Matthew 9:23-26 - Ellicott's Commentary On The Whole Bible

(23-26) The other Gospels fill up the gap. While our Lord was speaking the words of promise to the woman, messengers came from the house of Jairus, reporting that the child was dead. They whisper to him, using the self-same words as had been used by the friends of the centurion, “Why troublest thou the Teacher any further?” And Jesus turns, and speaks words of comfort to the father’s heart: “Be not afraid, only believe.” They come to the house, and He suffers none to enter but the father and mother, and Peter, James, and John, who now, for the first time, are chosen from among the chosen, for the special blessedness of being with Him in the greater and more solemn moments of His ministry; and as they enter, the preparations for the funeral — always following in the East a few hours after death — are already begun. Minstrels are there, with a crowd of real or hired mourners, raising their wailing cries. And then, in the calmness of conscious power, He bids them withdraw, “for the damsel is not dead, but sleepeth.” To Him the death, though real, was yet but as a sleep, for He, as afterwards in the case of Lazarus (John 11:11), had come to awaken her even out of that sleep. And then, with the heartlessness and unbelief natural to hireling mourners, they “laughed Him to scorn.” They were too familiar with many forms of death to be mistaken as to its outward signs. And then He entered, with the five, as before, into the chamber of death, where the body was laid out for the burial, and grasped her hands, and uttered the words, of which St. Mark gives the Aramaic form, Talitha cumi, “Damsel, I say to thee, Arise,” and “immediately she arose, and walked.” St. Luke, again with a touch of medical precision, reports the fact in the form, “her spirit,” or “her breath, returned,” and, with St. Mark, records that our Lord commanded that “something should be given her to eat.” The restored life was dependent, after the supernatural work had been completed, upon natural laws, and there was the risk of renewed exhaustion. As in other cases, He charged the parents that they should not make it known. It was not good for the spiritual or the bodily life of the girl that she should be the object of the visits of an idle curiosity; and yet, in spite of the command, the fame of the act spread abroad through all that country.