"The child is not dead but sleeping" (Mark 5:39).
We could live without death. It wouldn't be missed. Woody Allen said, "I'm not afraid to die. I just don't want to be there when it happens." But Benjamin Franklin wrote in a 1789 letter, "In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes." He died five months later.
The Word of God could be summed up in the following way: Nothing is certain but death and the power of Jesus Christ over it.
In Mark 5 Jesus raises the twelve-year-old daughter of a man named Jairus. Yet before doing so, He makes a startling announcement: "The child is not dead but sleeping." And this is truly a monumental moment in the Gospel. It is the Son of God coming and renaming death. It is the day Christ changed death's name to "sleep." With these seven words, among the most powerful in the Gospel, our Lord Jesus is doing three things.
He is teaching us faith. Faith, by way of definition, is to call something what God calls it, even though our eyes, mind, and experience say otherwise. A Christian dies and we hold a funeral, yet by faith we conclude and confess that the person has merely fallen asleep. I receive a small piece of bread at Holy Communion yet believe that it is what our Lord calls it: His body.
He is showing how easily He alone can raise the dead. "'Little girl, I say to you, arise.' And immediately the girl got up and began walking" (Mark 5:41-42). He is just like a mother here, waking up her dear child in the morning. "Time to get up!" How difficult is that? And it is with the same ease and love that He will waken you, His dear child, on the Last Day.
He is taking away the fear of death from which we suffered. He has, by these words and His own death, altered both the name and the reality of death. It is now, to quote Luther, "but a slumber." Which of you is afraid to take a nap or go to sleep tonight? Such is the Christian faith and view of death. This hymn line makes it memorable: "Teach me to live that I may dread the grave as little as my bed."
Also memorize these seven words: "The child is not dead but sleeping."
