Little Girl, Get Up: Mark 5:35-43

While Jesus was still speaking to the healed woman, messengers arrived from Jairus' house. Their faces told the story before their words: "Your daughter is dead. Why bother the teacher anymore?"

Dead. Jairus had come to Jesus while she was dying. He had begged. He had led the way. And now, because of a delay—because of a woman who had touched a cloak—his little girl was gone.

Jesus turned to him immediately. "Don't be afraid. Just believe."

Just believe. With messengers of death standing before him. Just believe.

They walked to the house—Jesus, the father, Peter, James, and John. Even from a distance, they could hear it: the wailing. Professional mourners had already arrived, filling the house with practiced grief, flutes playing dirges, women weeping the prescribed laments.

Jesus stepped inside. "Why all this commotion and wailing? The child is not dead but asleep."

They laughed at him. Laughed—the bitter laughter of people who had seen death and knew what it looked like. They had laid her out. They had felt her cooling skin. The girl was dead.

Jesus put them all out. Every mourner, every skeptic, every laughing face—outside. He took only the parents and his three disciples and entered the room where the child lay.

She was twelve years old. The same number as the bleeding woman's years of suffering. Old enough to understand she was dying. Young enough that her death was a tragedy beyond words. Her body lay still on the bed, small and pale and empty.

Jesus took her hand—the cold, limp hand of a corpse—and spoke in Aramaic, the intimate language of home: "Talitha koum." Little girl, get up.

Immediately—that word again—she stood up and began to walk around.

Mark says the parents were "completely astonished." The Greek is stronger: they were out of their minds with amazement. Their daughter, dead one moment, was walking. Talking. Looking at them with living eyes.

"Give her something to eat," Jesus said. So ordinary. So practical. The girl who had been dead needed lunch.

He ordered them to tell no one. But how do you explain a daughter's resurrection at dinner? How do you hide a walking miracle?

Some stories refuse to stay silent.