to wonder if the child might be you. You who believe, and you who sometimes believe and sometimes don’t believe much of anything, and you who would give almost anything to believe if only you could. “Get up,” he says, and you dare to imagine that it’s your hand he’s holding, and that the power that is in him is the power to give life to the dead, and also to those who are only partly alive.[3]
Dare to imagine that it’s your hand he’s holding, and that nothing will keep him from sharing life in fullness with you.
[1] Mark 3:10
[2] Mark 6:56
[3] With thanks to Frederick Buechner http://www.frederickbuechner.com/blog/2018/6/25/weekly-sermon-illustration-jairus-daughter