Author: Rod Reasen II
There is a particular kind of interruption that cannot be planned for, yet can secretly hold a grip on our mind, and when it arrives, its disrupting effect carries the precision of a grenade. In September of 2021, at the height of COVID, one of those hit our family. While I was mowing our backyard, my wife came running out of the house, waving for my attention. As the mower came to a slow roll and fell quiet, she exclaimed, “Your parents have both been taken by separate ambulances to the hospital!” Two ambulances, two loved ones, and the full weight of it landed on me at once, in the middle of a pandemic that had already taken so much from so many.
I do not know which call you have taken or what disruption awaits you, but reflecting on that moment from nearly five years ago, I find the shock still unsettles me. In today’s passage, we will see how quickly life’s priorities can shift, and we will see what remains standing when the answer we receive is not the answer we asked for.
Matthew 9:18-26 (ESV)¹
“While he was saying these things to them, behold, a ruler came in and knelt before him, saying, ‘My daughter has just died, but come and lay your hand on her, and she will live.’ And Jesus rose and followed him, with his disciples. And behold, a woman who had suffered from a discharge of blood for twelve years came up behind him and touched the fringe of his garment, for she said to herself, ‘If I only touch his garment, I will be made well.’ Jesus turned, and seeing her he said, ‘Take heart, daughter; your faith has made you well.’ And instantly the woman was made well. And when Jesus came to the ruler’s house and saw the flute players and the crowd making a commotion, he said, ‘Go away, for the girl is not dead but sleeping.’ And they laughed at him. But when the crowd had been put outside, he went in and took her by the hand, and the girl arose. And the report of this went through all that district.”
Jairus and the bleeding woman
The first man in the scene is named Jairus. He was a synagogue ruler holding an administrative office rather than a priestly one, which made him responsible for the order of worship and for the public face of religious respectability in his town. He was not an anonymous face in the crowd. He was part of the local institutional authority that was at that very moment building a case against the Man he knelt in front of.
Read the eighteen verses ahead of this one, and you will feel the mixed mood in a room designed for celebration. The scribes had accused Jesus of blasphemy, the Pharisees had objected to the company He kept at the table, and John’s disciples had questioned Him on the practice of fasting. Verse 18 opens with the words “while he was saying these things to them,” which puts Jairus in the middle of active discourse. Into this he comes, humbly, putting his face to the ground in front of everyone watching, asking the accused for help.
Privileged, and yet he did not send a servant, request a private meeting, or carefully word the ask to protect his standing, because his daughter was dead and nothing else he owned measured up to her value. Jesus’ response: He arose. The wording conveyed the urgency Jairus had hoped for, but then something happened.
The account stops, and a second person enters from the opposite end of the socioeconomic world.
The nameless woman here had been afflicted with a bleeding disease for twelve years. Under Leviticus 15, she was not simply sick; she was contagious. Every bed she lay on, and every chair she sat in, was unclean, and anyone who touched what she had touched multiplied her burden. Twelve years of that shut her out of the temple courts, out of her own family’s table, and out of ordinary standing in a small town where everyone knew.
Mark states that she had suffered much under many physicians, had spent everything she had, and was not better but worse. Twelve years of continuous blood loss would have left her severely anemic as well, so forcing her way through that crowd was not only socially costly but physically punishing. You can read the desperation of her plight in the text.
Unlike Jairus, she carried a status the crowd would have found repulsive, and so her hope rested in a simple touch of the tassel on Jesus’ robe. Her touch, her hope set against more than a decade of despair and isolation, not only worked but came with so much more.
He stopped in a street full of people, made her visible on purpose, and gave a woman who had been untouchable for twelve years a level of compassion she had almost forgotten. Finding her, Jesus gazed into her eyes and said, “Take heart, daughter; your faith has made you well.”
To Jairus, He gave immediate action, which was the best answer that man could have received. To her, He gave something deeper. She got the healing at the touch, and she got the relationship on top of it.
He stopped walking
What I could not get past was the delay.
Jairus is standing there with a dead child at home, the only man who might do something about it has finally started moving, and then He stops for someone else, for a condition that had already run twelve years and could plainly have waited another hour.
If you have ever watched help turn aside from you toward someone whose emergency was less urgent than your own, you know that particular desperation, and you know it does not feel like a test of patience. It feels like being abandoned in slow motion.
By the time they reached the house, the mourning was already underway and professional. Rabbinic law required that even the poorest household in Israel provide no fewer than two flutes and one wailing woman for a burial ², so a synagogue ruler’s home would have been full of hired grief, performed on schedule, by people who had never met the girl. When Jesus arrived and said she was only sleeping, they laughed, because the matter was settled as far as they were concerned, and the work was already underway.
He continued anyway. He put every one of them outside, went in, took her by the hand, and the girl was raised.
The delay had cost Jairus nothing.
Matthew Henry said it better than I can.
“She was really dead, but not so to Christ, who knew within himself what he would do, and could do, and who had determined to make her death but as a sleep.”³
That is the bookend to two miracles and two families who arrived in desperation and did not leave in it.
Where my story and this passage part
My father was eventually released. My mother died on October 14, 2021, from the effects of the disease, one day after her birthday.
When desperation hits, we often come to the Savior with requests shaped like the miracles we have just read, because we have seen what He can do and we know He can do it again. Sometimes the answer is not the one we came for. If you are looking for the version of this passage where the right request produces the right outcome, I cannot give it to you, and I would be careful of anyone who tries.
Paul wrote something to a grieving church in 1 Thessalonians 4:13 that I did not understand until I needed it, and notice what he does not say. He does not tell them to stop grieving. He tells them not to grieve as those who have no hope. For their hope sits not on an earthly healing alone.
There is room in this faith for a man who is heartbroken and believing in the same moment, and if that is where you are sitting today, this passage is for you, just like Jairus.
My mother’s funeral was not a ritualistic performance, and there was nothing professional about the grief in that room. Hundreds of people came from every walk of life she had touched, lined up out the door, waiting for the chance to say thank you for what she had done in their lives. And her family rejoiced all the while, not in the sorrow of her loss but in the gain of an eternity with her Savior.
Matthew closes the account by telling us that the report of this went through the entire district. A raised life carries its own news. So does a new life in Jesus, a transformed new birth made possible in Christ alone.
The challenge
Through that season, I leaned on what I know about the One I follow and wrote it down to remind myself. I hope it is helpful for you today.
God is sovereign.
I know He loves me.
I know He promises to work all things together for His good purpose.⁴
Jairus and the woman show us that Jesus’ power is complete and available to anyone who believes. My mother’s story reminds me that He is still sovereign, and I am thankful that one day I will meet them all together for a final celebration above.
How do you handle desperation in your life?
And are you willing to accept an answer that does not fit your vision?
Stay on Mission
Jairus was a synagogue ruler in a Galilean town, an administrative office rather than a priestly one. He was responsible for the order of worship, for who read and who taught, and for the upkeep of the building. In practical terms, he was the public face of religious respectability in his community. Matthew calls him only a ruler, while Mark and Luke give his name and his office. That standing is what makes his approach to Jesus remarkable, since he knelt before the very religious establishment that was building a case against the man he was asking for help.
He was not offering a medical opinion, which is why the mourners laughed at Him. He was making a statement about duration rather than diagnosis. Sleep is a condition you get up from, and death in the presence of the one who raises the dead is temporary in exactly that way. The language was not new. The Hebrew Scriptures already spoke of death as sleep in passages like Daniel 12:2, and Jesus used the same image later of Lazarus in John 11:11. The girl was genuinely dead. She was simply not permanently so.
The word translated fringe points to the tassel that Numbers 15:38-39 commanded every Israelite man to wear on the corners of his garment as a physical reminder of the commandments of the Lord. She did not reach for a random piece of cloth. She reached for the most religiously significant part of what He was wearing. Coming from behind also served a practical purpose, since her condition made her ceremonially unclean under Leviticus 15, and anyone she touched in that crowd was affected by it.
Hired mourners were standard practice in first-century Jewish burials. Rabbinic tradition preserved in the Mishnah records that even the poorest household in Israel was expected to provide no fewer than two flutes and one wailing woman for a burial, which means a synagogue ruler’s household would have engaged considerably more. Their presence tells you two things. The death was not in question, and the family had already moved into formal grief. Burial in that climate happened the same day, so the entire scene unfolds within hours.
Matthew compresses this account, as he does throughout chapters 8 and 9, and the compression accounts for the difference. Mark 5:23 and Luke 8:42 record Jairus saying his daughter was at the point of death, with messengers arriving later on the road to report that she had died. Matthew removes that second scene and reports the father’s request in its final form. The same pattern appears in Matthew 8:5-13, where Luke 7:3-6 has the centurion send intermediaries, and Matthew presents him speaking directly. Neither account requires the other to be inaccurate.
He had a title, a building, a congregation, and a reputation, and every one of them argued against walking into that room. He went anyway, in public, in front of the people who could cost him his position. He did not send a servant, request a private meeting, or word his request carefully enough to walk it back later. For anyone in a position of authority, the lesson is not that humility is admirable in the abstract. It is that protecting a position can cost you the thing the position was supposed to protect.
It places two people at opposite ends of the social order inside the same nine verses. A man of significant religious standing and a woman who had been an outcast for twelve years both came to Jesus in desperation, both believed, and both were answered. The passage teaches that Christ’s power is complete and available to all, regardless of status. It also functions as a sign pointing past itself, since the healing of an incurable condition and the raising of a dead child point to the deeper sickness of sin that no one can remove on their own.
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