Please read the passage before the commentary.
This story is something like a sandwich, one story inserted into another story. While Jesus was on the way to raise a dead person, he healed a woman of her flow of blood.
Jesus would not want us to generalize the young person who has died. She was not some kid, some girl, or someone “off the street”. She was a daughter. She had a family, she had parents, relationships. She did not exist by herself. The women, likewise, was not some old lady, sickly and a bother. She too was a daughter, with a family, living in relationships.
What Jesus did was to restore these two daughters to their relationships. He restored them to their families, to their communities, to their people.
The two stories are interrelated. The girl is twelve years old. She was born about the same time that the older woman had begun to have health issues. this somehow meant that the two lives are intermingled, the two healings are interrelated. A child is the hope of the future; an elderly person is the fruit of our history. Each validates the other. In biblical thought, combining two opposites, like the young and the old, stresses completion or totality. It is like knowing everything from A to Z.
We can read into this account of the healing of the two daughters the mission of Jesus to restore right relationships, not only within families and communities, but also of us with God and God with us. To what right relationships does God want to restore us?
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