NOTES for Luk 8:40-56
All the history of the Savior's earthly ministry is the history of the Kingdom entering the world. And today's reading is the best confirmation of this. On the one hand, there is the raising of Jairus's daughter (vv. 41-56); on the other, a kind of story within the story about the healing of the woman who suffered from a flow of blood (vv. 43-48). It is interesting how this healing happens: as if in passing. Jesus does not even turn His attention to the woman; He simply feels that the power of God, which He carries in Himself, was needed by someone, though He does not know exactly by whom (vv. 45-46). This became possible because Jesus' healings were not exactly medical cures; they had no direct relation to medicine. Jesus simply carried in Himself all the fullness of God, and therefore the fullness of the Kingdom, and everyone who shared in this fullness was healed, if only he had at least a drop of trust in Jesus. And the woman who was healed could not have lacked trust: the bleeding from which she suffered made her unclean, and she herself could have defiled anyone she touched if healing had not occurred. It was necessary to believe completely in the possibility of healing and to trust completely this mysterious Teacher who heals everyone who comes to Him with faith. Jesus Himself confirms that the woman who was healed was saved by her faith (v. 48).
The same is true with Jairus's dead daughter: here we have before us not an ordinary return to life, not something like resuscitation, as some commentators of the modern age interpreted this event. After all, they had already begun mourning the dead girl (v. 52), and Jesus still needed time to reach Jairus's house when He was told of the death of the one He was going to heal (v. 49). But the death of Jairus's daughter could not be called natural. Death is natural when a person dies after exhausting all his physical and spiritual strength. Of such people the Bible says that they died "full of days." Here, clearly, there was nothing of the kind, and it was still too early for Jairus's daughter to die; she was killed by the evil in which our world, not yet transformed, lies.
Of course, every death is the visible triumph of evil and a manifestation of that damaged condition of the universe in general and of human nature in particular that is connected with the fall, but even in the fallen world the manifestations of this evil have their limits. And when someone who has died before his time comes into contact with the Kingdom, it can deliver him from death, bringing the manifestations of world evil within the bounds into which they can be brought without the complete transformation of the universe. Of course, from the point of view of the final goal, the full triumph of the Kingdom of which the Bible tells us, everything described is only a partial and temporary victory. But these victories become a foreshadowing of that final victory, when evil will be expelled from the world forever, and it will become part of that Kingdom in which there will no longer be any place for sickness or death.