Sermon Transcript
When Jesus had again crossed over by boat to the other side of the lake, a large crowd gathered around him. While he was by the lake. Then one of the synagogue leaders named Jairus came, and when he saw Jesus, he fell at his feet. He pleaded earnestly with him, my little daughter is dying. Please come and put your hands on her so that she will be healed and live.
So Jesus went with him. A large crowd followed and pressed around him, and a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for 12 years. She had suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors and had spent all she had, yet instead of getting better, she grew worse. When she heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, because she thought, if I just touch his clothes, I will be healed. Immediately her bleeding stopped, and she felt in her body that she was free from her suffering.
At once Jesus realized that power had gone out from him. He turned around in the crowd and asked, who touched my clothes? You see the people crowding against you, his disciple answered, and yet you can ask, who touched me? But Jesus kept looking around to see who had done it. Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell at his feet and, trembling with fear, told him the whole truth.
He said to her, Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering. While Jesus was still speaking, some people came from the house of Jairus, the synagogue leader. Your daughter is dead, they said. Why bother the teacher anymore?
Overhearing what they said, Jesus told him, Don’t be afraid, just believe. He did not let anyone follow him except Peter, James, and John, the brother of James. When they came to the house of the synagogue leader, Jesus saw a commotion, people crying and wailing loudly. He went in and said to them, why all this commotion and wailing? The child is not dead but asleep.
But they laughed at him. After he put them all out, he took the child’s father and mother and the disciples who were with him and went in where the, where the child was. He took her by the hand and said to her, Talitha koum, which means, little girl, I say to you, get up. Immediately the girl stood up and began to walk around. She was 12 years old.
At this they were completely astonished. He gave strict orders not to let anyone know about this and told them to give her something to eat.
Thank you, Johanna. Well, we can put ourselves in this woman’s shoes. Let’s do that. We don’t know her name. The Gospel of Mark doesn’t tell us.
We just know she had an incurable disease, and the nonstop bleeding that she experienced would likely have made her anemic and, of course, physically exhausted, emotionally exhausted. The bleeding also would make her socially unacceptable. And ceremonially unclean. You see, according to the Old Testament law in Leviticus chapter 15, verses 25 to 27, if you had her kind of condition, you had to stay away from other people. And so marriage, out of the question.
Childbearing, out of the question. Shaking someone’s hand, a pat on the back, a kiss on the cheek, out of the question. Eating with others, Couldn’t do that.
Family and friends, if she had any left, would have had to stay away from her. And she wouldn’t have even been allowed near the synagogue because of her, quote, uncleanness. So she’s being isolated from the faith community, and she’s being prevented from being able to worship God publicly. And on top of these things, she has a financial issue. Issue.
She spent all of her money trying to solve this issue that nobody else could figure out. Sounds like doctors that had their ideas, and they each had their own remedies and their diagnoses, and she tried them all just trying to figure this out. And yet what she’s left with is she’s stuck with the bill, and she’s not any better.
This woman is desperate. She’s hurting physically, she’s hurting emotionally, she’s hurting socially, she’s hurting financially, and this is all happening over the course of 12 years nonstop.
Now we put ourselves in his shoes. You can imagine as a caring parent that he put a chair beside his daughter’s bed and watches as she just lays there and he can’t do anything anything about her situation. Maybe he was sitting there for hours, maybe for days, maybe for months, maybe longer. But however long it actually was, it probably felt a lot longer to him in his hopelessness and in his helplessness. And so, we can imagine he probably at times would get up from the chair, walk around, stretch out his legs, walk around the room, head over to the synagogue where he was one of the leaders, and he would pray.
And yet, like any concerned parent, would find himself right back in that chair again. And he’s close enough to be able to see her and watch as everything’s unfolding, but it’s far enough away that he can’t again do anything about it. You can imagine this guy had been raised with the idea that a dad’s job is to provide and to protect and to care, and now he can’t seem to do any of these things at all. And so he’s watching as her neighbors are coming over. They’re bringing their remedies.
They’re bringing their meals. They’re bringing their advice. And he’s watching as her health continues to spiral downward. He’s watching as she fades in and out of unconsciousness, as her fever continues. She can’t eat.
She’s losing weight. She’s floating basically back in and out of consciousness, and time is running out, and he can’t do anything about it. Nevertheless, we can imagine, like a good man of faith, he put on a good show and a good face in front of others, telling people it’ll be okay. But inside, he’s probably not very sure.
The woman in this scripture and the man in this scripture are a really interesting combination. They have no relation to each other as far as we can tell. There’d be no reason that they would know each other at all. He’s a man in a society in which men had all of the power. She’s a woman.
He’s likely rich. She’s undoubtedly poor. One’s a respected pillar and community influencer in the community. He’s respected. She’s rejected.
He’s honored. She’s ashamed. One’s the leader of a synagogue. The other one wouldn’t even be allowed near the synagogue. One has a 12-year-old daughter who has a sickness that she’s dying from.
The other one has a 12-year-old disease and is suffering greatly from it. So despite their differences though, I think we can see some similarities between these 2 disparate people, right? They’re both incredibly in dire situations.
They both encounter Jesus and are so humbled that they throw themselves at his feet. And they both seem to have absolute trust and confidence that they’re coming to the one who can actually do something about their situation.
And so in the middle of these dire, desperate circumstances, Jesus says something in verse 36. That’s really the core issue at the heart of this passage. The message of Jesus to Jairus, the synagogue leader, and the message of Jesus to you and me this morning. In verse 36, Jesus says, don’t be afraid.
Don’t be afraid of a 12-year-old disease that’s incurable? Don’t be afraid that your daughter is dying? Don’t be afraid, he says. It’s as if he’s saying, trust me.
Do you believe that I have all of this under control? I think I know what I’m doing. Do you trust me?
I don’t know about you, but I’ll just confess that learning to trust God, that he’s got the whole situation under control, that God is able to do all things, that God knows what he’s doing, it’s really difficult. It times, is it not? It’s hard enough for us to trust other people. We have false advertisements and we hear politicians make false promises and we see business deals go awry. We see marriage vows broken.
We see commitments that go unfulfilled. And so we tend to have our guard up around other people and then we project that lack of trust onto God. I want us to take a few moments this morning and for us to just— can we just be honest with each other and acknowledge we struggle to trust. We struggle to trust God.
And I want us to see 3 tests of trust that are in this passage that we’re going to face all the time when we’re tested to trust not only God in a vague, general sense, as if everything’s going well, like we just sang, yes, I trust you.
But when everything is falling apart, Do you trust Him? Do I trust Him? To trust Him not just at a general level, but at a personal level, to say He cares for us individually. And not just when it looks like everything is going wrong, but when everything is going wrong. And not just when you’re dealing with a crisis, but when you’re dealing with an utter catastrophe like these folks.
When, not if, when those seasons come, And some of you are in that right now. I know that. I know that when those times come, we have to know that we can trust God. So to help us grow in our own ability to trust God, let’s take a closer look at this passage and look at the 3 tests of trust that we see in this passage, and then what kind of lessons that we can be able to learn as a result of these tests. So one of these tests that I see in this passage that we’re inevitably going to face is, number one, trusting God’s power, trusting in God’s omnipotence, His ability.
And here is the test: do you believe that God can save and rescue anybody in any situation, that nobody is a lost cause to God? Do you believe that God has power over all things? Do you trust that nothing is too hard for him? Do you believe that for yourself? Do you believe that for other people?
That’s precisely where our faith gets tested. And one of the reasons I think why this is such a test for me, and perhaps for you, is because without even recognizing it, if you’re a follower of Jesus, for many of us over time we eventually We become more and more cynical. We become cynics. We just come to a place where we stop believing in the power of God to change people or to change our circumstances. We become like the mourners at Jairus’ house, these professional mourners who are mourning and they’re weeping, and then Jesus says something ludicrous, and what do they do?
They laugh at Him. That’s us. So we condition ourselves, I think, just to protect ourselves, to not hope too much. Pray too boldly. I’m not going to have too high of expectations of God to come through so that I don’t end up being disappointed and then I don’t look foolish.
I think it’s a coincidence that this passage, though, comes where it does in the Gospel of Mark, because we’ve been spending time in this series in the Gospel of Mark over the last several weeks, and we’ve seen firsthand how unlimited God’s power is. We, of course, celebrated Easter last week, and so we kind of fast-forwarded to the end of, of the Gospel of Mark, but the ultimate display of God’s power of raising Jesus from the dead, of course. But in terms of our study in the Gospel of Mark, we’ve seen at the end of chapter 4, or we will see because we’re going to come back to it, that there’s a story about Jesus being able to calm a storm. For goodness’ sake, with just a word. We also studied in chapter 5 a few weeks ago about a man who is plagued by a legion of demons, and nobody can do anything about it, and they’re no match for Jesus.
And then we have these 2 miracle stories today that are just sort of pancaked all together. And the point that is being made— and so often people are like, why does Scripture seem to repeat itself? It’s because we don’t get it the first time. We’re not always listening. So we put all these things together.
We need to hear it. We need to pay attention. What God is trying to say to us is that when Jesus shows up, everything changes.
Do you know anybody else who can control the weather? I don’t. Do you know anybody else who can control wind and waves? Who has that kind of power over demonic forces? Who has the ability to destroy incurable disease?
Disease, to raise the dead? Only Jesus. Why? Because he’s the Son of God. He’s not simply a human.
He is fully God as well as fully man, and he has absolute and total authority as God over anything and everything.
And that’s what you and I are going to be tested to trust again and again and again. And you may be tested right now to trust. God’s saying, do you trust me? Do you trust that I’m able?
The synagogue leader, the seemingly powerful man, is rendered powerless by his daughter’s condition. And all of us can probably relate to that, where you can’t legislate against certain problems, you can’t outspend certain problems, you can’t outrun certain problems. That’s where he is. You can be wealthy, you can be prominent, you can have credentials, You can be resourceful, and sometimes it doesn’t make any difference. And that’s so frustrating.
And so, confronted with his powerlessness, Jairus comes to Jesus. And many of his colleagues had already decided they didn’t like Jesus at this point. They hated him. Some of them were already beginning to plot about how to kill Jesus. Jairus is learning to trust Jesus.
And so, Jairus pleads with Jesus earnestly to come heal my daughter. But as we see as the story goes along, it gets more complicated because Jairus is going to have to not only trust that Jesus can heal, he’s going to have to trust that Jesus can raise the dead.
He’s not just going to have to trust Jesus with his daughter’s life, he’s going to have to trust her with her death.
He’s going to need to trust that it’s just as easy for Jesus to bring somebody back from the dead as it is for you and me to walk wake somebody up.
What about the woman with the hemorrhage? Can you imagine her trembling in that crowd? She’s never in a crowd. She couldn’t go near crowds. But now she’s decided to do the unthinkable, head down, walking towards Jesus, hoping nobody else sees her, comes up behind him, reaches out her hand, probably shaking like a leaf, and she touches his garment.
This woman is completely desperate, but she’s also amazingly confident.
She knows that Jesus is able, and she trusts his power. Her touch is not just the touch of a finger. Her touch is a touch of trust and a touch of faith. We can safely presume— think about this— that there were other people in the crowd who physically bumped into Jesus that day. We don’t read about any of them getting healed.
We don’t read about any of them having a miracle done. Jesus’ clothes are not supernatural or miraculous or magical. So what was the difference? Wasn’t it her childlike trust? I mean, Jesus said it was.
Her cure was not simply because she touched him. Her cure was part and parcel because she trusted him. Of course, ultimately, she was cured by God’s benevolent power. Anytime somebody’s healed, it’s because of God’s benevolent power. But God’s power in this situation did not operate in a vacuum, absent her own desire to work her way in trust through the crowd to come up behind Jesus and say, I’m going for it.
Let’s be clear. It’s not faith by itself that makes the difference.
Difference. It’s not being optimistic. It’s not having a positive outlook that makes the difference. In this case, it’s the object of one’s faith.
Faith without the right object is meaningless, and the object of our faith has to be Jesus, period. It’s all about him, believing who he is, believing who he claims himself to be, trusting his character, trusting his power. And friends, that, that’s the test for you and for me, is it not? There’s a second test here, and this is as if the first one wasn’t hard enough. Here’s another test we see in this passage that we’re going to have to face again and again.
Second is trusting in God’s timing.
Trusting in God’s timing. I hate this one.
I mean, it doesn’t seem like Jesus is in much of a hurry here, does it? I think we can safely assume that Jairus, the disciples were with Jesus, and the crowd is pressing around him, and then the woman with the bleeding touches Jesus, and Jesus stops to have a conversation.
Look, this woman had a chronic problem that had been going on for 12 years. It is, of course, a serious thing. Couldn’t she have waited a little bit longer for Jesus to go to Jairus’ house, heal the girl, and then come back?
If an emergency room physician has a woman come in with a chronic ongoing problem that could wait a few more minutes, another couple of hours maybe, and then a girl comes in who is just about to die, and the girl ends up dying because you chose to focus on the needs of the woman and to have a conversation with her, what’s going to happen?
I would imagine some attorneys are going to get involved.
Or imagine that you need to go into an ambulance. The ambulance shows up and you’ve got some critical health emergency. And so you get into the ambulance. It’s screaming down the road. The sirens are blaring.
And the driver says, hey, if you don’t mind, I just want to pop into Starbucks here for a moment. Can I get you anything? Your chocolate croissant, maybe a latte or anything?
It is that kind of feeling that Jairus has to have been having. And if you and I had been there when Jesus stopped to talk with this woman, you and I would have undoubtedly said, Jesus, what are you doing? You, you can’t stop right now. You don’t have time. There’s something more urgent going on here.
You’ve got to hurry. And then when Jairus’s worst fears are realized and his daughter dies because Jesus is schmoozing with the crowd a little bit, Jesus turns and has the audacity to say, don’t be afraid.
Look, here’s the question for us: do you trust when God seems to be delayed in acting? Acting and answering you? Do you trust him when his timing is awful? Here’s what I know. I think some of you know this too.
God’s grace and his work and his timing almost never seem to operate on our schedules.
We all have our own idea of, okay, this is the right time, not later, now, this is the time. But here’s what I also know. Whenever you and I insist on imposing our own sense of timing on God, we’re going to struggle to trust him and to believe that he knows what he’s doing. So I ask this question: is it possible, is it possible that whenever God seems to be delayed in acting, that he’s doing it maybe for some crucial reason that you and I don’t know just yet? We don’t have all of the facts.
We haven’t figured it out. Is it possible that God has some facts that you and I don’t yet know? If so, would God say to you and me, trust me?
Now in this story, we have the luxury of having some facts. We have hindsight. We can look back to— Jairus didn’t know these things, and so let’s give him a little break here. He didn’t yet know about Jesus’ plan to capitalize on the moment when the woman came up to Him, and she’s standing right in front of Him, and He’s like, let’s do this now. He’s going to transform her life.
He’s going to heal her. He’s going to turn her into a lifelong follower. So, He’s going to capitalize on that. We also— Jairus didn’t know that Jesus’ intention was to do something more than just simply cure a fever. He’s planning to do something even greater.
Jairus just didn’t know all of that. Now, I in no way want to minimize whatever you have gone through or are going through. Those of you who know me know I’m not going to minimize that.
I in no way want to provide shallow pat answers that just promise everything will turn out the way that you want it to. Just trust, just trust, just trust. I can only speak for myself in recognizing that there are times when God delays acting in my life, and I find this out in hindsight, insight, in that a lot of my struggle in those moments to trust has been because of my own limited perspective and maybe even arrogance— or not maybe, yes, definitely arrogance— to question whether God knows what he’s doing about how my life should be going, as if I could possibly begin to have an idea of those things. And so God says to me in those moments, and perhaps to some of you, if it looks to you like I’m doing something or not doing something that doesn’t make much sense to you and that the timing is off, trust me. Trust that I am able.
Trust that I am working on your behalf, always working. Trust that I am wise. Trust that I am good. Trust that I have grace that is enough for you. It’s sufficient.
And so you have to trust my timing as well. Trust me. Those are the first 2 tests of trust. We could just stop there, but I got a 3rd one.
And that test is that we’re all going to face every day is third, learning to trust in God’s merciful love.
This is really the ultimate test, is it not? God, do you love me? Do you really love me? I just want to point out 3 brief, simple aspects of God’s mercy, God’s tenderness, God’s love that is on display in this passage.
Notice first that Jairus, as I’ve pointed out, is a man at the very top of the social food chain in his day, and the woman with the hemorrhage is at the very bottom. She has zero social capital. And yet look how Jesus just stops what he’s doing, giving her his full, undivided time and attention, and treats her like nobody else has in the middle of a chaotic crowd. Crowd as if there’s nobody else in the world but her, and then he makes the civic and religious leader, in his moment of greatest need, wait.
Why does Jesus do this?
It’s a pattern, if you read the scriptures, that we see all throughout the Gospels. Over and over and over again, we have people matched up like a Pharisee or a religious leader who’s paired up with, say, I don’t know, a tax collector or an adulterer. Or we have a person in a position of power and influence who is paired up with somebody who is in a position of desperation and weakness. Or we have a social, racial, economic outsider who is paired up with a social, racial, economic outsider. And invariably what happens again and again and again, Jesus connects with the outsider.
Always.
He doesn’t look at people based on their status or in the community, and instead seems to be able to be more attracted to the people that you and I would least expect him to connect with. Why? Because 1 Corinthians 1 tells us God chooses the foolish things of the world. World, things you and I would say are foolish, God chooses them to shame the wise. And God chooses the things that you and I might say are weak, He chooses the weak things to shame the strong.
And so, the point for us is that we can absolutely trust God because no matter how messy we are, no matter how deep our mess, no matter However many years the mess has been going on, it is not too much for God to handle. And so, when you reach out to Him in trust and in faith, He responds how? In merciful love, like a parent to his child. We can always come to Him, no matter who we are, no matter what we’ve done. It’s God’s mercy on display in this passage.
Notice also how incredibly tender that Jesus is in this passage. You might have skipped over this. I love, though, how Jesus refers to the woman with the hemorrhage in verse 34. Did you notice it? He calls her daughter.
Daughter. This is the only instance in Scripture in which we have record of that Jesus referred to somebody in that way. Must have been intentional. More than that, how many times do you think anybody in her life had referred to her as daughter? If at all, it’d probably been several years.
Jesus’ tenderness and his mercy and his love. And then notice Jesus’ tenderness and his mercy and his love when he goes in to see Jairus’ daughter. It’s not normally like Mark the writer, if you’ve been paying attention in the Gospel of Mark for him to give us specific, like, details or specific Aramaic words that Jesus would use. Everything is so fast-paced in Mark, it’s Jesus going from one place to the next, and it’s like there’s not really a whole lot of details. Not here, though.
For whatever reason, Mark includes what Jesus said to the child, Talitha koum. Now, Talitha, as explained to us in the reading, literally means little girl. Culturally, though, Talitha was a bit of a pet name. It’s a term of endearment, a nickname that you would use as a parent with a child with a great deal of affection.
Tim Keller describes how that word Talitha might be more accurately translated as something along the lines of honey, sweetheart.
The second Aramaic word that Jesus used, koum, K-O-U-M, It just means wake up. Jesus is essentially doing what parents have done with little kids for years. He’s doing what I would be doing with my granddaughter, taking her by the hand, gently saying, Honey, sweetheart, it’s time to get up.
Parents throughout Israel had probably used those exact same words that very morning to wake up their own children. And then after she gets up, what does a tender parent do? Pays attention enough to the details to say, this girl’s hungry. Let’s get her something to eat.
Jesus’ power on display here is not just raw power. It’s tender power. Power that notices small details. Power that focuses on the individual. And so, the same Jesus who with his words commands the storm to be still and for demons to leave a man speaks with such kindness and mercy that he grabs a little girl by the hand, says, honey, get up.
He’s that powerful and he’s that loving. Do you trust that? If we’re still not convinced that we can trust God’s merciful love, though we have a detail in verse 30 that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to us, but I want to point out that I think it’s pointing towards something else much, much larger. In verse 30, it says Jesus realized when the woman touched him that power had left him. It had gone out from him.
Now, it might not be as obvious at first reading, but I want to suggest that that picture is actually a small picture of a much larger ultimate example of Jesus’ mercy and love on display by going to the cross to pay the penalty for our sins. How so? What do I mean? Well, what verse 30 is pointing us toward is some kind of an exchange that takes place by suggesting that in order for this woman to be made strong, Jesus had to be willing to be made weak.
2 Corinthians 13:4 essentially tells us the same thing, that when Jesus was crucified, in weakness, it enabled us to live in God’s power. In other words, Jesus became weak so that we could become strong.
Jesus was afflicted so that we could be made whole and healed.
And Jesus died so that you and I could have eternal life. Why? All out of mercy and love for us. I said this on our Good Friday service. I’ll say it again.
If you and I are ever, friends, tempted to doubt that God loves us, look to the cross.
Look to the cross. Look what Jesus did for us. He paid the penalty for our sins. He paid the debt that we could never pay. He substituted himself for us, and our response should be, Gratitude and trust.
Now, these 2 stories that we looked at today might lead some to conclude, so Steve, are you saying that if I just trust in Jesus, if I just trust his power, if I trust his timing and trust his love, that that means I’m going to be delivered from all of the different trials in my life? All I have to do is just trust. Is that what you’re saying, Steve? And my answer to that would be no. No, that’s not what I’m saying.
That’s not what this passage means, and it’s not what the Bible teaches, that if you just trust in Jesus, you’ll never experience hardship. That, that would be false teaching. That would be what we would refer to perhaps in our day as the prosperity gospel, which by the way is no gospel at all.
The good news of the real gospel, the great news is far better than just being healed of your diseases in this life. The gospel is not that God heals you and me of sickness now, or we can be rid of the painful conditions of this world. The great news of the gospel is that God cleanses us of our sins forever and restores us to our Creator for all eternity if we put our trust in Him, not in a general sense, but specifically Jesus, trusting him as our sin substitute. That’s what we call salvation. I know that’s a very churchy word, but that’s really what salvation is, is it not?
Salvation is essentially trust. Trust not in just a vague sense, but trust specifically in Jesus’ claims about himself and about his ability to save. And the moment that you or I put our trust in those things, you’re saved. You have salvation.
You don’t have to conjure up fancy words. You don’t have to have some deeply spiritual moment. It’s simply recognizing that I need to trust Jesus. Trust him and put my trust in him to rescue and to save me. So look, I don’t have all the answers.
Answers as to why God may be placing you in a desperate circumstance, my heart breaks with you and I’d love to pray with you about those things.
For me, I guess part of it is because perhaps He’s trying to teach us to learn to trust Him more above anything or anyone else.
And that we’ve got to trust Him enough to reach out to Him in our time of need and to keep reaching out, keep trusting, keep calling him. So my exhortation to us is for us to not lean on our own understanding, to not lean on our own resourcefulness. Let’s not lean on our own timing.
Let’s not lean on our own merit. Instead, look to him and trust him and witness just how powerful and sufficient and wise and loving and merciful and good that he is. Would you pray with me?
Lord, I thank you for the reminder in this familiar passage of your attention to detail, your concern for the hurting, your desire for us to have relationship with you, that you know our name and you know our needs far better than we know them.
I pray your peace over this room, that individually and collectively you would bring encouragement and help, Lord, to those who may be struggling to trust right now. As we sang earlier, help us to trust you more. Increase our trust.
Thank you, Father, for your patience with us.
Thank you for loving us that you’d send your Son Jesus to die for us. I pray that, Lord, we would trust you as we leave this place this morning and trust you this week and trust you as we move into the seasons of life that may bring challenges. May we trust you.
You. Pray all these things in the name of Jesus. Amen.
