In the second half of Luke 8, we see a triad of Jesus’s miracles. First, Jesus calms the storm on the Sea of Galilee (vv. 22-25). Next, Jesus heals the demoniac by casting out the demons into a herd of pigs (vv. 26-39). The focus of this sermon is the final miracle in that triad which is really two for the price of one: Jesus heals the sick woman and the resurrection of Jairus’s daughter.
So, let’s go ahead and dive into the text.
I have written and preached on this same story as it is told in Mark 5. However, preaching the same story from a different Gospel gives us an opportunity to spend a little bit of time discussing why God, according to his will, gave us multiple testimonies of the same event. And perhaps more importantly, it gives us an opportunity to discuss what we are to make of the subtle and sometimes not so subtle differences between the Gospel narratives.
Our goal, then, is to gain a fuller appreciation for God’s holy, inspired, and inerrant Word by looking at the way this story is told in Matthew, Mark, and Luke as well as a better understanding of how the Holy Spirit used and inspired Dr. Luke to teach us something about Jesus, his authority over our bodies, and compassion for the dead and dying.
Let us begin by looking at this story in Mark and Luke and the unique perspective Dr. Luke has on the narrative.
The first point is to acknowledge the differences between the Gospels. It is not something Christians should avoid or push under the rug. Rather, we should embrace them. Dr. Vern Poythress, professor of New Testament at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia says this: “[T]he differences between the Gospels are an integral and significant part of the Gospels. The differences are there for a purpose: they help us. All the Gospels are talking about events that actually happened; they are not ‘making it up.’ But they are telling about events in ways that help us to grasp their significance and their theological implications.”1
Far from avoiding them, we should actually rush to the differences in parallel passages because that’s where we’ll find new ways to grasp the overall theological purpose of the passage. So how would we do that in the passage before us?
For starters, look at the way Luke describes the condition of Jairus’s daughter. In verse 42, Luke simply says “she was dying.” In the Greek, it is the kind of technical language we expect from a medical professional. Mark, on the other hand, is more literary instead opting for a Greek euphemism or idiom which, in English, translates to “at the point of death” (Mark 5:23). It’s a subtle difference, but it seems Luke really wants us to understand that Jairus’s daughter is in critical condition and, according to his opinion as a doctor with experience in these things, she is going to die without some kind of intervention.
Luke adds a similar detail after Jesus raises Jairus’s daughter back to life. Luke says, “and her spirit returned” (v. 55). Mark makes no mention of that, so why does Luke? Again, the differences give us more theological clarity.
Remember why Luke is writing his Gospel in the first place. At the beginning of his gospel, Luke says he wants “to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, that you may have certainty concerning these things you have been taught” (1:3).
In my sermon on Luke 1:1-14, I discussed the fact that Luke has an explicitly apologetic focus to his Gospel. Luke is saying, “I am so certain she was dead and that Jesus raised her from the dead because when Jesus said, ‘Child, arise’ her spirit returned to her. I don’t care what other people think, I’m telling you she was dead, and Jesus raised her back to life. I’m willing to stake my entire reputation on it.”
So, what’s Luke’s theological motivation for insisting on such a detail? It is as if Luke is winking at us through the text. If Jesus really brought a dead girl back to life, what does that mean for you, Theophilus? What does it mean for you, other first century reader? What does it mean for you, reader now in 2024? It means Jesus is Lord. It means Jesus alone has all power, and all authority, and all dominion. It means that you should throw yourself at his feet and put your faith in him because if he can save a little girl from death then he can save you from death too.
That’s the unique contribution of Luke, inspired by the Holy Spirit, in just a tiny difference. Poythress is right—the differences are important. They are there for a purpose. They are there to help us.
We could belabor the point and ask why Matthew’s narrative has Jairus saying his daughter is already dead by the time he comes to Jesus (Matthew 9:18). However, the so-called contradiction is not nearly the issue as so many critics make it out to be. What Mark and Luke expand into a longer story Matthew summarizes in about half the number of verses. As Augustine and Calvin and many other biblical scholars have noted, Matthew is simply being brief without losing sight of the main point which is that Jesus, in response to two demonstrations of faith, healed a woman of an incurable disease and raised a little girl from the dead. In the end, it is really only a stylistic difference that does not detract from the major implication of the story which is consistent across all the Gospels—that Jesus has compassion for the sick and dying and that he alone has authority to do something about it.
That is especially evident in the rest of Luke’s telling which we will spend the rest of our time on.
As I said earlier, this miracle is the third in a triad of miracles. First Jesus demonstrated his authority over creation by calming the storm. Then he demonstrated his authority over the spiritual realm by casting out the demons from the demoniac. Now he’s going to demonstrate his authority over the physical realm and the human body in particular. And just like in the other two miracles, he does so by also showing his unending compassion for those afflicted by the effects of sin.
That’s the first thing that strikes us about this passage, right? There’s an overwhelming sense that things are not the way they’re supposed to be. First, we meet Jairus who is desperate because his twelve-year-old daughter is going to die. Parents aren’t supposed to bury their children. Then, on the way to heal her, we meet the woman whose body has been inflicted by an incurable disease for twelve years.
As long as Jairus’s daughter has been alive, this woman has suffered not just physically, but spiritually and socially too. According to the ceremonial law, to have a bloody discharge like she did meant being in a state of perpetual uncleanness (Leviticus 15:19). She would not have been allowed to participate in the regular religious rites of her community. She would not have even been allowed to touch anyone. Imagine no hugs or pats on the back for twelve years. The picture is of complete and total alienation from both the community and from God.
Enter Jesus into this complete state of brokenness. His presence compels this miraculous response of faith from the woman. The woman who is forbidden to touch anyone and would likely have been severely punished for doing so fights her way through a crowd and touches Jesus.
Verse 44 says immediately upon reaching out and touching Jesus her discharge of blood ceased. And as wonderful and amazing as that must have been for her, immediately her worst fear happens because Jesus stops and asks, “Who touched me?”
Imagine what must have raced through the woman’s mind. The crowd grows quiet as they realize something has just happened. People are looking around, and wait, isn’t that her, the woman with the blood? Peter interjects, “Master, look at this crowd, it could have been any one of them!” But Jesus insists, “No, we’re going to wait here and figure it out because power has gone out from me.”
Does Jesus know it was the woman? The text seems to suggest so because it says, “the woman saw that she was not hidden”(v. 47). In other words, all eyes were on her at this point. And this helps us understand why the text says she was trembling and appreciate what happens next.
We can too easily think, “Oh how wonderful. Everyone must be smiling and just thrilled for her or maybe they are coming to grips with just how unfair they have been to her.”
Not at all. She’s trembling because she knows what they are thinking: “This unclean woman, she’s just broken the law of God, dirtied Jesus, and probably dirtied me in the process.”
She could have run for it. She could have pleaded for their mercy. But that is not what she does. What does she do? “And when the woman saw that she was not hidden, she came trembling, and falling down before him declared in the presence of all the people why she had touched him, and how she had been immediately healed” (v. 47).
She declares—she testifies—to this crowd the miraculous power of Jesus to heal the sick and the broken. She does not know how or why she was healed yet, but she knows it was Jesus. And then it is Jesus, in all his compassion, who provides the answer: “Daughter”—he calls her family—"your faith has made you well. Go in peace” (v. 48).
Of all the people pressing in on Jesus only her touch results in healing. Why? Jesus gives us the answer: her faith has made her well.
Jesus also says, “Go in peace.” Shalom. Wholeness—physical wholeness, social wholeness, and spiritual wholeness. She was alienated from God and without hope. Now, she is a daughter of the King. The commentator, Darrell L. Bock, puts it this way: “Peace here is not an internal, subjective feeling; it is a state that exists between the woman and God because of her faith.”2 She has been set free from the spirit of slavery, as Paul says in Romans 8, and received the Spirit of adoption by which all God’s children now cry “Abba! Father!”
How? By faith alone in Christ alone. That is what the free grace of the Gospel offers to anyone who would put their faith in Christ—eternal and permanent peace, not merely emotional relief but relational restoration with God.
Peace was probably the last thing Jairus was feeling in that moment. This woman had suffered for twelve years and in the matter of seconds upon meeting Jesus she was healed. But those few seconds must have felt like an eternity for Jairus.
Then, his worst nightmare comes to pass. A messenger arrives to tell him that it’s too late. His daughter is dead. They took too long, and though Jesus may have power to heal sick bodies, there is no way he has the power to raise dead bodies.
But this passage is about Jesus’s authority over all bodies—healthy bodies, sick bodies, and even dead bodies. He comes with not just any power but resurrection power, a power that is on offer to Jairus and his daughter. But how? Jesus gives us the answer once again: “Do not fear; only believe” (v. 50). Have faith, Jesus says. Have faith in my authority.
In comparison to the power and authority of Jesus, the great specter of death is but a little sleep. This is not merely true for Jairus but for all those who put their faith in Jesus, Paul says in 1 Thessalonians 4:13-14: “But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep.”
To the unbelieving world, there is no greater power than death. It does not matter if you are a sick, old woman at the bottom of the social hierarchy or the only daughter of the chief elder in your town; whether you struggle with a chronic disease or exercise three times a day and have the greatest diet in the world. Death is coming for us all.
But for the Christian there is a greater power still: the resurrection power of the Lord God who raised our elder brother Jesus from the grave and who promises to do the same for all his people. In the hands of our Redeemer, and compared to the eternal life that awaits us, death is nothing but a cat nap.
One of my favorite illustrations of this idea comes from The Lord of the Rings. In the film adaptation of The Return of the King, Gandalf and Pippen are cornered by the orcs who are breaking through the last barricade in Minas Tirith. Pippen, realizing his death is probably imminent, cries out loud to Gandalf, “I didn’t think it would end this way.” To which Gandalf responds, “End? No, the journey doesn’t end here. Death is just another path, one that we all must take. The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass, and then you see it…white shores, and beyond, a far green country under a swift sunrise.” For a hobbit from the Shire, it must sound like heaven.
That is the kind of hope followers of Christ have—that death is not the end, that it is just one more step on a journey, one that ends in eternal life with our Savior. It is such a bold and reckless hope that it elicits derision from a world who remains enslaved to fear. The crowds, when they hear Jesus proclaim his authority over death, literally laugh at him (v. 53). They mocked him. Christian, they will mock you too. But for those firmly secured to the Lord Jesus in faith, the only joke is on death because we have witnessed the great power Jesus has over the grave—in the raising of Jairus’s daughter and Jesus’s own resurrection.
So, what does this passage mean for us? How do we live accordingly with Jesus’s authority over the physical body and his power over bodily death?
I think the answer is in Heidelberg Catechism Question 1:
Q: Christian, what is your only comfort in life and death?
A: That I am not my own but belong body and soul, both in life and in death, to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ.
I belong body and soul to Jesus. There is a warning in those words and also a comfort.
First, the warning. Your body does not belong to you; it belongs to the Lord Jesus Christ who bought and ransomed you—body and soul—on the cross. By the power of his Holy Spirit, you—body and soul—have been joined to him.
The spiritual union you have with Jesus is so close and so real, Paul says, that what you do to your body, it is as if you were doing that to Jesus’s body. Hear what he says in 1 Corinthians 6:15-20: “Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? Never!…Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So, glorify God in your body.”
“My body, my choice” is the mantra of our culture. Not so for the church. I am not my own. You are not your own. Our bodies belong to the Lord. He has the ultimate authority over what we do with it, who we join it to, what we put in it.
You are not your own. That is the warning. But here is the comfort: you are not your own. You belong, body and soul, to the Lord Jesus Christ. He bought you with a price, at the highest cost imaginable, his own life. Do you think he will ever let you go? Do you think he will ever lose his grip on you? No matter how much we may fall short in subjecting ourselves to his authority, we remain his prized possession. We are forever sons and daughters of the King.
He will surely bring the good work he has started in us to completion (Philippians 1:6). On this side of glory, we continue to wrestle against the effects of sin on our bodies. We get sick, sometimes really sick. We wrestle against all kinds of ailments, chronic pains, and injuries. And, yes, should the Lord tarry, all of us here will die one day. We pray for healing, we pray for relief, we pray Maranatha! Christ return! But not without hope. Because no matter what happens we are on a journey to a place where there will be no more tears, no more death, nor more mourning, no more pain. Because the former things will have passed away, and we will enjoy eternal life, eternal peace, with our Savior forever (Revelation 21:4).
This sermon was preached at Christ Presbyterian Church in Burke, VA on September 1, 2024.
Vern Poythress, Inerrancy and the Gospels (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012), 25.
Darrell L. Bock, Luke, Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament, edited by Robert W. Yarbrough and Joshua W. Jipp (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 1994), 1:799.