Canter Bridge

The gospel writers occasionally seem to have lost the thread of communication theory.

What end is served, for example, by quoting one of your story’s main figures in a language that your readers do not understand? Such an obfuscating move might be put down to the desire to impress, the practice of linguistic elitism. There, the ability to toss off a foreign phrase rather than a desire to communicate weighs heaviest in the writer’s mind.

Yet this can hardly be the objective of the writer of Mark, for the Aramaic language in which he recalls Jesus’ words is not an elite tongue. It has no cachet. Something else is going on here.

It seems rather that the living witness behind the gospel’s words comes upon a moment in his recollections when he can only articulate the event by re-hearing Jesus speaking in the Aramaic of that special moment. One could translate into Greek, of course. In fact, the writer does just that. Yet the eyewitness has in his mind’s eye a moment so particular, so dense with meaning, that he is compelled to speak it out just as he heard it, regardless of whether those syllables are comprehensible to his intended reader.

Such is Peter’s recall of Jesus’ words to a little girl, the daughter of a synagogue leader named Jairus, who had left her parents too soon in bereavement’s tears. Talitha cum, Jesus is remembered to have said as he took the girl by the hand and restored her to life. ‘Little girl, get up.’

The words follow upon a comment that must have iced Jesus’ reputation as a madman with a cold heart, at least among the mourners who filled the home of Jairus, his wife, and his lost child. ‘The child is not dead but sleeping’. So Jesus had assessed the situation, no doubt infuriating well-intentioned friends of family who knew that such a time is not ripe for bad jokes, people who felt themselves appointed as the guardians of their friends’ grief-stricken hearts. They must have wondered who had let this man in and how he could be so heartless once the door had been opened to him. For, clearly, Jairus’ daughter was dead. Matters were beyond remedy. It was time to come to terms with them.

When he had entered, he said to them, ‘Why do you make a commotion and weep? The child is not dead but sleeping.’ And they laughed at him. Then he put them all outside, and took the child’s father and mother and those who were with him, and went in where the child was. He took her by the hand and said to her, ‘Talitha cum,’ which means, ‘Little girl, get up!’ And immediately the girl got up and began to walk about (she was twelve years of age). At this they were overcome with amazement. He strictly ordered them that no one should know this, and told them to give her something to eat.

Jesus sees beyond the iron horizons of death’s decree.

What is more amazing? That a credible narrative tells us he restored life to a little dead girl? Or that he saw to the detail of getting some bread into her warming body?