Today’s passage is Luke 8:40-56. Jairus, a ruler of the synagogue, asked Jesus to heal his dying daughter. As he went with Jairus a crowd pressed around him. A woman who’d been hemorrhaging for 12 years touched Jesus’ cloak and was healed. Jesus asked who’d touched him, she confessed, and he confirmed her healing. Although Jairus’s daughter was dead, Jesus resurrected her.
Why did the crowd not mind that Jesus was going to visit one of the rulers instead of staying with them?
What makes daughters important?
Both Jairus and the bleeding woman were people of desperation and expectation.
The crowd had a simple faith that Jesus would come back across the lake.
They didn’t know when, but they were expecting him.
In that crowd Jairus and the bleeding woman did not have a simple faith. They were desperate for healing. Jesus was their last hope.
The bleeding woman fought her way through the crowd just to touch Jesus’ cloak.
It must have been like the subway crowd at rush hour.
But the woman was determined.
She was not going to miss that train!
The crowd was not only her enemy, it was also her friend because she was anonymous in the shame of her condition in the press of all those bodies.
But Jesus’ call to her (45) took her out of her shame, out of her anonymity and into the light and peace of his love, a daughter of God.
“Daughter,” he said to her, “your faith has healed you. Go in peace” (48).
To Jairus, Jesus says, “Do not be afraid; just believe” (50).
Jairus likely told himself that on the way to get Jesus.
But then his daughter dies while Jesus is on the way to his daughter.
Now Jesus says it to him. He has to go through a houseful of mourners to get to his daughter that Jesus says is only sleeping.
Like the bleeding woman, he has to fight through a crowd of people and doubts and fears.
Jesus tells the girl to wake up as is she really is asleep and not dead from some malady, “My child, get up!”(54).
I have a daughter near the same age as Jairus’s daughter.
She just turned 13.
She is coming to live with me for a few months this fall and go to my school.
Although I talk to her regularly and visit her every year, we have not lived with each other since she was 6 months old.
I hope for many things during her visit, especially that she will meet Jesus, but I am afraid, just like Jairus because my daughter is a stranger to the way I live.
She knows me but she doesn’t know me at the same time.
Like the bleeding woman, time has been a crowd of years keeping us apart, keeping us unknown to each other at a deep level.
My sinful hope and desire made her in the first place and the result of my sins tore us apart, leaving a slow bleeding of 12 years that has not healed.
Now she will live with me, a God-given gift of love.
Like the crowd waiting at the shore, I am expecting Jesus.
Like the bleeding woman, I am reaching out for a healing.
Like Jairus, I am afraid. God have mercy.
Application: Pray my daily prayer for my daughter more intensely, more expectantly.
Lord, I pray you meet my daughter when she arrives.
