JESUS

“ALWAYS POLITICALLY INCORRECT”

“She is not dead but asleep.” He took her by the hand and said, “My child, get up!” Her spirit returned, and at once she stood up…. Her parents were astonished.” (Luke 8:52, 54-56, TNIV)

While my grandfather was in the hospital last month, I prayed with several patients of families in the waiting room. One such patientwas a little girl who had been hospitalized with a form of migraine headache that causes paralysis and has been completely non-responsive for a couple of days. For all the world she appears to be simply sleeping peacefully. Only it’s not that simple. She couldn’t be awakened by the doctors.

While I spoke with the mothershe caressed her daughter’s back and would every once in a while whisper something to her. I spoke to her a couple of times too. But she didn’t move, didn’t flutter her eyelids, didn’t respond in any way. We prayed that God would heal her, that He would awaken her and make her well and let her parents and sister hear her voice again. While the minister in mereassured her mother of God’s presence with them and His power to heal the little girl, the human being in me scoffed at my best efforts to say the right thing. That human part of me knows that when a loveone is sick, the only “Right Thing” to say is the Thing that makes that person well.

What that mother really wants is for someone to walk into that hospital room, flip off the monitors and machines, pull the needles and tubes out of her daughter’s body, whisper in her ear, “Time to get up, honey.” She wants someone who has the power to make her eyelids flutter and open and her body uncurl from its fetal position. That mother was not interested in “political correctness.” The Right Thing, for her, would cause her daughter to stretch and yawn and say, “Hi mom. I’m hungry. When’s dinner?”

If you’ve been where that motherwas, or imagined yourself there in your worst nightmares, then you can relate.

“Stop wailing. She’s not dead, but asleep.” Of course they laughed at Him: what would possess a person to say such a thing? When you enter a room with parents and grandparents and siblings and family and friends grieving at a child’s deathbed, the “politically correct” thing to say is definitely not “stop wailing.” Stop wailing? About the best reaction anyone who said such a thing in such a situation could hope for would be anger. “Stop wailing? How ‘bout taking a long walk off a short pier, buddy?”

And the point of the story is that Jesus doesn’t say the politically correct thing, the only thing that little girl’s father cared to hear at the moment, and the only thing the mother I met in hospital cares to hear. “Talitha koum,” were His exact words (Mark 5:41), remembered in Aramaic by someone who was there, I suppose. “Hey kid, get up,” is a pretty close translation. But in whatever language you hear it, it was the Right Thing to say, because she did exactly what He told her to do. She stood up and looked around and no doubt wondered what all the fuss was about. Can you imagine her asking her father “did someone die?” and her father trying to explain between laughing and hugging her that yes, someone had died, but it had turned out to be less of a problem that they had all imagined it was?

And that, I suppose, is what makes Jesus’ words the Right Thing not the Politically Correct Thing. His words were right because He knew something about the situation that the little girl’s family didn’t know; He knew that death was not final and that He was able to put it to flight as easily as waking up a sleeping girl.

That’s the Jesus in whom we trust. Not some polite, stained-glass Jesus who always says the most comforting things or the most politically-correct things. We can do that for ourselves. We can say words like that to each other. But nothing changes.Nothing is different. The one on the bed is still terribly quiet and still and death is still the final word and life still ends abruptly and finally and eternally.

No thanks! That’s not for me!

I’ll take the Jesus that barges into rooms full of sniffling, sobbing, shaking people and says “What’s the problem?” I’ll take the impolite Jesus who looks at death and smirks like He’s laughing at some private joke. I’ll take the Jesus who seems to actually believe that a dead person is just sleeping and then with a word or two makes everyone watching believe it too.

I’ll take that Jesus because frankly I have nothing else to offer anyone in response to all of the really hard questions of life. I have nothing else to take with me into a hospital room other than the promises of the gospel that in Jesus those who sleep, whether dead or just resting, can all be awakened with His whisper in their ears. I have nothing to promise to people like the mother I met except that the Lord will let her little girl know when it’s time to get up. Yes, I also realize and have experienced those appointed times when God calls one of His children home. And in those times He gives us peace. But, those times when the enemy is prematurely intervening, I say, “NO.” A thousand times NO!

Don’t you settle for anything less, either. You have sins that need forgiving, don’t you? You have an aching heart that needs hope, right? You have fears about the future and despair about the present and regret about the past, am I correct? Whatever the cause, maybe you have a spirit that hasn’t responded to anything in a long time, that for all practical purposes has flatlined.
Well, Jesus is ready, right now. He waits for us to do exactly what Jairus did in the Bible story and what a mother in a Jackson hospital has done every day since her daughter got sick. He waits for us to come to Him in faith. And when we do, He’ll come barging in and will set things right. He won’t always say the easy thing, or the politically correct thing, or the comfortable thing. But He will always say the Right Thing, and the same voice that woke Jairus’ daughter will wake you from death and into life, as well.

“Child, get up.” I think He means you.

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