Matthew 9:18-26 | "The Two Touches"

This sermon was recorded at Faith Evangelical Free Church in Grand Forks, North Dakota.

Good morning.

This has been quite the year, hasn't it?

Quite the year.

For our family, it's obviously all the COVID stuff.

And my wife's father passed away, my grandmother passed away.

It's just been a rough year, rough season of life.

And I know every single one of us could say that.

You could give details, you could give specifics as to how it is a rough season of life.

I'd like you to take your Bibles and turn to Matthew chapter nine.

This is an account of misery and grief.

What have you done this year, this season, when you're overwhelmed?

Maybe not even this season, beyond this season.

What do you do in general when you're overwhelmed by discomfort, by sorrow, by uncertainty?

Do you do anything different when hopelessness fills your heart?

Now some of you might say, well, it's a lot different now than it was before Christ.

Before Christ it was sorrow upon sorrow, and now it's sorrowing with hope, or something like that.

This passage reveals to us a situation, actually a couple of situations, that are full of misery and grief.

And they lead us down a pathway of how to approach that, of how to walk through that.

There are a couple of people here in this passage who come in humility to Jesus, and yet they boldly act on their faith.

I'd like to walk through that with you this morning.

If you have your Bible, I encourage you to follow along in Matthew chapter 9, beginning in verse 18.

Matthew 9 · chapter mention

It says, While Jesus was saying these things to them, behold, one 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.

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, 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, he saw the flute players in the crowd making a commotion, and he said, Go away, for the girl is not dead, but is 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 throughout all that district.

Amen.

Undergirding these two encounters is a cultural situation that had moved certain convictions and actions from a place of appropriateness to a place of inappropriateness.

That is, there had been some actions that were good and healthy and appropriate that now had become moral issues.

We've already seen some of them in the previous section with fasting.

In the Old Testament, fasting was a good and appropriate thing, only commanded on one particular time each year.

But it was a good thing.

God said it's good when you fast.

By the time of Jesus, that that had moved from a place of, yeah, that's a good thing if you want to do it, to you're sinning if you don't do it.

It had become a matter of right and wrong, a morality issue.

It had become a judgment issue.

You're sinning if you don't do this.

Something similar had taken place by this time in history with the idea of being unclean.

In the Old Testament, God laid out all of his rules and all of his principles for his people.

And for certain things, he said, if you do this, for example, touching a dead body, you become unclean.

That doesn't mean you physically are dirty.

It means that there's a ceremonial sense in which God said, You've done something, now you kind of need to be in quarantine for a little bit for certain reasons.

That's undergirding all of this text.

Because there are two unclean people here.

There are two individuals in this passage that probably should have been avoided, and that some would have looked down upon in judgment.

So let's walk through this.

There's a key to this passage that I think makes it pretty simple to follow, and that is a simple countdown.

Three, two, one.

Can we do that?

Hopefully you can stay with me through that.

I went long in first service, so who knows what'll happen now.

Three, two, one.

Hopefully we can stay together on that.

Let's begin then with the three.

We start with three words.

This passage is about despair.

It's about desperation.

And it's about death.

We start in this section of despair with a father's despair.

A father who has lost his only child.

We know from Matthew, from Mark and Matthew, Mark and Luke, that this is Jairus, that he is a ruler of the local synagogue.

That means he's probably like a modern church elder.

He's one of the individuals that led the body that gathered there.

But even more than that, he was a significant instructor and leader in the Jewish community outside of the synagogue.

His daughter has been sick.

We're not told how long.

And as Gibrus is on his way to see Jesus, she dies.

On his way to Jesus, a servant arrives and says, Don't bother him now.

She's dead.

His daughter was twelve years old.

Technically, at that point in time, in Jewish culture, she was a woman.

She was able to be married.

And likely at this point in time, at 12 years old, she would have been betrothed already to be married.

She wasn't yet because she was still with her father in his home.

But she was likely, if she was a normal 12-year-old girl already engaged to be married to someone, much like Mary was engaged to be married to Joseph.

Now she has died.

And all Jairus asks for is a touch.

Come and lay your hand on her.

We know this is his only daughter.

It's likely his only child.

But there's also a woman's despair over the loss of her own life.

You might say, well, I don't, this woman that was bleeding, she was still alive.

She wasn't dead.

No, she wasn't dead.

But in many ways, she was experiencing the loss of her own life.

Nothing is said about this woman as she comes to Jesus.

We don't know if she has a husband, we don't know if she has children, we don't know if she has parents still living.

All we know is that she comes to Jesus and she comes alone.

She comes alone, and that is indicative of the rest of her situation where she suffered the loss of everything.

Mark chapter 5, verse 26 tells us that she had suffered much at the hands of physicians.

Mark 5:26

If you want to understand a little bit about what kind of suffering that could entail, just watch one of those documentaries about medicine about a thousand years ago.

And then double that to 2,000 years ago.

And you get a sense of what could take place and how a person might suffer in trying to get treatment for symptoms, for a disease, for struggles.

We are told that she spent all the money that she had.

So here she is, seeking out Jesus, penniless, maybe without family.

Luke 8 tells us that she could not be healed by anyone.

She could not be healed by anyone.

And because of her condition, she was unclean.

So these two individuals were on the edge of hopelessness.

Much like the paralyzed man at the beginning of chapter 9, they were despairing of life.

You remember the paralyzed man's friends?

They were so desperate to get their friend to the feet of Jesus that they carried him on a stretcher up on top of a roof.

And then they began dismantling the roof tiles so that they could lower Jesus down inside the room.

That may be you.

Maybe it's COVID.

Maybe it's fear, uncertainty.

Maybe it's your your finances.

Employment or the lack thereof.

Maybe it's debt.

Maybe it's changes in life circumstances that you never in a million years would have thought would have happened.

Oh, there's all kinds of ways to describe getting hit by life like a cement truck.

Despair.

Hopelessness.

Our second word is desperation.

Desperation is despair that is left unresolved.

Despair left unresolved moves someone to action.

Now we know we all know how this works.

We all know how this works.

We all have varying levels of willingness.

This is a very simple example of this.

I don't like to pay someone to work on my home.

Now, there are lots of reasons for that.

Talking with someone just about that in between services, and you know, I think I can do it myself.

And I can do it cheaper, right?

But what it amounts to is pride.

There's pride in my heart that says, I'm gonna do this.

I want to do this, I don't want to spend the money.

So I will try to do it.

And if I struggle, okay, maybe I'll pull up YouTube and try to find somebody else that's done it and shown how to do it, and they'll walk me through it.

If that doesn't work, maybe I'll try to seek out a friend that can help me.

Only then will I call somebody and pay somebody to come and work on my house, right?

So there are certain levels of desperation.

They get more intense the further you go.

Sometimes it's simpler than that.

Sometimes it's I don't I don't like to pay somebody to change the oil in my cars.

That just grates on me.

But I don't have the time.

And so that that lack of time motivates me to pay somebody to change the oil in my cars.

We all, every single one of us, have levels of despair that motivate desperation.

Synagogue leader is a community leader.

He's respected, he's trusted.

Like a modern church elder, he is knowledgeable about scripture, he's able to teach scripture, he leads people in understanding scripture, he's committed to the obedience of scripture.

And in that culture, it is not just staying within the walls of the church building or the synagogue building, but living it out in the community as well.

He was a community leader as a result of it.

He's likely in line with the Pharisees.

As such, he's probably pretty well off, able to afford whatever kinds of treatment his sick daughter needs.

His daughter's been sick, but there's no mention of physicians, there's no mention of healers in her text.

It's probably very likely.

That Jairus had not let money be a motivating factor.

He took everything into consideration and he sought out everything possible for his daughter.

We don't know that.

I'm just surmising, just putting myself in the position of being a father of a daughter who is so sick, and now she has died.

Luke says that this is his only daughter, likely his only child.

His last option is Jesus.

Desperate times require desperate measures.

Unfortunately, we consider Jesus too often to be a desperate measure.

This is a significant deal going on here.

I like how Doug O'Donnell describes it.

He writes, can you imagine this scene?

What did the scribes and the Pharisees think of this?

This posture of kneeling, this request?

Has the whole world gone mad?

What is our gyrus doing?

How can it be that our colleague, one of the pillars of the Jewish community, is groveling at the feet of some unordained popular preacher, some demon-empowered miracle worker from the lowly town of Nazareth.

He's desperate.

And on top of that, he then asks Jesus to do something that if Jesus were any normal human being, would make him unclean.

That's the desperation of the synagogue leader.

Let's look at the desperation of the sick woman.

Any of you who have sought treatment or been treated for long, long periods of time can understand how that wears.

Kind of a burden that is.

Nothing.

No change, no effect.

It's all of no effort and effect in her life.

And now she has no more money.

Family's nowhere to be seen.

She's an outcast of society because of her uncleanness.

She's an outcast in her faith.

The very opposite of the synagogue leader.

The synagogue leader was accepted and respected in every single way.

This woman is unaccepted and rejected and unwanted in every way.

Most likely her life is filled with pain, discomfort, loneliness, depression, anxiety.

She's desperate.

And she sought to do something that would make others, including Jesus, unclean.

On the one hand, Jesus was asked to do something that would make him unclean.

On the other hand, somebody is seeking to do something that in normal circumstances would make Jesus unclean.

Despair, desperation, and death.

Luke chapter 8, verse 49 says, While Jesus was speaking to the woman, someone from the ruler's house came and said, Your daughter is dead.

Luke 8:49

Do not trouble the teacher anymore.

Your daughter is dead.

Do not trouble the teacher anymore.

If you've ever had the experience of losing a close relative to death, you can feel in your being the uncaring nature of that comment.

It's cold and harsh.

But it also points to the reality of death, doesn't it?

It's crushing, it's it's stabbing, it's it's hopeless.

There's his only daughter, and he's being told at the feet of Jesus, she's dead.

Don't bother Jesus anymore.

It's not worth it.

Don't trouble him.

But isn't that how we all deal with God sometimes?

He's a good place to go until things get hopeless.

Then we have to take things into our own hands, right?

It's easy to pray and to seek God and to seek his will and to seek his word while things are good and right and appropriate in life as well.

But the more desperate that we become, the less likely it is that we go to the feet of Jesus.

In the most desperate moment, he's being told, Don't bother with Jesus.

Jesus doesn't help me, I'm as good as dead.

Her life is effectively nothing at this point in time.

For twelve years, she's been relegated to quarantine.

She shouldn't be in this crowd of people following Jesus.

Her life is just home by herself.

Nobody can touch her, nobody can give her a hug, nobody can comfort her.

Jesus is her last option.

We have to make sure that we grasp this sense of loss in this passage.

There's literal loss of life on one hand, figurative loss of life on the other.

Both are full of despair, pursuing Jesus out of desperation.

Surrounded by death.

Three words.

Desperation, despair, and death.

Hopelessness.

But in their hopelessness, both of these individuals sought out Jesus, which leads from our three words to our two touches.

Jesus touches on the one hand the unclean, and he is touched by the unclean.

But there are also two believing individuals.

Let's think first about the unclean.

And as we think about the unclean, we need to think about a dead body on the one hand and a broken body on the other hand.

In Jewish culture, according to the Old Testament, touching a dead body, that is, in terms of preparing it for burial and all those things, would make one ceremonially unclean for seven days.

That meant you couldn't go to the temple and worship for seven days.

You needed to sort of quarantine, for our purposes, understanding that, for seven days.

And after that, there were prescribed rituals for doing your cleansing so that you would be appropriately presented back to God and brought back into life again.

Of course, there were some people that had more specific elements than that.

Priests were not allowed.

To touch a body unless it was absolutely one of their closest family members.

Nazarites who took a Nazarite vow were forbidden entirely from touching dead bodies during their time of vow.

Common belief at the time was that dead was dead.

There was no legitimate record of anyone having been raised from the dead in over 600 years.

The time of the prophets.

Once one died, all hope was lost.

Think of Mary and Martha, sisters of Lazarus.

They sent word to Jesus: hey, your friend that you love is sick.

Come so you can heal him.

Jesus said, Nah, I'm going to wait until he dies.

Mary and Martha, when they saw Jesus, what did they say?

If only you had been here sooner.

With death, all hope was gone.

That's why there are mourners outside of Jairus' home.

Because there is a 12-year-old girl gone, a tragic result of the curse of sin in which we all exist.

A man came to Jesus while his daughter was still living, believing that if Jesus would just touch her, she would be made well.

Now Matthew takes all of that timeline and he distills it all to a moment.

A moment in which Jairus is standing before Jesus with the knowledge, with the understanding that it's too late, my daughter is gone.

Which reveals some curious truths.

The man knew his daughter had died.

Yet he still asked Jesus to come.

He had reached the moment of despair and desperation and utter hopelessness of death.

And yet somehow he still says, Jesus, come and raise my daughter from the dead.

For his sake, and for the sake of his daughter.

Imagine me or any one of our staff asking you to sin.

What?

I must have misunderstood you, right?

No.

Jairus says, This will cause you to be unclean, Jesus.

Please come and do it for my sake.

Doesn't that make you think of another passage of scripture where it says, He became sin?

Who knew no sin?

It's a broken, a dead body.

There's also a broken body.

This woman suffered for twelve years.

Perhaps today we would have a diagnosis of some kind, a tumor of sorts, ovarian cysts.

We don't know.

What we do know is that her body was broken.

It was not functioning according to God's original design.

In all every way, this is another tragic display of the effects of the curse of sin in which we live.

And the Old Testament law had clearly laid out the reality of this situation for the woman.

Someone in her state was considered to be unclean.

Therefore, she was treated almost as a contagious kind of person.

Anything she touched, anything she sat on, anything she laid upon became unclean.

That meant there was immense and continual social restriction.

She shouldn't have been in the crowd of people that were following Jesus.

In fact, she was endangering the people in the crowd by causing them to become unclean.

They would become unclean simply by brushing up against her.

And that went on for twelve years.

To put it into perspective, the entire time, the entire lifetime of the little girl enjoying her freedom and the joys of childhood, this poor lady was confined and rejected.

Just as the tax collectors and the sinners.

To top it off, everywhere that she went, she was supposed to proclaim her uncleanness.

She was supposed to shout out unclean, unclean, hey, stay away, I'm unclean, I'm unclean.

So people could avoid her.

I'm sure you you sense already some parallels, so let's just dive into that for a moment.

How do we put ourselves in this culture that Jesus and Matthew are describing for us?

Well, maybe we can get somewhat close by thinking about our reactions to COVID.

Imagine that you know that you are in the same place with a COVID-positive individual.

In fact, you've been brushing up against them the whole time.

How do you react?

Some might might recoil almost in disgust and quickly move away.

Some might shiver a bit in compassion and get over it.

Others might might judge and say, Why are you even out?

You're supposed to be confined at home.

You're supposed to be quarantined.

Take how you might feel in a COVID situation, and then amp that up a little bit, and you get how people would feel about being in the presence of this unclean woman.

Then put yourself in her shoes and you get a sense of what she's experiencing.

These are the unclean.

There are also two believing individuals.

There are two demonstrations of faith.

Maybe Jairus had heard from the centurion about what Jesus did for him.

If you if you don't remember, you can look back at the beginning of chapter 8, chapter 8, verse 5.

There was a Roman centurion who came to Jesus asking him to heal his servant.

That particular centurion, we know, is the sponsor, is the patron of the synagogue in Capernaum, where Jesus is.

That centurion had, in essence, provided the funds for and enabled everything to take place to build the synagogue of which Jairus is a ruler.

So it's very likely that they knew one another.

It's very likely that Jairus had heard about what Jesus had done.

He had heard all the news about Jesus.

He'd heard about what he'd done over here and over there.

He'd heard about his healings, he'd heard about his teachings.

He had knowledge of Jesus that generated belief and motivated action.

Isn't that what we're told in Scripture?

Faith comes by hearing.

And what faith?

What faith?

Jesus, my daughter, has just died.

Please come and raise her from the dead.

Look over at chapter 11, verse 5.

Jesus is again addressing the disciples of John the Baptist because John is in prison.

He's about to be beheaded for saying something about the governor and about his personal life.

And he's questioning whether or not Jesus is really the Messiah they were to expect.

And Jesus says, Go back and tell John what you hear and see.

The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk.

Lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them.

The dead are raised up.

You see that?

Well, what we're looking at here in Matthew chapter 9 is the very first recorded instance in Matthew of Jesus raising someone from the dead.

Matthew 9 · chapter mention

So by chapter 11, Jesus says, You know about this.

You've heard and you've seen people being raised from the dead.

By chapter 9, that hasn't happened yet.

This man doesn't know that Jesus can raise the dead.

He believes that Jesus can raise the dead.

His hearing about Jesus has led to a faith that says, I'm in a unique situation.

I am at the end of my rope.

I believe that Jesus can do this.

And that makes Jairus a true son of Abraham.

In Hebrews chapter 11, verse 1, we're told that faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.

Hebrews 11:1

This man has a conviction of something that he has not observed, that he has not witnessed.

He's not seen Jesus raise people from the dead, but he believes that it can happen.

Why does he believe it can happen?

Because he has the same faith in God that his father Abraham had.

If you read further in Hebrews chapter 11, you will come to the point where it says, Abraham, when he took his son up onto Mount Moriah, not just his son, but his only son.

Hebrews 11 · chapter mention

Not just his son, and not just his only son, but the son that he loved.

Because God told him, Take him up there, and I want you to offer him as a sacrifice to me.

Take his life.

And Abraham did it.

Why?

Hebrews tells us.

Because he believed that God would raise him from the dead.

How do you believe that?

It's faith in Christ.

And here Jairus is exhibiting the same kind of faith that Abraham had when he took Isaac up onto the mountaintop.

Here is a man who, by some measure of faith, understands who Jesus is.

He understands that power resides within Jesus, and he believes that if Jesus simply comes to his home and touches his daughter, she will rise from the dead.

Is that your faith?

God may choose to not do the miraculous.

So there's an element in which our faith needs to be worthy of his trust.

Like Daniel's friends, Hananiah, Mishel, and Azariah, we know them better as Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.

Commanded to bow before this giant statue of a pagan king.

They said, No, we're not going to do that.

And he said, Well, if you don't do that, fine, that's your choice.

But I'm going to throw you into that burning furnace over there.

And they said, King Nebuchadnezzar, you're big.

Your statue's big.

But our God is bigger.

And he can save us even from the fire.

But even if he doesn't, know this.

We're not worshiping you or your image.

See, there was a belief, there was a trust that God could rescue them, but there was a settling, a trusting that even if God didn't, God was still God and He was worthy of their trust, right?

Well let's think beyond just the physical for a moment.

The greatest miracle any of us will ever witness is the miracle of eternal life.

Hebrews chapter, I'm sorry, Ephesians chapter two tells us that we're all dead.

Our family has a joke, D-E-D-E-D-D.

Sorry, but that is a D E A D.

Failed joke.

Jairus' daughter is laying at home.

Unable to do anything.

Unable to get up, unable to eat, unable to breathe, unable to think.

Why?

She's dead.

Every single one of us is dead in our trespasses, sins.

And yet Christ comes along and he gives light and life because he is the light and he is the life and he resurrects dead souls.

How many of us believe that about our God in relation to the unbelieving family members that we all have?

How many of us truly trust that Christ can indeed raise the dead soul of my relative who doesn't believe in him?

And do you pray that way?

Do you seek his face that way?

Do you come to him as Jairus did?

My whatever relative is dead.

You just come and speak life.

They will rise from the dead.

This father had faith that Jesus could overcome uncleanness in death and even reverse it.

And then the woman on their way to Jairus' house comes along and says, If only I can get close enough to touch the tip of his tassel.

She has an interesting choice of words.

She says, If only I touch his garment, I will be made well.

That word well is the word saved.

If only I touch his garment, I will be saved.

She's unclean, she's avoided by society, she's desperate, she's desperate to find hope in Jesus.

And that hope, that faith, that trust motivates her to break through all social and religious taboos to touch Jesus.

The very thought of that would have made a Pharisee shudder.

Perhaps because of her uncleanness, she seeks to approach Jesus from behind.

She doesn't necessarily want to touch him, but merely the tassel of his garment.

That's what Matthew specifically refers to here, and that's because of Numbers 15 and Deuteronomy 22.

See, every Jewish person was commanded by God on their outer garment that had four corners.

They were commanded to put a tassel on each of those four corners, and one of the threads in that tassel had to be blue.

God said, You are to do that to remember my commandments.

So Jesus is fulfilling the law.

And she says, If I can just touch one string.

One string.

Like the religious ruler, this woman demonstrates faith in Jesus.

She believes that by simply touching his tassel she will be healed.

What faith?

What faith is that?

She believed that Jesus could do what no other person or no other institution could do for her.

The woman and her religious leader both believed, contrary to their culture's common promotion, that Jesus' cleanness, his holiness, his power would overcome the uncleanness present in them in a miraculously healing way.

But this isn't just about physical uncleanness.

If only I will touch his tassel, I will be saved.

Church Father Jerome wrote, Her touch on the hem of his garment was the cry of a believing heart.

There are three words despair, desperation, and death.

Two touches.

Two unclean women, two demonstrations of faith.

At least one number, doesn't it?

When there's a countdown for a rocket launch, the pinnacle of the countdown is the smallest number, right?

The rocket doesn't fire at five.

It doesn't fire at three.

Three is important.

But it's not the most important.

The two touches are significant, but they're not the most important.

What's important here is that there is a singular savior.

There is one who saves.

And then the daughter who was raised.

First, the daughter who was saved.

She said to herself, If only I touch his tassel, I will be saved.

She has the audacity to be an unclean woman in a crowd of people following Jesus to the ruler's home.

Then she dares to reach out and touch the Lord, and so to make him ritually unclean, if that were possible.

And Jesus notices, the other gospels say he noticed that power went out from him.

He knew everything about her from beginning to end.

He knew everything about her twelve years of suffering.

He knew everything about her restrictions.

He knew everything about her alienation.

He knew everything about her.

And he doesn't turn around and say, Why did you touch me?

He doesn't chide her.

He says, Take heart.

Daughter.

Don't skip over that single word.

Daughter.

Jesus didn't shudder about getting infected with her uncleanness.

He's here to overturn all of this ritualistic religion that has no meaning.

It's just idolatry.

When Jesus comes to seek and to save the lost, it's very appropriate to spend time with the tax collectors and the sinners.

When Jesus comes to seek and to save the lost, it's very appropriate to seek out the unclean and the unwanted and to meet their deepest needs.

The deepest need of the paralyzed man at the beginning of chapter 9 was not healing from his paralyzed state.

His deepest need was forgiveness.

The deepest need of the tax collectors and sinners was not to be shunned by the religious elite, but to be sought out and invited into the kingdom of Christ.

The deepest need of the disciples of John was to realize that Emmanuel, God with us, was there, was present.

And in the same way, this woman's deepest need is not her physical healing, but her spiritual salvation.

Notice the language that Matthew employs.

We have already seen in verse 21, I will be saved.

Well, that continues.

And instantly the woman was saved.

Most of our Bibles say healed or made well.

Literally, it's the word sozo, it's the word for save.

What makes that interesting?

This is the only time in the entire Gospel of Matthew that Matthew uses this word to reference a physical healing.

Every other time there's a physical healing, he uses a different word.

Why, at this point in time, would he use this word that speaks of salvation instead of just physical healing?

If only I touch his tassel, I will be saved.

Take heart, daughter, your faith has saved you, and instantly the woman was saved.

Matthew's pointing out to us here in very clear language, this is not just about physical healing.

This is about spiritual healing.

By ignoring the religious rituals of uncleanness and focusing on the woman's need, this woman receives salvation, and instantly she becomes not a woman who is unclean, but a daughter of the living God.

In the same way that That Jairus cares for his daughter who is dead.

Christ cares about this daughter who has now come to him.

If you want to compare that, go back to the beginning of the chapter and you'll see Jesus say to the paralytic, Take heart, my son.

Your sins are forgiven.

If you want to look more at this, you can study Isaiah 35, especially verses 8 and 9, where Jesus fulfills the prophecy.

By taking care of the uncleaned, of the unclean by redeeming them.

No matter your filth, no matter your uncleanness, no matter the depth of your brokenness, or the hurt of your past, no matter the magnitude of your sin or your despair, seek Jesus.

Seek Jesus, reaching out, as it were, to touch just the tassel of his garments by an act of faith.

And he will not chide, he will not condemn, but he will welcome you as his son or daughter.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for they have the right to be called children of the living God.

This is speaking of all of us.

We're dead in our untrust in our trespasses and sins.

Our sins are called our uncleanness all throughout Scripture.

Meanwhile, Jesus continues on to the ruler's home where his daughter lies dead.

So we've seen then this situation where we have a daughter who was saved, and now we see a daughter who was raised.

And it begins with the culture's commotion for the dead.

Jesus gets to Jairus' house and he hears music and mourning.

He's confronted, coming up to the house, by the flutists and by mourners making a loud commotion.

This is normal, by the way.

Even the poorest of families was expected to hire, and I quote, not less than two flutists and one wailing woman.

That was standard operating procedure for a death in that culture.

The family and the friends are grieving, but they're expected to make it public.

And how do you make it public when all you want to do is be private?

Well, you hire somebody to mourn for you and to play mournful music.

But there's a terrible reality on display here.

This is the reality for those who die without Christ.

It's hopeless.

It's truly the end of all hope, and all there is is for somebody to mourn for you.

But thankfully it doesn't end there because we see Christ's power over death.

I love Jesus' bluntness here.

Get out of here.

Go home.

Shoo.

That's probably too demeaning.

I apologize.

That's not appropriate.

Go away.

Go away, for the girl is not dead, but she's sleeping.

And they laughed.

Can you imagine laughing at the one who sustains your life by the power of his being?

But in their in their mindset, when Jesus says she's not dead but she's sleeping, it's either coming from the mouth of a deranged man or it's someone whose power ought to motivate you to fear and to holiness and belief.

These are professional mourners.

They were around death all the time.

And they knew if someone was dead or not.

And in their lack of faith, they laugh.

Now understand, the girl's dead.

This was not a coma.

This was not a similar type of medical situation that only modern medicine could diagnose where she's unresponsive.

Matthew and the other gospels all record under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit that she had died.

Matthew 11, 5 tells us that Jesus raised the dead.

This is the only instance recorded in Matthew before that, so she must be referring to a girl who died.

The girl was dead.

Why does Jesus then say she's only sleeping?

Well, in the presence of the King, in the presence of the Lord of all creation, death is never the end.

In the hands of the Savior, death is merely like sleep from which one can awake.

Now it seems, if we want to think in very linear timelines, that Jesus had already called her soul back from the dead, such that all that was needed was awaking from sleep.

But that doesn't really matter because the point is this: death is impotent in the presence of the giver of life.

Death has no power in the presence of the one who gives life.

Of course, that's why the early church began to refer to a Christian's death as falling asleep.

Crowds bluntly put out.

Jesus again goes against the grain by touching the body of the young girl.

But rather than be infected himself by the uncleanness of a dead body, Jesus gives her life again.

As with the leper who was unclean, and Jesus reached out and touched him.

His holiness, his cleanness transformed that uncleanness.

We've seen Jesus demonstrate his divine authority over many things.

We saw him calm the storm, right?

We saw him demonstrate authority over the spirit world, over demons.

This is the first time we've seen his authority over death.

Do you understand what that means for you, Christian?

Let me illustrate it this way.

Martin Luther lost his 14-year-old daughter to the great plague that swept through Europe in the 16th century.

Some of his acquaintances later recalled how Luther reacted to that situation, and Timothy George has recorded it in his book about the faith of the Puritans.

Brokenhearted Luther knelt beside her bed and begged God to release her from the pain.

Then when she had finally died, and the carpenters were nailing down the lid of the coffin, Luther screamed out, Hammer away, hammer away, for on the last day she shall rise.

These are people who at the end of their rope come in humility and repentance and trust in Jesus and find entrance into God's kingdom.

They are those who come to him with faith and without religious pretense, trusting that as they reach out to him, he will save.

They are the ones who benefit from Jesus' own rejection of the religious idolatry that was going on in his time, demonstrating that he is God who came to save his people from their sin.

And so in this last chapter of chapter 9, it began with a desperate paralytic and his friends.

Then came the rejected tax collectors and the sinners that nobody would want to associate with, but Jesus did.

And then there's a dead daughter and a despairing woman.

But there is a merciful Savior who bears our sorrows and carries our griefs.

There is a powerful Savior who cleanses us from all of our uncleanness and one day will cause all of his own children to raise up out of the dead to be with him for eternal life forever and ever.

Amen.

Let's pray.

Lord Jesus, we come and we bow before you.

You are worthy of our trust and our faith.

We confess that too often we don't trust you.

Help our unbelief.

If it is needed today, give new life from the deadness of sin to someone.

Someone that's here this morning or someone that we know.

Grant them life.

So they hear your voice call them to new life.

Enable us in our relationships to believe that you, you are the one who can give new life.

You are capable of it.

Enable us to trust you through all of the difficulties and the sorrows and the despairs of life.

For we are never truly hopeless with you.

Amen.

That concludes this sermon from Faith Evangelical Free Church.

Our mission is to declare the Word of God and disciple believers into mature, devoted followers of Jesus.

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