Our four gospels often tell the same stories, but sometimes the details are different. One change Matthew makes to this story probably first set down by Mark is quite dramatic. As Mark tells it, a synagogue leader comes to Jesus in a panic, saying, “‘My little daughter is at the point of death. Come and lay your hands on her, so that she may be made well, and live.” But in Matthew’s version, which we read this year, the distraught father says, “My daughter has just died; but come and lay your hand on her, and she will live.” Dying or already dead? Did Matthew hear a different version of the story, or is he intensifying the miracle he is relating?
In both versions, Jesus gets to the house, after being diverted by the woman with the hemorrhage, and in both versions he sees life: When Jesus came to the leader’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 got up. And the report of this spread throughout that district.
This father suspected that his daughter's story was not yet over, and Jesus knew her life was not ended, that she was deeply asleep, perhaps in a coma. But what if she had been was already dead, as her father thought? Jesus raised Lazarus four days after burial; he raised a young man from his funeral bier. Did he raise this little girl or simply heal her? Is there a difference?
Here's a bigger question: Are we to pray for healing in the face of what looks like death? Sometimes… maybe more often than we do. Death is a reality of life, yes, and the power of God to heal is very real and very strong when communities exercise faith. When someone we know is gravely ill, we can ask the Spirit how to pray. If we feel a sense that physical healing can happen, invite the healing stream of God’s love into that person. I specify “physical healing,” because sometimes the healing a person receives is spiritual, preparing them for life after death.
Maybe it’s too limiting to talk only of healing through prayer – God also heals through medicine. A recent article in the Washington Post tells of a young woman named April, catatonic for twenty years after having been diagnosed with a rapid and severe onset of schizophrenia. Recently doctors discovered she also has lupus, a treatable autoimmune diseases that was attacking her brain. As the article says, “After months of targeted treatments — and more than two decades trapped in her mind — April woke up.” Researchers are finding that autoimmune and inflammatory conditions may be prevalent in patients with various psychiatric syndromes – who can be helped with simple treatment. Sander Markx, the physician treating April said, “These are the forgotten souls. We’re not just improving the lives of these people, but we’re bringing them back from a place that I didn’t think they could come back from.”
That is the business we are in as followers of Christ active in God’s mission to reclaim, restore and renew all of creation to wholeness. We are called to see life, even in the face of death. We don’t always know the outcomes of our faith – that’s why it’s called faith; we don’t get a road map or guarantees. But we walk forward anyway. Whether it’s 20 minutes or 20 years, or in the life that follows this one, Life will win.
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