Jairus

AI summary: Jairus matters because the cross references place him in one of the most tender and arresting miracle narratives in the Gospels. His public humility, urgent plea, and persistence through delay and apparent finality frame a scene in which Jesus reveals authority not only over sickness but over death itself. Taken together, the material presents Jairus as a father whose desperate faith becomes the setting for one of the clearest displays of Jesus' life-giving power.¹

A ruler of the synagogue at Capernaum, whose only daughter Jesus restored to life (Mark 5:22; Luke 8:41). Entering into the chamber of death, accompanied by Peter and James and John and the father and mother of the maiden, he went forward to the bed whereon the corpse lay, and said, Talitha cumi, i.e., “Maid, arise,” and immediately the spirit of the maiden came to her again, and she arose straightway; and “at once to strengthen that life which had come back to her, and to prove that she was indeed no ghost, but had returned to the realities of a mortal existence, he commanded to give her something to eat” (Mark 5:43). ³