Today’s Passage: Mark 5
This chapter tells three stories, and they are really one story told three times over. On the far shore, among the Gentiles, a man lives in the tombs, so wild that no chain can hold him and a whole legion of demons has made its home in him. Jesus speaks a word, and by the end of it the man is sitting quietly, clothed and in his right mind. Then Jesus crosses back over the lake, and a synagogue leader named Jairus falls at His feet, begging Him to come and heal a dying daughter. On the crowded way there, a woman who has bled for twelve years reaches out and touches His cloak, and she is healed on the spot. Before they reach the house, messengers arrive to say the child has died. Jesus tells the father, “Do not be afraid; just believe,” and He goes in and raises her with two words of His own language. Tombs, long years, death itself: each one had already won before He arrived. He goes to all three anyway.
As you read, hold this: Nothing is too far gone for Him.
Context The world of Mark 5
The country east of the lake was largely Gentile land, which is why a great herd of pigs could be feeding on the hillside there, animals no faithful Jew would keep. A man driven to live among the tombs was a man cut off from every comfort of home and community, and Jesus steps straight into that unclean place on purpose, as He does again and again in this chapter.
Continual bleeding made a woman ceremonially unclean under the law (Leviticus 15), so that her very touch would pass her impurity to whatever she touched, and a dead body defiled in the same way (Numbers 19). Yet with Jesus the current runs the other direction. Where uncleanness would ordinarily spread to Him, His holiness instead flows out to cleanse whatever it touches.
Jairus was a synagogue leader, a public and respected man, and Mark sets him deliberately beside a woman who is unclean and impoverished and unnamed. Standing and wealth buy no one a better Savior. The ruler and the outcast both come to Jesus the same way, by reaching out to Him in their need.
Mark 5:1–20 (BSB)
¹ On the other side of the sea, they arrived in the region of the Gerasenes. ² As soon as Jesus got out of the boat, He was met by a man with an unclean spirit, who was coming from the tombs. ³ This man had been living in the tombs and could no longer be restrained, even with chains. ⁴ Though he was often bound with chains and shackles, he had broken the chains and shattered the shackles. Now there was no one with the strength to subdue him. ⁵ Night and day in the tombs and in the mountains he kept crying out and cutting himself with stones. ⁶ When the man saw Jesus from a distance, he ran and fell on his knees before Him. ⁷ And he shouted in a loud voice, “What do You want with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I beg You before God not to torture me!” ⁸ For Jesus had already declared, “Come out of this man, you unclean spirit!” ⁹ “What is your name?” Jesus asked. “My name is Legion,” he replied, “for we are many.” ¹⁰ And he begged Jesus repeatedly not to send them out of that region. ¹¹ There on the nearby hillside a large herd of pigs was feeding. ¹² So the demons begged Jesus, “Send us to the pigs, so that we may enter them.” ¹³ He gave them permission, and the unclean spirits came out and went into the pigs, and the herd of about two thousand rushed down the steep bank into the sea and drowned in the water. ¹⁴ Those tending the pigs ran off and reported this in the town and countryside, and the people went out to see what had happened. ¹⁵ When they came to Jesus, they saw the man who had been possessed by the legion of demons sitting there, clothed and in his right mind; and they were afraid. ¹⁶ Those who had seen it described what had happened to the demon-possessed man and also to the pigs. ¹⁷ And the people began to beg Jesus to leave their region. ¹⁸ As He was getting into the boat, the man who had been possessed by the demons begged to go with Him. ¹⁹ But Jesus would not allow him. “Go home to your own people,” He said, “and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and what mercy He has shown you.” ²⁰ So the man went away and began to proclaim throughout the Decapolis how much Jesus had done for him. And everyone was amazed.
Jesus steps into a landscape of death and finds a man whom everyone else has given up for lost. The chains had failed to hold him, and driving him out among the tombs had done nothing but deepen his misery. Yet the demons know exactly who has arrived. They name Him Son of the Most High God and fall to begging, already conquered in the very posture they take before Him. The name Legion tells us the sheer horror of it, an army of evil crowded into one man, and even that vast number is no match for a single word of His authority. The two thousand animals that rush into the sea are not a picture of cruelty but a measure of scale, showing us how much was bound up in this one soul. This was a war, and the man himself was the battlefield Jesus had crossed the lake to free.
And then the gospel takes on a human face: a man restored, clothed and seated and in his right mind. It should have drawn the whole town to Jesus, but fear chooses the lost pigs over His presence, and the people beg Him to leave their region. The one man who has every reason to cling to Him begs to come along in the boat, a beautiful and understandable desire, yet Jesus sends him home instead, to tell his own people how much the Lord has done for him. Mercy received becomes mercy announced, and so the whole Decapolis comes to hear what Capernaum so often resisted. Nothing in those tombs, it turns out, was ever too far gone for Him.
Mark 5:21–34 (BSB)
²¹ When Jesus had again crossed by boat to the other side, a large crowd gathered around Him beside the sea. ²² A synagogue leader named Jairus arrived, and seeing Jesus, he fell at His feet ²³ and pleaded with Him urgently, “My little daughter is near death. Please come and place Your hands on her, so that she will be healed and live.” ²⁴ So Jesus went with him, and a large crowd followed and pressed around Him. ²⁵ And a woman was there who had suffered from bleeding for twelve years. ²⁶ She had borne much agony under the care of many physicians and had spent all she had, but to no avail. Instead, her condition had only grown worse. ²⁷ When the woman heard about Jesus, she came up through the crowd behind Him and touched His cloak. ²⁸ For she kept saying, “If only I touch His garments, I will be healed.” ²⁹ Immediately her bleeding stopped, and she sensed in her body that she was healed of her affliction. ³⁰ At once Jesus was aware that power had gone out from Him. Turning to the crowd, He asked, “Who touched My garments?” ³¹ His disciples answered, “You can see the crowd pressing in on You, and yet You ask, ‘Who touched Me?’” ³² But He kept looking around to see who had done this. ³³ Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell down before Him trembling in fear, and she told Him the whole truth. ³⁴ “Daughter,” said Jesus, “your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be free of your affliction.”
Jairus falls at His feet, and Jesus goes with him at once. On the crowded road, twelve years of loss reach out for nothing more than the fringe of His garment. The physicians had failed her, her money was spent, and her uncleanness had shut her out year after year, yet her faith says only, if only I touch His garments. And power flows. Jesus will not let her slip back into the crowd unknown. He draws her out into the open, not to shame her but to lift her face and call her Daughter and send her away in peace, so that her secret reaching is completed in a word spoken to her eyes. All the while Jairus is left waiting, and that waiting is a hard mercy that will soon open into a greater glory than a healing on the road could ever have been. Twelve years had already won. Jesus stopped for her anyway.
Mark 5:35–43 (BSB)
³⁵ While He was still speaking, messengers from the house of Jairus arrived and said, “Your daughter is dead; why bother the Teacher anymore?” ³⁶ But Jesus overheard their conversation and said to Jairus, “Do not be afraid; just believe.” ³⁷ And He did not allow anyone to accompany Him except Peter, James, and John the brother of James. ³⁸ When they arrived at the house of the synagogue leader, Jesus saw the commotion and the people weeping and wailing loudly. ³⁹ He went inside and asked, “Why all this commotion and weeping? The child is not dead, but asleep.” ⁴⁰ And they laughed at Him. After He had put them all outside, He took the child’s father and mother and His own companions, and went in to see the child. ⁴¹ Taking her by the hand, Jesus said, “Talitha koum!” which means, “Little girl, I say to you, get up!” ⁴² Immediately the girl got up and began to walk around (she was twelve years old). And at once they were utterly astounded. ⁴³ Then Jesus gave strict orders that no one should know about this, and He told them to give her something to eat.
Word study "Talitha koum" (Mark 5:41)
Aramaic preserved in Greek letters: Ταλιθὰ κούμ, which means, “Little girl, get up!”
Mark keeps the very words Jesus spoke in His mother tongue, the Aramaic of an ordinary home. The Lord of life leans over a deathbed and speaks as gently as a parent waking a child in the morning, and here His authority sounds like nothing so much as affection. She rises at once and begins to walk, and in the same breath He tells them to give her something to eat. The power that raises the dead does not think ordinary care beneath it.
“Why bother the Teacher anymore?” is the voice of hope that has already given up. Jesus answers with a command that creates the very thing it asks for: Do not be afraid; just believe. The word He uses for believe is pisteuō, the same trust the Gospel called for in its opening chapter. Laughter meets Him at the door, and He simply puts the mockery outside, takes the parents and His three disciples in, and reaches down to hold a dead girl by the hand. He speaks His tender Aramaic over her, and she walks. Then He orders both silence about the miracle and a meal for the child.
The Lord of the tombs, the long illness, and the deathbed is not three separate lessons to file away. He is one Savior who keeps going where no one else is willing to go. Nothing is too far gone for Him.
Study notes Going deeper
Long before Mark set any of this down, a psalm had already put words to the reach we see here.
"He brought them out of darkness and the shadow of death and broke away their chains." Psalm 107:14 (BSB)
The prisoner of Legion sits at last in his right mind. A woman shut out for twelve years is called Daughter. A girl of twelve years old gets up and walks and eats. It is the same Lord in every scene, and the same long reach into the places where hope had already been abandoned. Nothing is too far gone for Him.