Week 37 Mark
His daughter was dying so Jairus went to Jesus to plead with him to come and heal his girl.
But they arrived too late. People at the house told them the girl had died. Jesus disregarded them: the child isn’t dead; she is only asleep (the crowd hooted – they knew dead).
It made me wonder what the Lord thought about being-dead. Lots of modern people figure dead is dead. Talking about death-as-sleep is just softening the vocabulary. Death sleep is never-waking-up sleep. No emerging from unconscious rest to drowsy wakefulness. Just a non-stop forever incessant enduring permanency that stretches into the unending future. Sleep is a deceptive word because normal sleep ends when I wake up. Sleep without wake isn’t really sleep.
So I wonder if the Lord is using the word in a way that makes a different sense to him – an insider’s view of death. Maybe he’s saying that death really is like sleep. It’s the full cycle including: Step One) when I die and leave my current state of being – let’s say from consciousness-to-unconsciousness, and then Step Two) where I pass right on into a new state – let’s say unconsciousness-to-consciousness. Maybe that’s the norm: moving on from the sleep of death into a post-mortem state of wakeful awareness.
The miracle was miraculous because it halted the normal process. The girls’ sleep of death was interrupted & reversed when the Lord redirected her back into natural life in the material world.
Note: quote from Mark 5:39 (NLT)