Mark 5:21-43

Mark 5:21

The Daughter of Jairus.

This story shows us:

I. The Heart of Jesus. Many are anxious to find out what the face of Jesus was like, but our concern should be to know how His heart feels towards us. If you lay your hand upon any page in the gospels, you will feel the throbbings of a heart full of wonderful pity for all sinners and sufferers. All His sayings and doings, His death and resurrection, reveal a loving kindness to which there are no bounds. As the great ocean opens its bosom to receive all the rivers, so Christ's bosom is open for all the sorrows of men. The heart of Jesus to you is the very same as it was in the house of Jairus. He is the same yesterday, today, and for ever.

II. The Hand of Jesus. It touches the sick and dead; it is full of power. With a mere wish, with a word at a distance, He could have healed this girl; but it was usually His way to touch those He healed. He did more than touch this girl; He firmly grasped her with His warm human hand, and she arose. He became a man, our kinsman and elder brother, that He might be near enough to touch us fully, and to touch us always.

III. The Healing of Jesus. This girl must have had strange feelings when her soul returned to the body it had recently forsaken. We are not told that she was startled or frightened. Perhaps she could say about her new life what Dr. Malan of Geneva said about his: "I was awakened as a mother awakens her child with a kiss," with all the power of God and with gentleness more than a mother's, Christ by touch and voice awoke the girl, and welcomed her back to life. Jesus has more than a touch, a tear and a kind word to give to our misery. His name declares the work to which He gave himself on earth, and gives Himself still in heaven. Jesus means healer. Nor is He like the healers in our hospitals, who must sometimes leave the healed to starve and to find hunger as cruel as disease. Christ did not heal and then leave this girl: He helped her up, and got her food. He preserves and strengthens for ever the life He gives to the soul. About the after history of this girl we are told nothing. But we are sure that she loved her healer while she had being. We readily believe that she was made Christ's by every tie of gratitude. And so our religion is a religion of gratitude for the greatest and freest favours. It is, therefore, a religion of love and joy.

J. Wells, Bible Children,p. 199.

Reference: Mark 5:21. H. M. Luckock, Footprints of the Son of Man,p. 109.