Matthew 9:23-26

Matthew 9:18 , Matthew 9:23

The Raising of Jairus' Daughter.

I. The miracles of raising from the dead, whereof this is the first, have always been regarded as the mightiest outcomings of the power of Christ; and with justice. They are those, also, at which unbelief is readiest to stumble, standing as they do in more direct contrast than any other to all which our experience has known. The line between health and sickness is not definitely fixed; the two conditions melt one into the other, and the transition from this to that is frequent. In like manner storms alternate with calms; the fiercest tumult of the elements allays itself at last; and Christ's word which stilled the tempest did but anticipate and effect in a moment what the very conditions of nature must have effected in the end. But between being and the negation of being the opposition is not relative, but absolute; between death and life a gulf lies which no fact furnished by our experience can help us even in imagination to bridge over. It is nothing wonderful, therefore, that miracles of this class are signs more spoken against than any other among all the mighty works of the Lord.

II. Note the relation in which the three miracles of this transcendent character stand to one another; for they are not exactly the same miracle repeated three times over, but may be contemplated as in an ever-ascending scale of difficulty, each a more marvellous outcoming of the great power of Christ than the preceding. Science itself has arrived at the conjecture that the last echoes of life ring in the body much longer than is commonly supposed; that for a while it is full of the reminiscences of life. This being so, we shall at once recognize in the quickening of him who had been four days dead a still mightier wonder than in the raising of the young man who was borne out to his burial; and again, in thatmiracle a mightier outcoming of Christ's power than in the present, wherein life's flame, like some newly extinguished taper, was still more easily rekindled, when thus brought in contact with Him who is the fountain-flame of all life. Immeasurably more stupendous than all these will be the wonder of that hour when all the dead of old, who will have lain (some of them for many thousand years) in the dust of death, shall be summoned from, and shall leave, their graves at the same quickening voice.

R. C. Trench, Notes on the Miracles,p. 191.

References: Matthew 9:18. Clergyman's Magazine,vol. iii., p. 280; Homiletic Quarterly,vol. i., p. 469. Matthew 9:20. J. Ker, Sermons,p. 186.