'When Jesus heard it, He answered, saying, Fear not:
believe only, and she shall be made whole.'
--LUKE viii. 60.
The calm leisureliness of conscious power shines out very
brilliantly from this story of the raising of Jairus's daughter. The
father had come to Jesus, in an agony of impatience, and besought
Him to heal his child, who lay 'at the point of death.' Not a moment
was to be lost. Our Lord sets out with him, but on the road pauses
to attend to another sufferer, the woman who laid her wasted finger
on the hem of Christ's robe. How Jairus must have chafed at the
delay, and thought every moment an eternity; and perhaps said hard
things In his heart about Christ's apparent indifference! Delay
seemed to be fatal, for before Christ had finished speaking to the
woman, the messenger comes with a word which appears to me to have
in it a touch of bitterness and of blame. 'Trouble not the Master'
sounds as if the speaker hinted that the Master was thinking it a
trouble, and had not put Himself much about to meet the necessity.
But one's gain shall not be another's loss, and Christ does not let
any applicant to Him suffer whilst He attends to any other. Each has
an equal claim on His heart. So He turns to the father with the
words that I have read for my text.
They are the first of three sayings of our Lord round which this
whole narrative is remarkably grouped. I have read the first, but I
mean to speak about all three. There is a word of encouragement
which sustains a feeble faith: there is a word of revelation which
smooths the grimness of death; 'She is not dead but sleepeth'; and
there is a word of power which goes into the darkness, and brings
back the child; 'Maiden, arise!' Now, I think if we take these
three, we get the significance of this whole incident.