There's just no getting around it. This week that we've spent together on Matthew 9, 18 through 26, this business about the synagogue leader whose kid died, and then the lady who's been bleeding since forever, and she sneaks up to touch the hem of Jesus' garment. There's no way to frame it differently, it's just kind of sobering stuff. If we have any empathy at all, you hear stories like this and you feel things for these people. You compare them to situations that you've been through, stuff that has nipped at your heels for a long time, things that make you feel like a social outsider, things that cause deep, abiding hurt and grief. And you just can't help but hurt along with these people. And you kind of can't help but revel in the joy of their circumstances changing as well. Well, I should say at least one of them, because where we're at in the conversation so far is that we've got a crisis that this fellow Jairus, the leader of the synagogue, bursts into this party with the repugnant cultural others that Jesus is hanging out with and announces, I got a crisis. My daughter's just died, but there's also an expression of faith. But you can come put your hand on her and she'll live. Then, as Jesus is on his way over there, this lady who has this terrible, embarrassing, religiously problematic issue going on carries out a weird gesture of faith as well in her brain. She's like, if I can just touch him, this is gonna work out. So they've both somehow reasoned to the same thing. And that is, all it takes is a touch from this Jesus character. He has such authority and such power that that would solve our problems. And all of this is reminiscent of the gesture made by the leper at the beginning of chapter eight. And in so many words, he says to the paralytic, I am willing. Take heart, son. In so many words, without really actually saying any words, he says, I am willing, to gyrus the synagogue leader. Yep. And he gets up and he follows him. And he says, Take heart, daughter, your faith has healed you to this lady with the bleeding problem. So we have these two things that we've been milling around with all week long. And one is the desperation of these two scenarios, which echoes of the desperation of a whole bunch of other scenarios we've seen over the last two chapters of Matthew. And the other is the empathetic humanity that I'm sure all of you can't help but feel in response to the difficulties these people are going through. And at the most basic level here, what we're seeing is people with a very underdeveloped sense of faith and understanding of Jesus having seen enough to say, all right, I got two ropes I can grab at in front of me, but I only get to grab at one of these two, and this is the grab that is going to determine my fate. Do I grab at the establishment rope, the world system rope, the system that I've been around my whole life, or do I grab at this new rope that I really don't know everything about, but it sure looks like it's real? And all of these people have this one thing in common. They grab for the rope they believe to be more trustworthy. And in doing so, they are all rewarded as Jesus acknowledges that grabbing for that rope was an act of faith. And then he heals their thing, each time making a theological statement explicitly or implicitly about what's going on. In this case, the theological statement toward that woman on the street on the way to deal with the situation with Jairus' dead daughter is, well, how about this? Daughter. I mean, think about that. Jesus is going to heal someone's beloved daughter. The story is wrapped in the love of a father, the affirmation of a father, the willingness of a father to risk everything because of his love for his daughter. And then what does Jesus declare this woman to be when he heals her? Not just, okay, you can go to church again now, lady, or all right, that should take care of your disgusting undercarriage bleeding now, lady. You're good to go. That oughta patch her up. No, he says, Take heart daughter. I mean, the most affirming, intimate language that Jesus could have held out to this woman, literally bookended in this story, literally contexted and framed by the unending love and affirmation of a father for his daughter, that's what she just got. She got a 14-point swing all the way from total rejection to being totally embraced and affirmed in front of everybody. And that's it. That's the end of that story. We go on to verse 23 of Matthew chapter 9. It says when Jesus entered the ruler's house, this is Jairus, and saw the flute players and the noisy crowd, he said, Go away, the girl's not dead, but asleep. But they laughed at him. There's a whole lot of cultural layers there that don't make a ton of sense to us, and that's okay, because I think people grieve very differently in other parts of the world from the West that I know most of you who are sitting here talking with me are from. So when it comes to the grieving thing in the ancient Near East, we've got a bunch of ancient sources, as well as a bunch of recent sources, like just how things continue to be in a lot of parts of the Near East that look a lot like what we're seeing here in terms of the grief ritual. There's this ominous, haunting, somber flute music. I mean, you can picture that. You go to a funeral in the West, what do you get? Like some goofy dirge on the organ that's just like meandering music in the background with low tones and so forth. I mean, some of us try to perk it up by being like, ah, Skeeter would have wanted Florida Georgia Lion playing at his funeral, and so there's that. But I mean, come on, we all know what typical funeral music is, and even if it's different than typical funeral music, that's a riff or a pushback on typical funeral music. Well, it sounds like there was typical funeral music here. In other words, we're far enough into this death process that already the people who go around and play their sad flute for people who've died are there and hanging out. Uh, maybe these people got paid. What I do know is that part of the noisy crowd did get paid. We know for sure that professional mourning was a thing. And it sounds ridiculous. And the first time I heard this, it kind of made me mad. It was like, oh, gross. This reminds me of the people who I've seen at funerals who are kind of tacky, and these are the people who seem to be in kind of a grief contest and want everybody to know how very, very sad they are and how much closer they were to the deceased than everyone else. And uh maybe you think I'm being cold-hearted, but if you did what I do for a living and you'd seen it as many times I've seen it, you would know this is a phenomenon. People will sometimes do really screwy, weird, unhealthy stuff around grief. And so when I first heard about professional mourners, I was like, this is disgusting, gross, go away. But the more you think about it, we're like, well, I don't know, we kind of want that from the people who run funerals for us. I mean, you want the funeral director guy to act sad that your grandma died. You wouldn't like it if he's like, uh, hey, people die all the time. I'm not gonna pretend to be mopey around this. Like, it is what it is for me, you go ahead and be sad. Like, uh no, come on. A degree of respect is communicated by the appearance of grief. And so you got people who would come around and just wail and get paid to wail. And so some of the people who are there crying over Gyrus's dead daughter, which is enormously tragic, someone dying in their youth like that. Some of them are probably family and friends. Some of these people probably find a way to supplement their income by just going around and being professionally sad. Whatever the case, this is their job. They think they know pretty well about how death is. So when Jesus shows up with one person, maybe no more, but one person with him who believes that resolution is coming, everybody else believes in the normal natural thing. Death is final, it beats everybody. It just doesn't matter what you think about religion or not religion, or God or not God, or this denomination or that denomination. I mean, this is one thing we all have in common. Death hurts, and it feels like it's kind of the thing that kicks everybody's butt eventually. And so when Jesus comes in, he's like, go away, the girl's not dead, but asleep. One, he just dismisses the professional sad people. Scram, the girl's not even dead, she's asleep. In other words, like the one thing that you bring to the table here, it's irrelevant and it doesn't matter because she isn't dead. So they laugh at him. I mean, that's adorable. Like they know this guy just healed a paralytic who lives in their town, like uh Doug or Carl or Glenn or Gary or whatever the guy's name is. Like, remember he was crippled, and we've all seen him around, and now he walks and he's totally fine. Remember that leper guy whose like limbs were rotting off and stuff? He's fine now. This is the same guy. Like it's like how the chief never takes Sean Spencer seriously in psych. Like, well, I don't know, I'm real skeptical of this. He solves all your crimes, he fixes everything that goes wrong. He's probably right again. So, okay, I don't know, whatever. They dismiss him, they laugh at him. But after the crowd had been put outside, so Jairus, the master of the house, says, beat it, trusting that Jesus can do this. So, okay, the crowd's gone. And then Jesus went in and took the girl by the hand and she got up. And it's literally that simple in the text. But here's a weird scenario, and this is a little dark that I've run several times myself. In my brain, I have imagined so many times a scenario in which I discover that my brother, who was killed in a violent, tragic car accident, who I love and who I miss, and who is irreplaceable to me, and much more so I'm even I'm sure to my parents. I've imagined several times what it would be like to discover that that was a clerical error, that he wasn't dead, that he was somewhere else and couldn't get back to his family, and then I just find him. And then I imagine what it would be like to go to my parents' house and walk up the steps and knock on the door, and maybe I kind of put my brother behind my back a little bit. He's bigger than me. So I don't know, maybe that wouldn't work, but you get the idea, and then my parents come to the door and they're like, Why are you knocking on the door? What's up? I'm like, Mom, Dad, I've got somebody I want you to say hello to. And then my kid brother steps out and he's not dead anymore. And all of that grief and loss and brokenness that my family has felt over that just kind of goes away. And it's ridiculous. I mean, it it's ridiculous. That that isn't happening, that doesn't make any sense. But I think the reason that my brain goes there is because of how uh uh uh natural yet unnatural death is, how deep that separation and the ripple effect of that one split second decision that a couple of drivers made that sent shock waves through the entire history of our family and the future of our family. And the idea of being there to see the look on my parents' face in this ludicrous scenario where I would get to see that healed and restored and set right is both maybe weirdly cathartic, maybe some weird expression of grief, and also uh probably just some strange way that the mind processes the deepest losses we experience. I don't know. Maybe that sounds crazy and you can't relate to that at all. Maybe some of you can relate to that a little bit. But uh in this case, i it's not crazy talk. The whole town saw this happen for this family. This guy went from the deepest wound that I as a dad, a husband, uh, a man could imagine. He went from that wound being open and bleeding out in the most painful of ways to just immediately the thing being like a dream, as far as the East is from the West, solved, resolved. She's up and she's fine, handed back to her dad. And so look, uh this week has been different. I get that. I say that from time to time because the passages are different, the text is different. It it isn't cyclical, it's taking us somewhere. And that just means that when we get to some of these, uh it conjures stuff for me. It makes me wrestle in a different way than the normal academic rhythms that I tend to maybe even inflict on the text. But I'm glad that there's that ebb and flow between the deeply human and deeply personal, and also the deeply analytical and complex abstract theological ideas you gotta wrestle with. This passage has both. I understand I've leaned pretty deeply into the human side of it, and thank you for indulging me on that. I do want to process through the big picture theology stuff and where this fits into the whole narrative thrust of Matthew, but as you can see, we've gone way over. So that will just be what we do next time around. Thank you for so graciously being with me this week and letting me game this out at a different pace and with a little different tone than what we do a lot of times. I'm excited to talk about where this fits on Monday. And Matt, this is the 10 minute Bible hour. I appreciate you. Let's do this again soon.