“He took along the child’s father and mother

and those who were with him

and entered the room where the child was.

He took the child by the hand and said to her, ‘Talitha koum,’

which means, ‘Little girl, I say to you, arise!’

The girl, a child of twelve, arose immediately and walked around.

At that they were utterly astounded.

He gave strict orders that no one should know this

and said that she should be given something to eat.”

Every week at Mass we recite the Nicene Creed together, “I believe in one God…” Before I went to seminary, my varied personal experiences led me to an adult commitment of faith in God and a belief in the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. In addition to reading the Bible cover to cover and rereading and studying many parts of it regularly, including at one point having several verses committed to memory, I also read the Catechism of the Catholic Church cover to cover, twice. Notwithstanding the periods of doubts and distance, my encounters with Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit profoundly drew me into deeper relationship with God. My experience of other world religions, natural skepticism, analytical mind, lateral thinking, as well as, my keen interest in science, however, meant that I was not an easy believer. Earlier in life, I often sought proof and certainty, even if provided supernaturally. God was patient with me, as were my professors in seminary. Graduate-level studies in theology demonstrated to me the intellectual rigor of great theologians and of the Church, itself. It’s not been a perfect history and not all of us practice it with such rigor, but our faith is for people who think. 

Thinking people have problems with miracles or they should. They go against the natural order and should be impossible. They are more than just some gap in our understanding of science that we haven’t explained yet. God doesn’t just fill in the gaps. No, they are an intervention of the divine in the natural order of things. It is beyond the scope of this article (which is super unsatisfying, I know) to attempt a reasonable explanation of miracles. As unsatisfying as it is in brief, if God is who He is, we are who we are, and the universe is what it is, then miracles are reasonable. Likewise, although it can’t be proven by reason, our faith is, nonetheless, reasonable. Faith, though, is faith. It is not proof. That’s the leap. We can’t just think our way to faith. At some point, even when we have been convinced of the reasonableness of faith, we still must reach out in trust to God. The raising of Jairus’s daughter, although it may be reasonable, is impossible to prove. I believe it as an act of faith. I believe that Jesus raised a little girl from death to life. As such, what interests me most is not how he could possibly do it, but how he actually did it. 

There are no special effects, no dramatic details, no great publicity, no trumpet blasts. Limited to her parents and his closest disciples, Jesus simply speaks two words to her (in Aramaic, no less) and she gets up. It is not the act of a showman, a magician, or a fraud. It is an immanent act, close and intimate, quiet and personal. It’s an act of divine love. Jesus raises her to life as if it were the most natural thing for him to do, like waking her from sleep or giving her something to eat. Somewhere in the midst of this impossible miracle done in such a mundane way is the revelation that God is the God of life and love, that life and love are the most natural things for God. That is not an abstraction. It is the very details of our lives and how we love. God is close to us. God is in us. To me, that makes sense.