Arising

Sermon for Evensong on Trinity 1, 7th June 2026

1 Samuel 18:1-16, Luke 8:41-56

I don’t know what you would want me to talk about this afternoon: we’ve got two lessons in the Bible which are pretty difficult to link up. On the one hand, the story of David and Jonathan begins. I don’t particularly want to talk about that today, because it seems to me that next week, when Cardiff Pride is on, would be a better time for a sermon about David and Jonathan. But we can certainly note that ‘the soul of Jonathan was bound to the soul of David and Jonathan loved him as his own soul’. They were very good friends.

The other story, the story of bringing Jairus’s daughter back to life, means a lot to me because it is really part of my own journey of faith: it’s one of the first things that made me believe in God; but I have to confess that the version in St Luke’ s Gospel that we had this afternoon isn’t the one that I remember best, but instead it is the one in St Mark’s Gospel.

You know that the first three gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, are called the ‘synoptic’ gospels, meaning gospels ‘from the same viewpoint’, and most of the same stories appear in all of them. St John’s Gospel is rather different. The story of Jairus’ daughter appears in all three synoptic gospels. This morning our services had St Matthew’s version. Now we have read it in St Luke. It’s in St Mark’s Gospel as well; and indeed there is a story, which has a very similar structure to the story of the raising of Jairus’ daughter, in St John’s Gospel, but it’s about Lazarus, the brother of Martha and Mary. He too was raised from the dead by Jesus.

Going back to the story of Jairus’ daughter, what I remember from hearing the story first when my Mum read it to me, or possibly when I heard it in Sunday School when I was little, was that I thought the little girl was called Tabitha and that she might have been related to Tabitha Twitchit the cat, the shopkeeper cat, mother of Tom Kitten and cousin of Ribby, in the Beatrix Potter books.

The word wasn’t ‘Tabitha’, but ‘Talitha’. ‘Talitha cumi’. That difference, L rather than B, hadn’t struck me; but it was the meaning of ‘Talitha cumi’, the Aramaic words which appear both in Luke and in St Mark’s Gospel, that was the thing which stuck in my mind, but not in the words from Luke that we heard just now, but rather in the King James Version of Mark, where the ending of the story goes, ‘… taking the child by the hand he saith unto her, Talitha cumi; which is, being interpreted,

Damsel, I say unto thee, Arise.’

Damsel, arise! What a wonderful, memorable way to say it.

I’m afraid that the Bible version that we’re supposed to use these days, and which Geoff so ably read for us, doesn’t really have anything like the same resonance. No damsels. All it says is, ‘Child, get up.’ I can’t think of a better example of bathos. You need damsels, damsels not just getting up, but arising: you need poetry, you need spiky words, words that you remember! What had happened was something utterly amazing. A miracle. She was dead: and Jesus got her to come back to life. What a miracle.

So the words that stuck in my mind were ‘Damsel, arise.’ These miracles, these things that Jesus did, which went beyond the laws of nature, especially the resurrections from the dead, of Jairus’ daughter (who was possibly not called Tabitha) and of Lazarus, and then the really big miracle, the biggest one of all, the resurrection of Jesus himself; these are the things which started me on my journey of faith.

The idea of the unseen God, the creator and sustainer of us all, is pretty academic. It certainly felt like that when I was growing up: how do you know – how do you really know there is a God? Why would you believe? It’s the stories in the Bible, stories not of abstruse theory but rather the amazing miracles, that take it out of the realm of rather abstruse theory and on to a level which, although ultimately beyond our understanding, give us something tangible to believe in.

As St Paul says in the first letter to the Corinthians, if we don’t believe that the resurrection of Jesus was true, then our faith is in vain and there is nothing to believe in. Christianity would all be a sham. But if on the other hand it did happen – and there seems to be quite a lot of good historical evidence – then there is no reason not to believe that Jairus’ daughter, and Lazarus, were brought back from the dead by Jesus. We can’t know what the mechanism was. Apart from resuscitation in emergency medicine, where people have just immediately stopped breathing, we really have no technical knowledge which would enable us to revive a corpse which had been dead for several days.

Quintessentially the only one who can give life is God, God the creator and sustainer. We can do all sorts of wonderful things today. We can clone Dolly the sheep and create amazing generative AI to reproduce a lot of of the functions of our human brain, but at the moment when Dolly Mk2 was conceived, there was still that moment when the embryo passed from potential to actual being and started growing by itself. There has to be a transition from nothingness into being, and we believe that God is the essence of being, the creator and sustainer. In the story of Jesus and these miraculous resurrections, we have to infer that no man could have done them, just as a man, and that therefore there must have been something extra about Jesus.

Somebody might say that it is oversimplifying things simply to say that he was the son of God. But that is what we believe, that he was at one at the same time both human and divine. The precise nature of his divinity is something that people have argued about over the centuries. The Greeks in classical antiquity had the idea of a divine man, θείος ανήρ, a man with superhuman powers, whereas by the time we got to the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, and then 125 years later the Council of Chalcedon, Christians had agreed on the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, God in three persons, and in particular on God and Jesus being in some way one and the same.

Jesus couldn’t have raised Jairus’ daughter unless He was God. That is a massive thought for me as a nine-year-old to have had, and probably a pretty massive thought for me as a 75-year-old too.

Jesus was quite shy about it. He didn’t want to establish his credentials by doing miracles. He berated the Pharisees for demanding signs, and when he was being tempted by the devil in the wilderness after he had been baptised by John the Baptist, the devil took him up to the pinnacle of the temple and said, go on, jump off. The angels will save you. There will be some kind of divine parachute. Jesus was having none of it.

You might also consider that the earliest bits of the New Testament, the ones written nearest to the time of Jesus, were St Paul’s letters rather than the gospels, and that St Paul’s letters really don’t mention miracles, except for the big miracle, the resurrection of Jesus himself, so miracles are perhaps a bit edgy.

But the Roman Catholics have a wonderfully easy relationship with miracles. You can’t become a saint in the Roman Catholic Church until you have performed or been at the bottom of two miracles, which have to be attested in a very rigorous way.

When I went to Rome in 2019 for the canonisation of John Henry Newman, when the Church made him a saint, there were two people present who had experienced miraculous cures when they had invoked the help of the Blessed John Henry Newman in their prayers. Those healings were accepted as miracles. Well, I think as Anglicans we might be a bit more cautious, and I suspect we are quite content just to accept that there’s never been anything like what Jesus did – although miraculous healings might seem to happen more often than we might expect.

The other person who benefited from Jesus’ miraculous powers was the lady who had had a haemorrhage for 12 years and had not had the benefit of the National Health Service unfortunately. She had ‘spent all she had on physicians’ to no avail. Jesus didn’t actually do anything for her to be healed. She just touched the hem of his garment and somehow his divine power entered into her and stopped her bleeding. Her faith had made her whole.

I pray that we will all remember these things that go beyond nature, but which do seem, incontrovertibly, to have happened. Surely in the light of them we can’t just go on living our lives as though God wasn’t there. Surely we mustn’t go on tolerating genocide and wars of aggression. Surely we mustn’t go on treating some people as being less deserving of a good life than others, just because of where they were born.

Jesus said we should love God, and love our neighbour. Jesus isn’t just an idea. He was a real, historical figure, and he did miracles, miracles which he could only have done if he was God. We should listen to him.

Here what he said was, ‘Damsel, arise’. What a wonderful earworm to take away.

‘Damsel, arise’.The Lord is here. His spirit is with us.