A Father Falls at His Feet

Four verses, and Mark uses them to open something he then refuses to finish.

Jesus crosses back over the lake and the crowd gathers again on the shore. A man pushes through it, and before Mark tells us what the man wants, he tells us who the man is: a synagogue leader named Jairus. Both halves of that carry weight. A synagogue leader was a respected man holding an office, responsible for the building and for the ordering of worship, the sort of man the scribes would sit down and talk with. He also has a name. Mark describes other people Jesus helps rather than naming them, a leper, a paralytic, a man with a withered hand, and somebody kept hold of this one's name.

He sees Jesus and goes down at his feet. Work out what that costs a man with a title, in public, in the dirt, in front of a crowd.

“My little daughter is near death. Please come and place Your hands on her, so that she will be healed and live.”

There is no theology in that and no attempt to say it well. It comes out the way frightened parents talk, in short pieces, in the order the pieces arrive. He does not ask for a word spoken from where they are standing. He wants Jesus inside the house with his hands on the child, and he wants his daughter alive tomorrow, and those two things are the whole of what he came to say.

So Jesus went with him, and a large crowd followed and pressed around Him.

The passage stops there, halfway to the house. Jesus is walking, a large crowd is pressing in on him from every side, and somewhere in the middle of it a father is trying to move faster than the people in front of him.

Mark is about to interrupt himself with somebody else entirely. He does that on purpose, and it is not a change of subject, and we will come back to Jairus. For tonight the picture holds still: a man who had a great deal to lose is face down in the road, and the answer to his question has to wait while the crowd shuffles forward.