When confronted with a twelve year old girl who had just died, the story about that radical rabble-rouser and rabbi Jesus of Nazareth does not have him saying: \u201cYour daughter is in heaven now because God needed another angel\u201d; nor is he reported as saying, \u201cI know just how you feel, but your daughter is in a better place now.\u201d Nope, the way the story runs is that Jesus walks into where the girl is lying, takes her hand, and says, \u201cGirl, get up!\u201d and she does. (For you Bible geeks, this is in Mark 5.35-43.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mind you, I\u2019m not someone who believes in the literal factual truth of the stories in the Bible, nor do I believe in the literal truth of the stories told by Shakespeare, and in fact I have a limited amount of trust in the literal factual truth of stories in the New York Times or on Fox News. Stories have their own narrative logic that is different from, but no less true than, literal factual truth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So reading this story is not going to make me go out and try to do some faith healing \u2014 no more than reading King Lear is going to make me say to my sweetheart, \u201cI love you according to my bond; no more nor less.\u201d (For you Shakespeare geeks, that\u2019s act 1, scene 1, lines 94-95.) However, reading this story in the Jesus saga is going to make me think twice before uttering platitudes to the parents of a dead child. Jesus did not try to placate them by saying, \u201cYour twelve year old is one of God\u2019s angels now.\u201d Instead, he showed up. He didn\u2019t weep and wail. He was matter-of-fact. He paid attention to the parents, and paid attention to what they really wanted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Just to state the obvious, this story is not a literal story about a dead girl that came back to life, but it is about a different kind of miracle: showing up, not freaking out, and paying attention to someone who needs it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1 comment lost<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When confronted with a twelve year old girl who had just died, the story about that radical rabble-rouser and rabbi Jesus of Nazareth does not have him saying: \u201cYour daughter is in heaven now because God needed another angel\u201d; nor is he reported as saying, \u201cI know just how you feel, but your daughter is … Continue reading “Just to state the obvious”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[18,19,80],"class_list":["post-171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-theology","tag-bible","tag-jesus-of-nazareth","tag-soteriology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=171"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12856,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171\/revisions\/12856"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/yauu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}