Trust in Jesus the Lord of life and death

(Prayer)

I imagine that most of you have heard of triage.

Triage is the process used to prioritise emergency medical care by identifying patients who need immediate care from those who don’t.

 

It makes sense to do that. Especially if there are more patients than medical staff to deal with them.

You wouldn’t expect a doctor to deal with someone who didn’t have a life-threatening situation before dealing with someone who does.

In the passage we are going to look at this morning (Mark 5: 21 – 43), it seems that Jesus wasn’t very good at this kind of triage.

When He should have rushed off to save a little girl from dying, He allowed Himself to get side tracked with a woman that could have been dealt with at a later stage.

It turned out to be a fatal decision because the little girl died. If He was a doctor, Jesus might have lost His job.

Ah, but you see, Jesus is so much more than a doctor. He is King Jesus.

• Lord over nature as we saw in the storm at the end of chapter 4.
• Lord over the supernatural as we saw with the demon possessed man in the first half of chapter 5.
• And as we will see in this passage, Lord over life and death.

So, let’s see more of the detail of this passage.

The first thing we see is that…

Jairus has a problem (5: 21 – 24a)

His daughter was dying.

Jairus was a synagogue leader who would have commanded much community respect, but he humbles himself and falls at Jesus’ feet as one would before someone of much greater status.

This was a risky thing for him to do, given what the other Jewish leaders (more senior than him) thought of Jesus and were planning to do to Jesus.

But tough times call for tough measures. His daughter was dying. He must have heard of or seen Jesus’ other miracles. This was his only hope.

He throws caution to the wind. He begs and pleads with Jesus to come with him, lay His hands on his daughter and heal her (save her).

Jesus agrees to go with Jairus. Hope springs up in Jairus’ heart. Jesus cares. Imagine if Jesus had said no because of how the other religious leaders had treated Him?

But that hope in Jairus’ heart was soon to be crushed as Jesus makes the fatal decision to deal with… (and this is the second thing we see)

A woman who has a problem (5: 24b – 35)

This woman had more than one problem.

• She had a bleeding problem. It’s not clear to me whether this was a radical problem with menstruation or a haemorrhaging issue to do with her blood not clotting properly when injured. Maybe it was both. But whatever it was, she had suffered with it for 12 very long years.
• More than that, during that time, she had suffered at the hands of doctors who not only couldn’t help her, but it had got even worse under their treatment.
• More than that, she was financially ruined by having spent all her money on these doctors.

• And on top of all of that (and it’s not mentioned directly in the passage) she would have been a social and religious outcast for those 12 years. For as long as she had this bleeding issue, she was ceremonially unclean, unable to participate in the life of this religious community.

Well, she also must have heard about or seen the miracles of Jesus and faith welled up in her. “If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed”. It was believed at the time that the clothing of a person carried the power of that person.

And she was right. She was miraculously (immediately) healed by touching Jesus’ clothes!

Jesus senses power going out from Him and He stops. “Just carry on Jesus, it’s all good, get to the little girl.” Jairus must have wondered what was going on.

“Aargh! Jesus doesn’t only stop; He now wants to know who touched Him. No one answers. Ok good let’s get to the little girl, she needs you.”

But Jesus insists. Jairus must have been beside himself. Maybe Jesus doesn’t care about his little daughter after all. The disciples are frustrated “You see the people crowding against you, and yet you can ask, ‘Who touched me?’”

But Jesus is insistent that He wants to know who touched Him and received His healing power. And eventually the woman, knowing that she had been healed by Jesus, owns up and falls trembling at Jesus feet.

How lovingly Jesus deals with her “Daughter your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.”

She came to Jesus suffering, filled with anguish, but she leaves healed, freed from this suffering and at peace (more than healing of her body?).

She left in peace, but Jairus is not at peace. He came to Jesus filled with anguish and now because Jesus had wasted time with this woman, he has even more anguish and despair.

Because he is told that his daughter has died. And then a stinging question from those who had come to tell him, “Why bother the teacher anymore?” “Why put your faith in Him anymore? This has been a colossal waste of time. Clearly Jesus doesn’t care for you and your daughter.”

But Jesus wasn’t wasting time with this woman. He was demonstrating His love and care for her. She had suffered, been rejected and badly treated by doctors for twelve years.

Jesus doesn’t just heal her; He also restores her dignity. The Lord of life and death cares for her, takes an interest in her and gives her peace.

“Well, that’s great that He cares for this woman, but He clearly doesn’t care for the little girl?”

Jesus is the Lord of life and death and He does care (5: 36 – 43)

Jesus encourages Jairus to not be afraid and to continue believing. To have the same faith that brought him to Jesus in the first place. He will see that Jesus does care and can still save his daughter.

Jairus may have believed in Jesus for the difficult thing (healing) but what about faith in Jesus to do the seemingly impossible thing (raise the dead)?

Jesus takes a smaller group of disciples and goes to care for the dead little girl. Jairus goes with Him.

When they get to the house there is a huge commotion as mourners are weeping and wailing. In those days all families (even the poorest) had professional mourners who would join others in leading the weeping and wailing. And because Jairus was a leader there would have been many other mourners there too and they didn’t mourn quietly and discreetly.

Jesus then asks a question and says something that the mourners find ridiculous. “Why all this commotion and wailing? The child is not dead but asleep.”

These mourners knew death when they saw it and so they laughed at Him. The Greek word means to laugh down at, that is to ridicule or scorn Him.

What’s going on here? Jesus seems to have acknowledged that she had died, when He told Jairus to keep on believing, and now He is saying she isn’t dead but asleep.

Is the girl dead? Under normal circumstances you would say yes without any qualification.

But Jesus was there, the Lord of life and death. And with Him there, death will have no hold on her. Death will be viewed differently.

Jesus, the Lord of life and death, will wake her up like she had fallen asleep because He wants to and can.

Keeping only the parents and the disciples, He puts everyone else out (verbally and physically). They have no faith and not only will not be part of this miracle that Jesus will do. He doesn’t need their mocking presence around.

And then, as though the little girl was only asleep, He takes her by the hand, tells her to get up, and she gets up and starts walking around.

Jesus is the Lord of life and death! And He really does care!

He cared for the woman, even though there was someone worse off than her.

He cared for Jairus, his wife and little girl even in death.

The Lord of life and death doesn’t have to practice triage, He can heal the living and the dead.

How do we apply this passage to our lives?

Jairus might want to say to us that Jesus cares for us in this way … when someone you love dies, just believe and ask Jesus to raise them back to life again and He will.

The anonymous woman might want to say to us that Jesus cares for us in this way … if you are sick, pray to Jesus believing He will heal you and you will be healed.

Now, while that is what Jesus did for them in that specific situation, at that specific time, for specific reasons and it was recorded here in the Bible … Jesus doesn’t say everyone else can expect that to happen to them does He?

We know for sure that Jairus’ daughter died again and left this earth … as did Jairus and his wife … as did the woman. They all succumbed to something and died probably with faith in Jesus.

And to state the obvious, Jesus didn’t heal them again or raise them back to life again then, even if they still faith had appealed to their previous experiences.

And that doesn’t mean that Jesus cared any less than when He did heal and raise them back to life.

That is the normal way of life that God has set up in this fallen world.

When it comes to the gospels, we must be very careful how we understand and apply what Jesus did while He was on earth in the flesh with specific people in specific situations for specific reasons … to ourselves after Jesus is no longer with us in the flesh on this earth.

If we are not careful with understanding that, we can cause a lot of heartache created by false expectations and false teaching.

Careful understanding of the gospels is always about context and where the gospel is taking us to in our understanding of who Jesus is and what He came to do.

I have already made the point that we can’t understand this passage to be saying that if we had enough faith we will always be healed from sickness and our loved ones raised from the dead. That’s obvious.

So, to understand how to apply this passage to us we must go forward to the central point of why Jesus was on earth, His work in His death and resurrection. Which the miracles in this passage were leading up to anyway in showing us that Jesus is Lord of life and death.

And it is in His death and resurrection that Jesus’ love and care for us is best displayed by:

• Providing so much more than the healing of sickness … providing the healing of our souls from sin. “By His wounds you have been healed”, in the context of Isaiah 53 where it was first stated, is talking about our permanent healing from sin by Jesus on the cross.
• Providing so much more than if we died and were raised to life again, only to die again … providing spiritual life instead of the spiritual death we are born with because of sin. So that when we do die, we go to Jesus in heaven and then on the new earth for eternity.

These miracles of Jesus in our passage, are only the beginning of us understanding that Jesus is the Lord of life and death with the power to heal and provide life in an even more powerfully miraculous way than what Jairus and the woman experienced.

The great thing about this specific passage is that it helps us deal with the anguish of suffering when it seems like the Lord of life and death is slow in coming to our rescue in the suffering of this world, almost like He doesn’t care.

• Some people have to wait 12 years for healing
• Others feel like God is more interested in helping others and not them

But don’t fear, He does care. He might raise your loved one from the dead or He may leave them in their far better condition in heaven (if they have been saved by Jesus).

He might heal you (He still does that today – no question on my part). But eventually we will all succumb to something.

But for now, our lives will include suffering, as it did for Jesus on this earth.

But wonderfully even our suffering God uses for our good.

• God tells us in Romans 8: 28 – 29 that everything in this life (even our suffering) He is using for our good, which is to make us more like Jesus.
• God explains how that works in Romans 5: 3 – 5 when He says suffering (with the help of His Spirit and with our faith) produces perseverance. Perseverance produces character. Character produces hope and a deeper experience of God’s love.
• God also tells us in 2 Corinthians 4: 17 that our suffering (when persevered with faith) is somehow achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs it.

And then of course when we do “fall asleep” as death is described elsewhere in the NT too, we will (beyond this world) experience the perfect fulfilment of Jesus’ care for us forever.

Jesus made sure of that in what He did in His death and resurrection. His Holy Spirit even made sure we had the faith to benefit from that.

Never fear that Jesus doesn’t care for you. Even if you struggle with Jesus’ timing. He always does and we will all get it one day.

Questions:

A fellow Christians comes to you having read Mark 5: 21 – 43, and they say to you that Jesus wants us all to know that if we have enough faith, He will heal us of all sicknesses and raise our loved ones from the dead so they can be with us again. Based on Sunday morning’s message on the same passage, what would you say to them and why?