Jesus' Compassionate Power, Part 1

Luke 8:40-48

Well, that's an appropriate hymn to sing before our message from the gospel of Luke, "O The Deep, Deep Love Of Jesus."  We'll find that out as we see it manifest again in the incidents recorded for us in the eighth chapter of Luke's gospel.  Will you open your Bible to Luke chapter 8 and we have before us a text of Scripture from verse 40 through 48.  Actually, this particular text should go all the way to the end of the chapter because it incorporates two miracles, but we're going to only get through one, this morning, and we'll consider the second one next time.  Let me read the text, Luke 8, starting at verse 40.

"And as Jesus returned, the multitude welcomed Him for they had all been waiting for Him.  And behold, there came a man named Jairus and he was an official of the synagogue, and he fell at Jesus' feet and began to entreat Him to come to his house for he had an only daughter about twelve years old, she was dying.  But as He went, the multitudes were pressing against Him and a woman who had a hemorrhage for twelve years and could not be healed by anyone, came up behind Him and touched the fringe of His cloak and immediately her hemorrhage stopped.  Jesus said, 'Who is the one who touched Me?'  And while they were all denying it, Peter said, 'Master, the multitudes are crowding and pressing upon You.'  But Jesus said, 'Someone did touch Me for I was aware of the power had gone out of Me.'  And when the woman saw that she had not escaped notice, she came trembling and fell down before Him and declared in the presence of all the people the reason why she had touched Him and how she had been immediately healed.  And He said to her, 'Daughter, your faith has saved you, go in peace.'"

Another powerful account...unforgetable account of Jesus healing someone.  The world, everything and everybody in it, is dying.  Tragedy and sorrow, pain of life is told in the endless and inescapable experiences of sickness and death, the Fall of man has placed into the fabric of our universe the deadly force of death, sends all people spiraling down careening into sickness and death and the attendant sorrow and suffering that goes along with them.  And nobody avoids that, no matter how advanced we become in science, no matter how sophisticated our medical technology becomes, at best we are only able to postpone the inevitable.  And, of course, because God has made us for relationships and God has given us a capacity to love, there is associated with sickness and death immense grief and sadness as well as suffering. 

Jesus understood that.  Jesus stood at the grave of Lazarus, according to John 11, and as He stood there, it says Jesus wept.  He wasn't weeping particularly for Lazarus because He was about to raise him from the dead, He was entering into the tears of all the people of all the time who stood beside the tomb.  He understood the pain and the sorrow that stretches both forward and backward from that moment throughout all of human history and is filled with the relentless pain of sickness and death.  And the question, of course, to ask is, is there any hope?  We keep asking it medically.  Medical science has worked for a long time to find chemistry as an answer.  Labs and test tubes and experiments have led us to all kinds of medication, all kinds of procedures to try to stop disease and postpone death.  And more recently we've gotten involved in trying to restructure people's genetic code or if there are just too many negatives in their genetic code, not even let them be born so that we don't perpetuate the pain and suffering of disease and death.  And then there are all those cryonics people who want to freeze you until the cures are found and bring you back to life and give you some kind of immortality.  All of this, of course, is simply a way to stall off in some small way mitigate the inevitable, "It is appointed unto men once to die," it is in the fabric of human life that from the moment you are born, you begin the process of dying.  And the cause of it all, as we well know, is sin.

And the question is...is there hope?  Is there an answer?  And I'm here to tell you there is hope, there is absolutely hope.  There is a healer who has the power to heal all diseases and one day will do that.  In fact, there is one promised by the Old Testament prophets, the Messiah, the Savior, the Anointed One, the King who is to come, the Son of God, the Lord of lords, and when He comes He will introduce a new kind of life.   He will restore paradise, if you will.  He will make an Eden-like world, it's called the Millennial Kingdom.  And in that Kingdom if someone dies at the age of 100, they die as a baby.  Death will be stalled off.  In fact, death will become somewhat unnatural, as people live for centuries as they did before the time of the Flood.  Disease will become, in some ways, unnatural, uncommon as the Great Healer demonstrates His power in massive force in that uncursed earth called the Millennial Kingdom.  That's a thousand years at the end of human history.  And after that, that same Messiah, Savior, that same Lord, that same God/Man will create a new heaven and a new earth in which disease and death will not just be mitigated, not just unnatural, but non-existent.  There will be an eternal realm called heaven in which there will be no sorrow, no sadness, no pain, no tears and no sickness and no death forever.

This is the promise of the Bible.  This is the promise of Scripture.  The Bible also tells us there's only one person who can do this, there's only one person who has the power to recreate, the power to conquer all that the curse has brought into existence, the power, if you will, over the physical world, even over the animal world so as to create a Kingdom on this earth in which a lion will lie down with a lamb and the natural enemies in the animal kingdom will no longer be those natural enemies.  And children will be able to play in snake pits without fear, snakes will not longer be poisonous and children will be able to lead around wild animals without any concern for their welfare and well being.  A world in which the desert will blossom like a rose as the whole topography of the earth will be changed and natural disasters will be mitigated and the temperature and the climate of the world will be benign.  It will be a glorious and wonderful world and ruling over it will be the One who has the power to create that world.  And then at the end of that thousand years, He will uncreate the entire universe as we know and in its place will come a new heaven and a new earth in which there will be eternal perfection and eternal righteousness and the absence of all of those things which He demonstrated the power to control during His Millennial Kingdom.  The question is, who is this person and who is the one who can do this, give us such hope of healing, such hope of conquering death, such hope of eternal life without sorrow, pain and suffering?  Who is this one? 

The answer is, there's only one and His name is Jesus Christ.  Any other claimants to be the one are frauds and charlatans and fakes, they are not to be trusted.  There is only one and it is Jesus.  And the New Testament is written to prove that it is Him.  There are four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, that basically go over the same material so that we can see it like we would witness any events going on in a person's life from various standpoints to somehow begin to grasp the greatness and the wonder and the glory of the life and ministry of Jesus Christ by viewing it from different angles.  The point of it all is to show you that there is one who has come, born of a virgin, lived a perfect sinless life, one who demonstrated power over the animal kingdom, He controlled the fish and told them where to go in the Sea of Galilee to be at the right spot by the right side of the boat when the net went in so they could go into the net under His command.  He controlled the pigs to be the recipients of thousands of demons who charged into them upon which the pigs went into the ocean to give an illustration to everybody of the destructive power of Satan.  He has control over the storm.  He had control to stop the wind and stop the waves in their tracks so that ripples didn't even run to the shore.  This is the one who can bring the Millennial world, this is the one who can recreate the new heaven and the new earth.  He has power over demons.  He has power over Satan to conquer him in his own temptation.  He has power over disease and He has power over death. 

We've already, up to this point in Luke's gospel, been there when Jesus did many healings.  We've been there when He raised the son of the widow of Nain right out of the casket when he was being carried to the burial plot.  We have seen His power over demons, with His power over disease, His power over death, His power over the physical world.  And here we're going to see it again in another remarkable look at the amazing power of Jesus Christ.  Only this time we're going to go a little bit more deeply into the person of Christ.

And this was kind of triggered in my thinking, you can study these miracles just in the narrative flow, you don't even need an outline because who needs an outline in a story?  There's not an outline in a novel.  There's not an outline in a well-told story.  And in a narrative you don't need to sort of chop it up.  But as you flow through the story, what struck me was when I was reading this and meditating on it, and I came to the statement that Jesus makes when He says at the end of verse 46, "I was aware that power had gone out of Me."   Now that is just a riveting statement and it just, you know, jolted me back in my chair to sit and think about what that meant.  We went from seeing a miracle and hearing the story about a miracle to inside the Savior, inside deity, inside the God/Man, not talking about the lady who was healed felt, not talking about what Peter felt when he blurted out his solution to the dilemma, not talking about what others who were there in the crowd were experience.  We went immediately into finding what Jesus was feeling.

You know, and I thought about that, and I thought...well, there's probably no better story than this one to get in touch with the personal aspect of Jesus' ministry.  I'm not saying this is hard to understand, I'm saying it's in some ways impossible to understand because we can't comprehend deity.  But here's one of those amazing glimpses that probably take us as far into the nature of God as we can go.  The miracles of Jesus are to verify that He is God.  And this one gets up close and personal. 

A lot of people have a desire to heal people.  I think probably all of us have the desire to see the people around us that we love healed.  There have been people through the years that have offered themselves as would-be healers.  They had a desire to heal, a lot of them had a desire to make money at the expense of people who wanted to be healed.  But surely there have been people who had the desire, plenty of people, there's just never been anybody who had the power.  Only Jesus and those Apostles to whom He delegated that power expressed it.  And that's really the key.  Two things are required if you're going to be the healer.  One is that you have the desire to heal, that is that you care about suffering and pain and death.  And the other is that you have the power to do it.  Those two things come together perfectly in Jesus Christ.  But behind His healing power is that healing desire.  And I just want to kind of get in touch with that healing desire and as we go through the narrative of the story, it's really a miracle in a miracle, so I'll kind of have a sermon in a sermon.

While we're studying the account, I want to just point out the personal way in which Jesus engaged Himself with people.  First of all, His accessibility...His accessibility.  Verse 1...or verse 40 says, the first verse in our text, "As Jesus returned, the multitude welcomed Him for they had all been waiting for Him.  Jesus had been in Gadara, the region of Gadara, the town of Gerasa or Gergasa, either name.  He had gone over there to get away from the crowd.  But He never went alone, in fact He had in His own boat the Apostles and then there were other boats that went with Him.  They sailed from Capernaum which was kind of the headquarters of His Galilean ministry.  They sailed about six miles across the northern portion of the Sea of Galilee to the Gentile eastern shore.  Jesus went over there to get some relief from the non-stop crush of the mob that never let Him alone.  He needed time not just alone, but time with His disciples, the learners, His students, the people to whom He could explain the meaning of the parables that He gave to the crowds.

And so they all went across the Sea of Galilee to get away, but when they got to the other side, the eastern shore, Jesus immediately ran right into two wild bizarre maniacs coming down the hill to attack Him and those that were with Him.  And you remember the story focused in on one of them who was filled with at least two thousand demons.  Jesus delivered him and saved him and turned him into a missionary.  And the people in the region were so frightened by the power of Jesus, power to deliver this man that they were not able to deal with at all, even if they tied him up in chains and cords.  Jesus delivered him.  He was clothed and in his right mind and all the demons went into the pigs and the pigs dove off the banks of the sea and drowned.  The power was more than they wanted to deal with and they certainly weren't interested in the message of Jesus.  They weren't in the forgiveness of sins.  They just wanted Jesus out.  And so verses 37 to 39 says the people of the country of the Gerasenes surrounding district asked Him to depart from them.  That's exactly what He did.  Sad...that was His only visit there. 

The man who had been delivered from the demons wanted to go with Jesus and learn more, but Jesus left him there as the first Gentile missionary.  You've got to stay here or there won't be any gospel presentation in this whole area.  And so Jesus returned and there was the crowd, right there where they had been.  In Mark chapter 5 and verse 21 it says, "He got off by the seashore by Capernaum and there they were.  They had been waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting."  It was a huge crowd of thousands of people and in that crowd were all the people who hurt, all the people who suffered, all the people with pain and sorrow, all the people who were handicapped, disabled, all the people who couldn't hear, couldn't see, had any kind of malady from the beginning to the end of possibility.  They were all there waiting and waiting with all of their anxieties, and all their cares for Jesus to come back.  And some of them were borderline panicky, such as the man Jairus the ruler of the synagogue who had a twelve-year-old daughter who was dying.  You can imagine that as he waited and waited and waited, wondering when Jesus would come, his anxiety was reaching a point of paroxysm to which he paralyzed in his mind and his fear would reach a fever pitch.  This is a kind of crowd that can't wait for Jesus to get back to continue the healing which they had come to know Him for. 

And that's what He did.  He didn't try to avoid them.  He stepped off the boat and there they were and that's the way it was pretty much every day.  And it tells us of His accessibility.  He was unlike many religious leaders.  He didn't seclude Himself in some ivory tower, protected from people.  His entire ministry was spent in public with the people in the streets, in the fields, in their homes, in the synagogues, on the road, by the sea, in the boats, wherever it was.  Only occasionally did He retreat to isolate Himself for the purpose of giving further insight and instruction to those who believed in Him.  Even on some occasion He got away just for the replenishment, the rest, the need to restore His energy.  And sometimes He got away all by Himself because He needed time alone with His Father.  But always when the morning came, He was back and the crowd was waiting.  That was all right because it was to them He had come.  It was to them He had to prove who He was.  It was to them He had to preach the message that God would forgive their sins if they would cry out in humility for that forgiveness.  And even thought he crowd hounded Him.  And even though the crowd dogged Him and even though the crowd crushed Him and even though the crowd endangered Him and even though sometimes the crowd tried to kill Him, He was accessible to them.  So when He came back, they were all there.

Now you have to understand that to them He was a hero.  To them He was the ultimate celebrity, just like He would be today if He came into the world and banished illness from a section of Los Angeles.  All the sick people from as far and wide as could possibly get there would be there with all their cases, endeavoring to push themselves up to where He was.  But that's what He needed to do because it was to the people that He had to present the message of forgiveness.  He had to tell them they were not just physically in distress, they were poor prisoners, blind and oppressed spiritually and they needed the forgiveness of God for their sins.  And God would forgive their sins based upon the wonderful work that He would soon do on the cross.  He had to preach to the crowds, that's what He did.  And He had to heal the people in the crowd and raise the dead to demonstrate that He was the promised Messiah who could do all those things that the Old Testament said the Messiah would do when He brought in His glorious Kingdom. 

But at the same time, the crowd was fickle.  It's the same crowd that screamed for His blood later on.  They were looking for miracles.  They were looking for solutions to human problems, physical problems, social problems.  There weren't many believers.  The group of real disciples was relatively small.  And in the midst of a crowd like this, there...there was everything from those who really believed in Him to those who hated Him and were just spying so that they could report back to the scribes and Pharisees some breach of tradition for which they could hold Him culpable.  But the middle part of the crowd were just the miracle workers, fans.  They were the sign seekers.  In fact, a little later on in Luke's gospel Jesus said to the multitude, "You are a wicked generation who seek for a sign."  All you want is more miracles, as if He hadn't done enough to prove who He was, they were saying, "Show us evidence before we believe, show us evidence."  And they had plenty of evidence.  It wasn't that they honestly had intellectual doubts.  It wasn't that at all.  They refused to admit their sin that they were poor prisoners, blind and oppressed, but they wanted the miracles to keep coming.  They didn't want to drive Jesus away, so on the one hand they refused His message, on the other hand, they keep asking for more evidence, keep the miracles coming.  So they were all there.

And verse 41 says, "And behold," now that's just kind of a jolt, that's a surprise?  Startling moment.  "There came a man named Jairus."  It's a Greek equivalent to the Old Testament name Jair, J-a-i-r, appears in the Old Testament in the book of Numbers.  So this is a Jewish guy, he is an official of the synagogue.  Mark also records this account, so does Matthew.  This is one of those accounts that is given great detail, Matthew chapter 9 verses 18 to 26, Mark 5:21 to 43, and then here in Luke from 8:40 to the end of the chapter.  There's a lot of coverage on this story because it's really an important one.  And what makes it remarkable, I think, is at this point the fact that this man Jairus is an official of the synagogue.  He's a ruler of the synagogue.  That's as high as you can go in local community social strata.  You couldn't get any higher.  I mean, if you had been chosen to be a ruler in the synagogue, that's the pinnacle. 

The most respected man and he contrasted that most respected man who startlingly comes up and bows before Jesus, and I'll explain why that's such a shocking thing in a moment, but in contrast to that man, there's another woman.  Two people out of this crowd that have legitimate faith.  That man who was a ruler of the synagogue and a woman who was an outcast.  And the contrasts are pretty clear.  One is a man, one is a woman.  One is rich, one is poor.  One is revered and exalted, the other is vilified and despised.  One is respected, one is rejected.  One is used to being honored, one is used to being scorned.  One has a twelve-year-old daughter dying, and the other has a twelve-year-old disease.  One leads the synagogue, and the other is excommunicated from the synagogue.  And here you see the Savior embracing the extremes.  And this, in a sense is the fulfillment of the Magnificat of Mary when Mary was told that she was to be the mother of the Messiah, the Son of God.  You remember, that one of the things she said, recorded in Luke 1:52, is that God, My Savior, brings down rulers and exalts those that are humble.  And here's a perfect illustration of that.  He brings down a ruler, and He lifts up a humbled person.  Here is the ruler and the outcast.

But first, the ruler.  This is pretty startling, actually, for an official of the synagogue to do this.  He is the man of great respect.  He would be, tantamount to an elder in the church in the community, mature spiritually, devoted to the Lord, at least to the religion of Judaism, devoted to the people, leader of the people, trusted in terms of wisdom, knowledge of the Old Testament.  He was a part of a small group.  It is said by some historians that synagogues either had three elders or seven, in a small town three, in a larger town seven, some say.  And so he would be one of them.  Maybe he was the main one.  They had a title for the main ruler of the synagogue.  But the responsibility of these men was pretty much to take care of all the administration of the synagogue which was the local center of Judaism.  They had the responsibility for all public services which went on all through the week, as well as on the Sabbath.  They supervised all activities, appointed all teachers, all readers of the Scripture, all those that prayed and all those that explained the Scripture.  They had all administrative responsibility.  This man was surely in the synagogue there in Capernaum.  He had tremendous responsibility there.  He was a part of the Capernaum religious establishment.

And interestingly enough, the local religious establishment was pretty much connected to the national religious establishment which was dominated by the Pharisees and the scribes.  While the Sadducees, the religious liberals, kind of ruled the political aspects and economic aspects of Judaism, it was the Pharisees and the scribes that handled the theological aspects, the religious aspects in terms of the life of the people.  And so the synagogue would tend to have been connected to the Pharisees and the scribes, interestingly enough, who hated Jesus.  They did everything they could to destroy His ministry, to attack Him.  They resented Him.  They despised His message.  They are already plotting to kill Him.  That's why this is surprising because here is a man who must be known as a leader in the synagogue by everybody in the town, who is connected to the religious establishment that is so critical of Jesus, and yet here he comes.  Surprising.  All religious battles aside, he has been reduced to a grief-stricken father.  He fell at Jesus' feet, verse 41 says, and began to beg Him to come to his house, to entreat Him.  He disdains all of his religious connections.  He no longer is concerned at all about what some Pharisaical and scribal connections might think of this religiously correct act.  He really doesn't care about that.  All he cares about is that he get to Jesus and get Jesus to his daughter. 

Now Jesus had done many miracles in Capernaum of which this man would have knowledge.  In the very synagogue of Capernaum, if you read chapter 4 verses 33 to 37, Jesus had an encounter with a demon-possessed man.  Jesus was sitting in the synagogue and all of a sudden the demon-possessed man screams, the demon takes over his voice and the man screams, "Ha...what have we to do with You, Jesus of Nazareth?  Have You come to destroy Us?"  And then the demon says, "You holy One of God."  The demon gave an accurate testimony.  Jairus may well have heard that since Sabbath attendance in the synagogue was mandatory, particularly if you were a leader in the synagogue, an elder, chief ruler.  He had exposure to Jesus' power over demons because Jesus cast the demons out of that man that day and followed it up by going home and healing Peter's wife's mother from an illness, and followed that up by many more miracles.  So this man had information about Jesus and he had come to believe that Jesus did have the healing power of God.  Maybe well believed that Jesus' message was a true message, too.  And maybe he came not just as a man humbled by the exigency of his daughter's illness, but humbled by the reality of his own unworthiness and his own sinfulness.  And he falls at the feet of Jesus and he begins to beg Him.  And Mark 5:23 gives exactly what he said.

What he said was, "My little daughter is at the point of death, please come and lay Your hands on her so that she will get well and live."  He wanted her well.  Twelve years old, I mean, that's marriage age in Israel at this time.  She's just begun to flower into womanhood.  This is the moment for which they had waited.  All of her life was prologue, ready now to be a wife and mother.  Later on the word comes that she died and another message comes from this man to Jesus, "My daughter has died.  My daughter has died, but come and lay hands on her and she'll live."  Matthew compresses both of those into one statement there.  But he had enough faith to believe Jesus could heal her, he even had enough faith to believe that Jesus could raise her from the dead.  He's a rare man in the upper echelons of Jewish history, very unusual to find a ruler of a synagogue believing in Jesus, believing in His power, humbling himself in this fashion.

There's another one called the rich young ruler, remember?  Who came with a superficial interest and went away as lost as when he came because he wouldn't admit his sin and he wouldn't submit to the lordship of Christ.  Apparently this man didn't have that problem. 

And he says...it says he had an only daughter, Luke is the only one who uses "only."  Luke likes to use that word.  He uses it two other occasions, chapter 7 verse 12, chapter 9 verse 38, and a couple of other incidents because it increases the pathos.  And she was just 12.  At the time she was born, the Lord Jesus was living in Nazareth, was only 20 years of age.  But there was a rendevous with that girl on this day, twelve years later.  Her father says to Jesus, "She's going to die, come lay Your hands on her, let her live cause she's dying."  How grateful he must have been for the accessibility of Jesus.  How grateful he must have been that unlike modern so-called healers incarcerated on the twelfth floor of a five-star hotel, Jesus wa