While He Was Still Speaking

The whole shore had been waiting for him.

Luke says it plainly. When Jesus returned, the crowd welcomed Him, for they had all been waiting for Him. Every one of them had a reason to be there. Some had come to watch. Some had come for help. One of them had a little girl at home who was dying.

His name was Jairus, and he led a synagogue. In his town that made him somebody. On the shore that day he went down on the ground in front of all of them. A synagogue leader named Jairus arrived, and seeing Jesus, he fell at His feet and pleaded with Him urgently, “My little daughter is near death. Please come and place Your hands on her, so that she will be healed and live.”

Luke adds that she was his only daughter, who was about twelve.

So Jesus went with him.

That’s the whole answer. No questions, no conditions. He turned and started walking toward the house, and the crowd went with them, pressing in on every side.

Then, on the way, he stopped.

Someone in the crowd had touched his cloak. A woman, sick for years, who had spent everything she had on doctors and only gotten worse. She was healed the moment she touched him, and he knew it, and he would not move on until he found her. But He kept looking around to see who had done this. She came forward, shaking, and told him the whole story in front of everybody. He listened to all of it. Her story belongs to her, and it was worth every minute he gave it.

But this chapter is standing a few feet away, next to the father.

The text doesn’t say a word about what Jairus did while he waited. It doesn’t say whether he spoke, or kept his peace, or looked back toward the house. It only puts him there, beside the man who had agreed to come, while a crowd stood still and a stranger told her story. Anyone who has ever sat in a waiting room can fill in what those minutes are like. The text leaves it unfilled, and so will this.

What can be said is this. Jesus kept him close. He didn’t send Jairus home to wait. He didn’t say he’d come by later. He stopped with Jairus still at his side.

While He was still speaking, messengers from the house of Jairus arrived and said, “Your daughter is dead; why bother the Teacher anymore?”

It’s the sentence every person who has ever waited for someone is afraid of. It came on the road, in public, from people who knew the house.

It’s worth being fair to the men who brought it. They had walked out from a house full of grief to find their master in a crowd. They had seen what they had seen. And their question, why bother the Teacher anymore, sounds less like a sneer than like people trying to spare everyone a trip that could no longer do any good. They thought it was over, and they said so to the one man who most needed to know.

Then comes the line the whole chapter turns on.

But Jesus overheard their conversation and said to Jairus, “Do not be afraid; just believe.”

He overheard it. The message wasn’t brought to him. It was brought to the father, and Jesus heard it because he was standing right there. The stop on the road hadn’t sent him somewhere else. When the worst news of Jairus’s life arrived, the one he’d been waiting on was close enough to hear it at the same moment he did, and he spoke straight to the father.

Mark never gives Jairus’s answer. He only shows where Jairus went next. He kept walking toward the house.

Mark gives that walk no lines at all. This is reading between them: it was the same road, with the crowd now sent back, toward a house where, by every account he’d just been given, there was nothing left to do. He went anyway, and the one who had said just believe went with him.

Jesus let only three of his friends come the rest of the way: Peter, James, and John. At the house the mourners had already started. Jesus saw the commotion and the people weeping and wailing loudly.

He went in and asked why they were weeping. The child is not dead, but asleep.

And they laughed at Him.

That laughter is easy to judge, and there’s no need to. Luke explains it in a few words. They laughed, knowing that she was dead. These were people who had been in the room. They had seen her stop breathing. Their grief was real, and it had already moved on to what grief does next, the wailing, the arrangements. A stranger at the door saying she was only asleep sounded like a man who didn’t understand what had happened.

He didn’t argue with them. After He had put them all outside, He took the child’s father and mother and His own companions, and went in to see the child.

A handful of people and a little girl in a quiet room.

Taking her by the hand, Jesus said, “Talitha koum!” which means, “Little girl, I say to you, get up!”

Mark keeps the words in the language Jesus actually spoke, Aramaic, the everyday tongue of Galilee, and then translates them for readers who didn’t know it. He did that only a handful of times in his whole book. It’s the closest a reader gets to hearing the sound of his voice, and what it says is little girl.

Immediately the girl got up and began to walk around. Her parents were beside themselves. And then Jesus gave one more instruction, the last thing he says in the story.

He told them to give her something to eat.

Not a speech about what had happened. Not an explanation. A plate.

This book has already told the stories of two people whose waiting did not end like this one. Rizpah kept watch over sons who never got up. David cried out over a son he never saw again. Plenty of people reading this have sat in a quiet room and nobody stood up. This chapter doesn’t promise anyone a miracle, and it would be wrong to.

What the record does show is something smaller, and it holds even when the ending is different.

A delay on the road is not the end of the road. When the bad news came, Jairus wasn’t alone with it. The one he’d been waiting on was still walking beside him.

Where this meets your week

When help goes to someone else first. Maybe it feels like every prayer gets answered but yours. A friend’s child came home. A neighbor’s marriage mended. Jesus stopped on the road for someone else, and nothing in the story says he had forgotten the man standing next to him. If someone else’s good news has been hard to hear lately, send them one honest line this week saying you’re glad. You can be glad for them and still be waiting.

When the news comes on the road. A phone call. A message from someone who knows them. Things are worse, and someone kindly suggests it may be time to stop hoping out loud. The messengers meant well, and Jesus answered with a few plain words to the father, not a rebuttal to them. Before you decide what the news means, don’t turn around. Do the next ordinary thing you were already going to do for the one you’re waiting for.

When the people at the house have stopped hoping. Some of the people closest to you have grieved already, and when you talk as if the story isn’t over, they look at you the way the mourners looked at the stranger at the door. You don’t have to argue them out of it. Jesus didn’t. Choose the two or three people you can be honest with about your hope, and keep it with them.

Have something ready to eat.

When Jesus finally gave an instruction about the girl, it wasn’t to talk with her about where she’d been. It was to feed her. Should the one you’re waiting for ever walk in, the first thing they need from you may be the same. This week, find out or remember the thing they always liked to eat, and keep it in the house. A box of their cereal, the coffee they drink, the ingredients for the one dish they used to ask for. Don’t tell anybody why it’s there.

If the door opens, you won’t have to think about what to say first. You’ll have something to put in front of them.

He took the girl by the hand and spoke to her in the language of her own kitchen. Little girl, I say to you, get up!

Then, while her parents were still standing there astonished, he turned to them and told them to give her something to eat.