SIX

THE WAITING

Grant that we may follow the example of Jesus’s patience.” That is what Thomas Cranmer, the author of the original Book of Common Prayer, wrote as a prayer to be used on Palm Sunday—the Sunday before Easter. What does he mean by patience? Patience is love for the long haul; it is bearing up under difficult circumstances, without giving up or giving in to bitterness. Patience means working when gratification is delayed. It means taking what life offers—even if it means suffering—without lashing out. And when you’re in a situation that you’re troubled over or when there’s a delay or pressure on you or something’s not happening that you want to happen, there’s always a temptation to come to the end of your patience. You may well have lost your patience before you’re even aware of it.

Cranmer’s prayer is particularly poignant because it is prayed the week before Easter, the time when we remember Jesus’s sacrificial death on the cross. Jesus displayed patience not just in the way he faced his execution and his enemies. He also displayed remarkable patience with his disciples—think of his patience with them in the storm—and with the people he met throughout his life.

Mark records the meeting of Jesus with a religious leader, a ruler in the synagogue, named Jairus. He would have been a man of great devotion to God, morally respectable, as well as a figure of wealth and social prominence. Mark writes:

When Jesus had again crossed over by boat to the other side of the lake, a large crowd gathered around him while he was by the lake. Then one of the synagogue rulers, named Jairus, came there. Seeing Jesus, he fell at his feet. . . .

(Mark 5:21–22)

Here is a man of authority and standing, yet he falls at the feet of a Galilean carpenter. That’s pretty unusual, isn’t it? He must be desperate. So what’s the problem? Mark tells us:

Seeing Jesus, he fell at his feet and pleaded earnestly with him, “My little daughter is dying. Please come and put your hands on her so that she will be healed and live.” So Jesus went with him.

(Mark 5:22–24)

His little girl is as good as dead. That’s the language he uses: She is going to die unless Jesus comes. So you can imagine Jairus’s excitement when he realizes there’s hope for his dying daughter, yet his insides must be churning with fear that he and Jesus will be too late. So Jesus, Jairus, and the disciples hurry toward Jairus’s home, and they’re followed by a crowd of people eager to see another miracle:

A large crowd followed and pressed around him. And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years. She had suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors and had spent all she had, yet instead of getting better she grew worse.

(Mark 5:24–26)

It is interesting that the text says that “she had suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors . . . yet instead . . . grew worse.” In other words, she had not simply been suffering from her disease, but also from the cures. She had exhausted all her finances, and all the medical options:

When she heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, because she thought, “If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed.” Immediately her bleeding stopped and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering. At once Jesus realized that power had gone out from him.

(Mark 5:27–30)

The crowd is pressing in on Jesus, this woman touches him and is healed, and we read that Jesus realized power had gone out from him. This is the first time the Greek word dunamis, “power,” from which we get the word dynamite, is used in the book of Mark. Jesus has a sensation of weakness, of draining, and he knows that there’s been a healing. He has lost power so she could gain it. He stops the entourage, the emergency procession, and he turns around and says, “I need to find out who touched me”:

He turned around in the crowd and asked, “Who touched my clothes?” “You see the people crowding against you,” his disciples answered, “and yet you can ask, ‘Who touched me?’” But Jesus kept looking around to see who had done it. Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell at his feet and, trembling with fear, told him the whole truth.

(Mark 5:30–33)

When Jesus finds the person who was healed by tapping into his power, he stops and has her tell “the whole truth,” the whole story of what happened.

Imagine Jairus’s anxiety during all of this; the disciples’ irritation; Jesus’s patience and composure. This woman with a chronic condition is getting attention instead of the little girl who has an acute condition. Jesus chooses to stop and talk with the woman who has just been healed. This makes no sense. It is absolutely irrational. In fact, it’s worse than that: It’s malpractice. If these two were in the same emergency room, any doctor who treated the woman first and let the little girl die would be sued. And Jesus is behaving like such a reckless doctor. Jairus and the disciples must be thinking, “What are you doing? Don’t you understand the situation? Hurry, or it will be too late. The little girl needs help from you now, Jesus. Hurry, Jesus, hurry.”

But Jesus will not be hurried. As he’s standing there and talking with the woman, the thing that Jairus feared all along happens:

While Jesus was still speaking, some men came from the house of Jairus, the synagogue ruler. “Your daughter is dead,” they said. “Why bother the teacher anymore?”

(Mark 5:35)

Imagine how Jairus feels about Jesus at that moment. But Jesus looks at him calmly and,

Ignoring what they said, Jesus told the synagogue ruler, “Don’t be afraid; just believe.”

(Mark 5:36)

In essence, Jesus says to Jairus, Trust me. Be patient. There’s no need to hurry. Every culture has a different sense of time. This becomes glaringly evident in cross-cultural encounters and events. Picture a wedding where the groom is from a culture where being fifteen or thirty minutes late is okay, while the bride is from a culture that frowns on any lateness whatsoever. She and her bridesmaids are ready for the wedding but the groom isn’t there and it’s fifteen past the hour. On the left side of the sanctuary there’s hand-wringing and worried glances. On the right side, everybody’s calm. Timing is relative. And everybody has a sense of “this is the right time but not this.”

God’s sense of timing will confound ours, no matter what culture we’re from. His grace rarely operates according to our schedule. When Jesus looks at Jairus and says “Trust me, be patient,” in effect he is looking over Jairus’s head at all of us and saying, “Remember how when I calmed the storm I showed you that my grace and love are compatible with going through storms, though you may not think so? Well, now I’m telling you that my grace and love are compatible with what seem to you to be unconscionable delays.” It’s not “I will not be hurried even though I love you”; it’s “I will not be hurried because I love you. I know what I’m doing. And if you try to impose your understanding of schedule and timing on me, you will struggle to feel loved by me.” Jesus will not be hurried, and as a result, we often feel exactly like Jairus, impatient because he’s delaying irrationally, unconscionably, inordinately.

What We Really Need

But precisely because of the delay both Jairus and the woman get far more than they asked for. Be aware that when you go to Jesus for help, you will both give to and get from him far more than you bargained for. Be patient, because the deal often doesn’t work out the way you expected. Take Jairus. He came to Jesus to cure his dying daughter, but he got far more than that. Let’s go to the climax of this story. The plot has thickened again: Even though the little girl’s dead, Jesus looks at the father and says, “I’m coming anyway.” They proceed:

He did not let anyone follow him except Peter, James, and John, the brother of James. When they came to the home of the synagogue ruler, Jesus saw a commotion, with people crying and wailing loudly. He went in and said to them, “Why all this commotion and wailing? The child is not dead but asleep.” But they laughed at him.

(Mark 5:37–40)

When they eventually arrive at Jairus’s home everyone is in mourning for the dead girl. So of course they laugh when Jesus says she’s asleep. They know a dead child when they see one. The story continues:

After he put them all out, he took the child’s father and mother and the disciples who were with him, and went in where the child was. He took her by the hand and said to her, “Talitha koum!” (which means, “Little girl, I say to you, get up!”). Immediately the girl stood up and walked around (she was twelve years old). At this they were completely astonished.

(Mark 5:40–42)

Of course they were astonished. Jairus came to Jesus for a fever cure, not for a resurrection. When you go to Jesus for help, you get from him far more than you had in mind.

But when you go to Jesus for help, you also end up giving to him far more than you expected to give. Jairus came thinking he would have to trust Jesus just enough to get home, hoping that somehow the child wouldn’t die before he arrived. But Jesus demanded far more from him: After Jairus’s daughter had died, because of the apparent malpractice of the Great Physician, Jesus looked right into his eyes and said, “Trust me.” Now, that was a test of faith far beyond anything Jairus had anticipated.

Or take the sick woman. She came to Jesus for healing. But she wanted to just touch and run. She wanted to say, “I’m better, I’m out of here”—simple as that. Jesus wouldn’t have it. Jesus forced her to go public. Keep in mind that this was very threatening for her. She had been coping with a blood flow, which made her ceremonially unclean. Because of this, to touch a rabbi in public would break a great taboo. And therefore Jesus’s request that she identify herself was a very frightening thing.

Why did Jesus insist that she go public? She needed it. You see, she had a somewhat superstitious understanding of Jesus’s power. She thought it was the touch that could heal her. She thought his power was manageable. And Jesus made her identify herself so he could say, “Oh, no, it was faith that healed you.” Let’s go now to the climax of her story:

Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell at his feet and, trembling with fear, told him the whole truth. He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.”

(Mark 5:33–34)

Jesus is saying to her, “Your faith is what healed you and now that you know that, you are in a life-transforming relationship with me.” There’s all the difference in the world between being a superstitious person who gets a bodily healing, and a life-transformed follower of Jesus for all eternity.

If you go to Jesus, he may ask of you far more than you originally planned to give, but he can give to you infinitely more than you dared ask or think.

What We Really Need to Know

As far as Jairus and the disciples are concerned, it’s malpractice for Jesus to let a little girl die while he deals with a woman with a chronic condition. But we who have read to the end of the story know something that they did not. We know that for Jesus to raise a girl from the dead or to cure a fever was no different—that he has power over death. We also know that Jesus had an opportunity to take a superstitious woman who has received a bodily healing and turn her into a life-transformed follower. Jairus and the disciples couldn’t see that either. They had no idea.

It seemed to Jairus and the disciples that Jesus was delaying for no good reason, but they didn’t have all the facts. And so often, if God seems to be unconscionably delaying his grace and committing malpractice in our life, it’s because there is some crucial information that we don’t yet have, some essential variable that’s unavailable to us. If I could sit down with you and listen to the story of your life, it may well be that I would join you in saying, “I can’t understand why God isn’t coming through. I don’t know why he is delaying.” Believe me, I know how you feel, so I want to be sensitive in the way I put this. But when I look at the delays of God in my own life, I realize that a great deal of my consternation has been rooted in arrogance. I complain to Jesus, “Okay, you’re the eternal Son of God, you’ve lived for all eternity, you created the universe. But why would you know any better than I do how my life should be going?” Jacques Ellul, in his classic The Technological Society, argues that in modern Western society we have been taught that nearly everything in life is there to be manipulated for our own ends.29 It has been common for many people to act in that way no matter what their time or place, but Ellul believes modern Western culture makes this condition even worse. We’re not God, but we have such delusions of grandeur that our self-righteousness and arrogance sometimes have to be knocked out of our heart by God’s delays.

Right now, is God delaying something in your life? Are you ready to give up? Are you impatient with him? There may be a crucial factor that you just don’t have access to. The answer, as with Jairus, is to trust Jesus.

How We Really Know It

Do you think it is odd that when Jesus arrives at Jairus’s house he says that the girl is just sleeping? The parallel accounts of this story in Matthew’s and Luke’s Gospels make it clear that Jesus understands she’s dead. She’s not just mostly dead; she’s all dead. Then why does he make that reference to sleep?

The answer is in what Jesus does next. Remember, Jesus sits down beside the girl, takes her by the hand, and says two things to her. The first is talitha. Literally, it means “little girl,” but that does not get across the sense of what he’s saying. This is a pet name, a diminutive term of endearment. Since this is a diminutive that a mother would use with a little girl, probably the best translation is “honey.” The second thing Jesus says to her is koum, which means “arise.” Not “be resurrected”; it just means “get up.” Jesus is doing exactly what this child’s parents might do on a sunny morning. He sits down, takes her hand, and says, “Honey, it’s time to get up.” And she does. Jesus is facing death, the most implacable, inexorable enemy of the human race and such is his power that he holds this child by the hand and gently lifts her right up through it. “Honey, get up.” Jesus is saying by his actions, “If I have you by the hand, death itself is nothing but sleep.”

But Jesus’s words and actions are not just powerful; they are loving too. When you were little, if your parent had you by the hand you felt everything was okay. You were wrong, of course. There are bad parents, and even the best parents are imperfect. Even the best parents can slip up, even the best parents make wrong choices. But Jesus is the ultimate Parent who has you by the hand and will bring you through the darkest night. The Lord of the universe, the One who danced the stars into place, takes you by the hand and says, “Honey, it’s time to get up.”

Why would we want to hurry somebody this powerful and this loving, who treats us this tenderly? Why would we be impatient with somebody like this? Jesus holds us by the hand and brings us through the greatest darkness. What enables him to do that? In his letter to the church in Corinth, 2 Corinthians 13:4, the apostle Paul says Christ was crucified in weakness so that we can live in God’s power. Christ became weak so that we can be strong. There’s nothing more frightening for a little child than to lose the hand of the parent in a crowd or in the dark, but that is nothing compared with Jesus’s own loss. He lost his Father’s hand on the cross. He went into the tomb so we can be raised out of it. He lost hold of his Father’s hand so we could know that once he has us by the hand, he will never, ever forsake us.

That’s the reason, by the way, that Thomas Cranmer’s Palm Sunday prayer reads as it does. The complete prayer actually says, “Grant that we may both follow the example of his patience, and also be made partakers of his resurrection.” Jesus Christ knew the only way to the crown was through the cross. The only way to resurrection was through death. So his healing of the sick woman was another foreshadowing of the cross. He lost power so she could gain strength. But on the cross he lost his very life, so we could live forever. The only way for Jesus to give us this power and life was to go through weakness and death.

Are you trying to hurry Jesus? Are you impatient with the waiting? Let him take you by the hand, let him do what he wants to do. He loves you completely. He knows what he’s doing. Soon it will be time to wake up.

Let us be conformed to his patience, that we might be made partakers of the resurrection.