Posted by The WORD in other words (2024) by Fr Dante Barril SVD – Rome
13th Sunday in Ordinary Time – B
God, according to our First Reading, “did not make death, nor does he rejoice in the destruction of the living” (Wis 1:13). But because of sin – generated by “envy of the devil” – death enters the world. However, as the Catechism of the Catholic Church beautifully puts it, “Death is transformed by Christ… The obedience of Jesus has transformed the curse of death into a blessing.” (CCC 1009).
The story of Jairus, the synagogue official in the Gospel, hints at the aforementioned transformation of death from curse to blessing. But before elaborating on that, we would like first to point to the extreme breadth of emotions that Jairus experiences in our Gospel today.
He went from despair (a synagogue official falling at the feet of a provincial Rabbi) to a glimmer of hope (when Jesus went with him); then to a numbing pain (at the news of the death of her daughter); and finally, to an unspeakable joy (when his daughter was restored to him and his wife).
If we notice Jairus spoke only at the beginning; in the rest of the story, he was silent. But with what he went through one cannot blame him; as my classmate likes to say, “I don’t know if a single heart is capable of felling all that.”
But apparently, Jairus’ fatherly heart handled everything just fine. The death of his daughter becomes for him and his family an experience of blessing. While on the surface the restoration of her daughter to life is a miracle, the real miracle is something more. His daughter will eventually die for sure (she was resuscitated, not resurrected) but his story lives forever.
And unlike others who could not keep their mouth shut after Jesus healed and ordered them to keep silent, Jairus – whose heart must be bursting with joy – obeyed the master’s “injunction of secrecy.” Jairus “kept all in his heart.” Like the blessed Virgin Mother, he becomes a disciple. This is the story’s real miracle.
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