God is for us and for life. God, after all, “did not make death, and he does not delight in the death of the living.” Death is our enemy, and God has joined with us to battle against it. The Gospel of Mark invites us to see how God is fighting for us through the stories of a Jewish woman and a Jewish girl on the cusp of maturity.

Jairus is a leader in the synagogue and his daughter is near death. He acknowledges Jesus’ power over death by falling at his feet and begging him “repeatedly” to come and heal his child. Jairus had faith that Jesus could heal his daughter and says: “My little daughter is at the point of death. Come and lay your hands on her, so that she may be made well, and live.” Jesus responds to his appeals and follows him.

As he is leaving, though, a woman in the crowd waylays him. She “had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years.” Like Jairus, she was desperate; and her scene now comes into the foreground, leaving Jairus and his ailing daughter in the background.

Mark uses this technique often in his Gospel. He cuts away from a scene, introduces another scene, and then completes the first scene. Biblical scholars call this a “sandwich technique,” with the two stories offering clues as to how to interpret each in light of the other. The story of Jairus and his daughter is not being abandoned; indeed, the woman with a hemorrhage will help us more fully understand it.

Jesus immediately responds to the suffering woman’s entreaty, for the moment she touches him she is made well, and though a crowd is pushing against Jesus, he senses the power of her faith, which elicited the healing. When Jesus asks, “Who touched me?” she acknowledges that it was she and, like Jairus, “fell down before him.” Jesus says, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.”

As her story ends, some members of Jairus’s house come to tell him to send Jesus away because another daughter, his daughter, has died. Jesus overhears the conversation, though, and tells them, “Do not fear, only believe” (5:36). The translation of the verb pisteuo as “believe” is misleading, though, for it has the same root as the noun for “faith,” pistis, just used earlier with the woman with a hemorrhage. The verb should be translated “only have faith.” Jesus is asking Jairus to maintain the faith he had when he fell before Jesus and begged him to help, the same faith the woman had just shown when she was healed. But Jairus’ daughter is not merely bleeding, she is dead. What faith is sufficient over death?

When Jesus arrives at Jairus’ home, people are understandably crying and wailing loudly at the death of the girl. Jesus appears almost to be mocking them when he asks the people why they are crying and claims, “The child is not dead but sleeping.” The people laugh at him, but Jesus puts everyone except the girl’s parents and three apostles out of the house. He grasps the dead girl’s hand and speaks to her in Aramaic, “Talitha cum,” which means, “Little girl, get up!” The girl, who we are now told is 12 years old, does get up and begins to walk.

The woman healed and the girl raised have some things in common: They are female; they are both called daughter; and they are linked by the number 12. The number is a sign of the restoration of the 12 tribes of Israel at the end of time, a sign of the Messiah and the eschaton. Israel is also known as the daughter or even the bride of God (Hos 2:19–21). In these healings, Jesus shows that he has come to bring daughter Israel to health and full life.

The healings that connect these daughters of Israel are signs of the spiritual wholeness and the destruction of death that the Messiah brings. And since we know that God “does not delight in the death of the living,” we know that new life for the restored people of Israel was a sign of the offer extended to the whole world. Wherever death comes to destroy, faith in Christ’s healing power is sufficient, even over death.

This article appears in June 22-29 2015.

John W. Martens is an associate professor of theology at the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minn,where he teaches early Christianity and Judaism. He also directs the Master of Arts in Theology program at the St. Paul Seminary School of Divinity. He was born in Vancouver, B.C. into a Mennonite family that had decided to confront modernity in an urban setting. His post-secondary education began at Tabor College, Hillsboro, Kansas, came to an abrupt stop, then started again at Vancouver Community College, where his interest in Judaism and Christianity in the earliest centuries emerged. He then studied at St. Michael's College, University of Toronto, and McMaster University, with stops at University of Haifa and University of Tubingen. His writing often explores the intersection of Jewish, Christian and Greco-Roman culture and belief, such as in "let the little children come to me: Children and Childhood in Early Christianity" (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2009), but he is not beyond jumping into the intersection of modernity and ancient religion, as in "The End of the World: The Apocalyptic Imagination in Film and Television" (Winnipeg: J. Gordon Shillingford Press, 2003). He blogs at  www.biblejunkies.com and at www.americamagazine.org for "The Good Word." You can follow him on Twitter @biblejunkies, where he would be excited to welcome you to his random and obscure interests, which range from the Vancouver Canucks and Minnesota Timberwolves, to his dog, and 70s punk, pop and rock. When he can, he brings students to Greece, Turkey and Rome to explore the artifacts and landscape of the ancient world. He lives in St. Paul with his wife and has two sons. He is certain that the world will not end until the Vancouver Canucks have won the Stanley Cup, as evidence has emerged from the Revelation of John, 1 Enoch, 2 Baruch, and 4 Ezra which all point in this direction.