In the Scriptures, there was a man named Jairus, he was a ruler of a synagogue–an important man in Jewish society.  A synagogue is a meeting place for Jews where the Law, the Prophets and the Writings were read and explained every Sabbath.  The practice of Jews meeting every Sabbath in a synagogue came about first when the Jews were exiled to Babylon for seventy years.  The temple Solomon built had been destroyed by the invading Babylonian Army headed by Nebuchadnezzar around 606 BC. Many in Israel died but still more were brought as captives into Babylon.

Amid the paganism of ancient Babylon, the Jews felt the need to maintain their spiritual identity by gathering together to worship on the Sabbath.  The practice stuck even when the Jews repatriated back to Judea because in their absence, Gentiles had settled in the land and so the Israelites had to live with Gentiles in lands that used to belong to the kingdom of Israel.  On ordinary Sabbath days, it was difficult and perilous to travel to Jerusalem to worship God.  The Jews in a locality would gather in a synagogue to worship instead. They only went to Jerusalem on the high days: Passover, Feast of Weeks, the Day of Atonement and the Feast of Tabernacles.

The ruler of a synagogue leads in the prayer, he reads from the Old Testament and, if there is no visiting rabbi, he explains the Scriptures.  He also administers the treasury of the synagogue which is used for charitable work.  So Jairus was an important man, a learned man, a man respected and known by people.  He was influential, he was an opinion maker. It was a humbling experience for him to seek Jesus out among the throng in the streets.  But then Jairus was a father, he had only one daughter who was twelve years old.  She was grievously ill and at the point of death when Jairus left their home to search for Jesus of Nazareth, the famed miracle worker.

When Jairus approached Jesus, he had only one plan, to fall down at the feet of Jesus, beg him to come to his house and heal his sick daughter.  He had a specific request: that his daughter be restored to health.  Much to his relief, Jesus did  not need much convincing.  Jesus readily acquiesced to his request and started to walk toward Jairus’s home.

While they were walking toward Jairus’s house, a servant came to tell Jairus not to bother Jesus anymore because his sick daughter had died.  Jairus’s last act of desperation proved futile, his daughter can no longer be restored to health because his daughter had died.  Why would they need a healer when the daughter wasn’t lying sick anymore? She was beyond sickness, she was dead.

Jairus’s need for Jesus was limited.  He needed Jesus only to heal his daughter.  His need for Jesus was limited by his limited knowledge of who Jesus was. He only knew Jesus as a healer and so he came to Jesus asking for a healing, that was all.

Jairus and his wife were emotionally fatigued.  They had been on an emotional roller-coaster ride with their daughter’s sickness. The daughter was well-loved, their darling, she was so young, just blossoming out of childhood into womanhood.  It is not the natural order of things for parents to bury their children.  Their minds were numbed by the suddenness of the loss.

Jesus said to them:”Fear not, only believe, and she shall be made whole.”  If your daughter had just died and someone said this to you, you will politely nod.  Inside, you want to yell, shut up! But, knowing that the speaker was just trying to comfort you as you process your loss, you accept the comment silently.  But your heart is sinking with the weight of the reality of the loss.  I don’t think that they were hoping for anything much at this point, they allowed Jesus into the child’s room so that he could offer a prayer for the dead child as a comfort to the parents.

When Jesus said that their daughter was only “asleep” and everyone within earshot laughed derisively, Jairus was too numb to get angry at the discourtesy and indelicacy of the crowd.  And then Jesus took the dead child by the hand and ordered her to arise.  The girl’s spirit came to her again and she rose from her deathbed.

In my mind’s eye, I can just see Jairus:  his eyes wide as saucers, his mouth agape.  His mind racing to keep up with the events that have just transpired.  If they were numbed by the death before, they are now paralyzed with incomprehension:  they were dumbfounded, they were at a loss for words.  They were “astonished with great astonishment” was how Dr. Luke described Jairus and his wife.  They were astonished.  And just in case you missed it, their astonishment was great. Their astonishment was disproportionate to the events, they were emotionally catatonic and unresponsive.

I imagine that Jairus’s mind just “hung.” Imagine you were multi-tasking on your PC, you have so many windows open, so many programs running, you make the mistake of hitting the enter button too fast and too often, the computer screen freezes as the computer’s circuitry tries to execute all your commands.  I imaging Jairus’s mind freeze up just like that.  There were just too many things going on, too many feelings to process, the mind just couldn’t cope.

I do not think that they were astonished only because their child had just died and the child who had just died came back to life before their very eyes.  It was more than just that.  I think that the gears of their mind were slowly trying to make sense of what had just happened.  Little by litte, the light is dawning on them that Jesus was no ordinary prophet, no ordinary rabbi, he was no ordinary do-good-er or healer.

Slowly, they begin to realize that they have just witnesses a man –Jesus, exercise power over life and death–only God has that kind of power over life and death.  Only God can take a lump of clay, breathe into it and the lump of clay becomes a living soul.  Only God can give life.

Now Jairus was a Jew.  He has been taught since his childhood that God is invisible, that he is unapproachable, that God dwells in the thick darkness of the smoke arising from the burnt offerings in the temple.  God doesn’t walk around the earth anymore breathing life into people.  He did it once during creation and God has rested from this life-breathing work.  His astonishment does not only come from the impossibility of the dead coming back to life, his astonishment comes from the fact that his dead daughter came back to life because Jesus ordered her to come back to life.

Jairus froze.  Was Jesus of Nazareth really the Christ?  Was this carpenter from Nazareth truly the Son of God?  His mind could not wrap itself around the truth that the very God was standing in his house. Jesus seemed so ordinary, so common.  How can Jesus be God?  But inside him there was an insistent voice that was saying, Jesus is God!

God is incomprehensible and unapproachable, “how shall we acquaint ourselves with One who eludes all the straining efforts of mind and heart?  How shall we be held accountable to know what cannot be known?”

Jairus’s astonishment comes from seeing Jesus in a radically new and different way. A.W. Tozer, in his book, The Knowledge of the Holy speaks of the “human tendency to reduce God to manageable terms.  We want to get Him where we can use Him, or at least know where He is when we need Him.  We want a God we can in some measure control.”

We feel secure thinking we know God when all the while, our knowledge of God is so shallow, so off-the-mark because our idea of God is a mere “composite of all religious pictures we have seen, all the best people we know, and all the sublime ideas we have entertained.”

When with their spiritual eyes people “see” Jesus, God the Son, for the first time,  they react in disbelief, in shock, in consternation and anger.  Jesus precisely presents to our minds what God is truly like and we recoil from Jesus’ revelation because we see how totally wrong we were about what God is like all along.

This is the same reason why people reject Jesus Christ.  They chose to hold on to their own concept of who God is instead of conceding that “in Christ and by Christ, God effects complete self-disclosure.” People are unwilling to move away from their own mental image of God and accept the revelation of who God truly is in Jesus Christ.

Jesus said: “Neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal him.  Jesus is the brightness of the glory of God, he is the express image of God.  When we look to Jesus, we see God.

But most people would rather have their image, their mental idol because the “God” they have formed in their minds is much like them and much easier to live with.  But a God who is like us cannot be God at all, for God is not a man.  “An idol of the mind is as offensive to God as an idol of the hand.”

Perhaps, like Apostle Paul, we need to shed the scales from our spiritual eyes, to see God not as we have formed Him in our mind (such as when we think: I like to think of God as….).  We need to move on to the revelation of God in Jesus Christ.  Like the author of the Hebrews, we need to “see Jesus” for who He is, not just as a martyr, not just a good man, not just a great teacher, not just a great humanitarian or a man with a cause.  We need, just like Jairus, to see Jesus as the God that He is. Just like Jairus, with great astonishment, let us behold Jesus.  Le us behold, our God! Behold your God!