Raising the Dead: A Meditation on Mark 5

The story of Jesus raising Jairus’ daughter from the dead serves to teach us many things, not least of which is the relationship between us and Jesus.  Jairus, a leader of the synagogue, had a 12 year old daughter who was sick and dying.  As a father of daughters whom I love greatly, I can appreciate the pain and grief that must have passed through Jairus as he saw his beloved child suffering under the weight of her fatal disease—a sight many parents have had to see over the millennia.  I am thankful beyond words that I have not had to watch the death of my own children, but I know many who have, and their torment is beyond reckoning.  God gives us children, gives us a capacity to love them more than ourselves, and yet sometimes permits us to suffer with them as they die.  No parent wants to bury their own children, but in the greatest of sadness, far too many have had to do so.

Death, especially the death of children, is a lamentable sign of the broken world in which we live.  It is easier, perhaps, for us to countenance the death of heroes who perish in triumphant struggle against evil; the death of horrific villains who finally face justice for their crimes; the death of the aged who have walked many miles in their now failing bodies.  But it is far harder for us to countenance the death of the young, the vulnerable, and the innocent.  We look upon the reports of thousands of children kidnapped by ISIS only to be butchered, tortured, or sold into slavery, and we cannot bear the vision nor the thought of such horror.  We see in the evening news the abuse and murder of children in every city in America, even as we protect in our laws the facilities which have murdered countless millions of unborn children.  We see the insanity of a murderous bigot who steps into a Charleston church, murdering all he can, while a child plays dead at his grandmother’s instruction to avoid the gunman’s gaze.  Death is all around us, but the death of children seems the most garish, the most unsettling.  They seem to us innocent and defenseless, and when they die, we cry out to God in our pain.

As in so many things, we see them much more clearly in children.  Adults confuse everything in their well practiced sins, their convoluted philosophies, and their self serving pride, but children are not nearly so well practiced in evil.  Children show us the promise and hope of the future, the tenderness and gentleness of a life not yet calloused by poor choices with their sometimes brutal consequences.  When children suffer and die, we see the best of our human condition lost, the best hope we have to climb out of the muck and the mire dashed.  When we see children die, something dies inside of us, too, and we weep for them with a special kind of tears—tears for the loss of something beautiful in them, and the hope of something beautiful in us.

Perhaps it is precisely this that we must learn from the death of our children:  they are not their own nor our saviors.  In fact they are sinful and corrupted just like we are, though they have not had opportunity to exercise their fallen nature as well as we have.  They, like all of us, have fallen under the curse of the Law, because they, like all of us, have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.  Children may be the best reflection of what our fallen humanity can be in this fallen world, but they are like us, fallen.  As St. Paul reminds us, there is none that is worthy, none that can be saved by their works or their own native righteousness—no, not even one.  Even the child born so tender and sweet has coursing through her veins the poison of Original Sin, which is the only way such children could be subject to death at all.  For if the wages of sin is death, we know that if children die, it is because they are fallen sinners like the rest of our fallen race.

So what can we possibly learn from the incalculable depths of suffering which arise from the death of a child?  Like Jairus, we can learn that their salvation and ours, rests in Jesus Christ alone.  Like Jairus, our eyes can see and our ears can hear as Jesus takes our children by the hand and calls them to arise.  Like Jairus, we can despair of our own merits, our own works of righteousness, our own accolades, power, prestige, or position, and receive the free gift of salvation in Jesus.  Like Jairus, we can learn that Jesus really is the resurrection and the life, and that all who are found in Him by faith will live forever.  Like Jairus, we can trust that just as Jesus takes the hands of all children who die in Him, He will take our hands as well when death’s cold river flows over us.  Like Jairus, we can believe and live in Jesus by His grace through faith in Him and His life-giving Word.

The death of anyone, especially children, is a tragedy.  Our Lord has no pleasure in the death of anyone—not the wicked, nor the virtuous, nor the old, nor the young, nor the erring, nor the wise, nor the poor, nor the wealthy, nor the prosperous, nor the downtrodden.  For all of us, our whole human race, Jesus has come to be our propitiation for sin, that any and all who call upon the Name of the Lord Jesus Christ might be saved from their sin and death.  It is for us all, from the child in the whom whose eyes will not see the light of day because of the abortionist’s deadly tools of dismemberment, to the child who dies from the carelessness of the intoxicated or distracted driver, to the child who dies from disease or accident or atrocity, to the father or mother or sister or brother who dies in any of a myriad of ways, that Jesus has come to be our salvation, our life, and our hope.  It is for us all that He has become the Lamb of God, taking away the sins of the world through His Cross, so that He might be the giver of eternal life to all who abide in Him.

Where is God in the death of the child?  He is not the author of their suffering and death, anymore than He is the author or instigator of the evil which takes them from us.  But He is there in His Holy Gospel of salvation, saving them unto life everlasting, and teaching us to trust Him as even these little children do.  If our children are the best we can hope to be, we are reminded that even our children need Jesus as their savior from sin, death, hell, and the power of the devil—that the best we could hope to be is never enough to save ourselves.  We see in the death of the saints the precious fruit of their martyrdom, which is the unvarnished and purely proclaimed free Gospel of salvation in Christ alone.  Here Jesus takes their hand even as He reaches to take ours, speaking life into our dead bodies, saying, “Little one, I say unto you, arise.”  Amen.