Exegetical and Hermeneutical Commentary of Luke 8:50
But when Jesus heard [it,] he answered him, saying, Fear not: believe only, and she shall be made whole.
50. when Jesus heard it ] The remark was addressed to Jairus, and St Mark says that Jesus “ overheard it.”
Fuente: The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges
But when Jesus heard it,…. The message that was brought to the ruler, and the hint that was given, that it was needless to give him any further trouble:
he answered him; not the messenger, but the father of the child, as the Vulgate Latin, Syriac, Persic, and Ethiopic versions read:
saying, fear not: do not be dismayed at this message, nor despair of help, notwithstanding such is the case:
believe only, and she shall be made whole; exercise faith in me, that I am able to raise her from the dead, and I will do it; and she shall be restored to life, and to perfect health and strength again.
Fuente: John Gill’s Exposition of the Entire Bible
And she shall be made whole ( ). This promise in addition to the words in Mr 5:36. See there for discussion of details.
Fuente: Robertson’s Word Pictures in the New Testament
1) “But when Jesus heard it, he answered him,” (ho de lesous akousas apekrithe auto) “Then Jesus upon hearing (this), replied directly to him,” to Jairus the ruler of the synagogue, Luk 8:22; Mar 5:36.
2) “Saying, Fear not: believe only,” (me phobou; monon pisteuson) “hear not; only trust,” Joh 11:39, or you just do not fear or be overanxious, only trust, trust me and my Father, Mar 5:36, and I will heal her or bring her to life, Luk 8:54-55. It was not too late for Jesus to help.
3) “And she shall be made whole.” (kai sothesetai) “And she will be healed, “‘made whole and alive, Pro 3:3-5; Psa 145:17-19; Mat 9:22. And she would be saved.
Fuente: Garner-Howes Baptist Commentary
(50) Believe only.There is a slight difference in the shade of meaning of the Greek tense as compared with the like command in St. Marks report, the latter giving Believe as implying a permanent stateBe believingSt. Lukes report laying stress on the immediate act of faith.
Fuente: Ellicott’s Commentary for English Readers (Old and New Testaments)
50. Believe only In his earlier ministry Jesus allowed his miracle to precede the faith in order to create faith; in his advancing ministry he had a right, from his past works, often to require faith before the miracle; and then the miracle justified and rewarded the faith.
Fuente: Whedon’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments
‘But Jesus hearing it, answered him, “Don’t be afraid. Only believe, and she shall be made whole.” ’
But Jesus turned to Jairus and told him, “Don’t be afraid. Only believe, and she shall be made whole.” Jairus had just seen an example of this, a ‘Daughter’ who had believed and had been made whole (Luk 8:48). Let him recognise that this was also a symbol of what was intended for his daughter too. It is clear from what is said below that he only partially believed (the centurion had not been amazed when his servant was healed, only grateful, but he was amazed). But he had at least had sufficient faith to come to Jesus in the first place. Jesus always saw that as sufficient faith. He does not measure our faith, He responds to it.
Fuente: Commentary Series on the Bible by Peter Pett
DISCOURSE: 1506
JAIRUS DAUGHTER HEALED
Luk 8:50. When Jesus heard it, he answered him, saying, Fear not: believe only, and she shall be made whole.
AFFLICTIONS may well be deprecated by us as painful to flesh and blood; but they are often the means of humbling us before God. Multitudes came as suppliants to our Lord, who would never have regarded him if they had not felt the pressure of disease or trouble. The rich in general were the most backward to acknowledge him; but they found that in the hour of affliction none other could do them good. Hence occasionally we see the opulent presenting their supplications before him. Nor did he reject the suit of any, whether they were rich or poor. The answer he gave to the ruler of the synagogue is recorded in the text; and it will naturally lead us to notice the rulers faith:
I.
How it was tried
Jairus (such was his name) had much to try his faith
[He had an only child (twelve years of age) in dying circumstances. Having heard much of our Lords miracles, he applied to him on behalf of his daughter, and earnestly requested him to come and restore her to health. But while he was returning with Jesus to his house, his servant brought tidings that the child was dead. This was a dreadful shock to the parents feelings, and might have utterly destroyed all his hopes.]
Thus it is that the faith of Gods people is often tried
[They are enabled to make application to their God and Saviour. But the storm in the meantime gathers thick around them: their difficulties so increase, that their hopes seem almost blasted. They have cried for pardon, and find only an increasing sense of guilt. They have prayed for deliverance from corruption or temptation, and experienced the assaults of Satan more violent than ever. Thus they are almost ready to think that God has cast out their prayer, and shut up his tender mercies from them. It was in this manner that holy Job was tried. Yea, the experience of most, however diversified, is generally found to agree in this [Note: Psa 107:5-6; Psa 107:12-13; Psa 107:18-19; Psa 107:26-28.].]
But this accumulated trouble was permitted for the further exercise of the rulers faith.
II.
How it operated
He was enabled humbly and confidently to depend on Jesus
[It was his faith that first led him to Jesus for help: nor, when his case seemed desperate, did he give up his hope. It is probable that our Lord might perceive some rising apprehensions in his mind; but he sustained him instantly with those encouraging words, Fear not. Jairus expected now that his child should be raised as from a sleep. The idea of sleep, however, only called forth the derision of the mourners. Such was the fruit of their ignorance and unbelief: but the ruler himself resembled the father of the faithful [Note: Rom 4:18; Rom 4:20-21.].]
It is in this way that true faith will ever shew itself
[It will surely lead us to Jesus for relief: it will make us humble and importunate in our supplications to him. We shall not presently turn from him because our difficulties increase: we shall rather adopt the expression of holy Job [Note: Job 13:15.]. Unbelief may prompt us to deride what we do not understand; but faith will make us acquiesce in Gods declarations, though we cannot fully comprehend them, and expect the accomplishment of his promises, however his providence may appear to contradict them.
Jesus did not fail to respect the faith that honoured him
III.
How it was rewarded
Jesus answered the ruler to the full extent of all his wishes
[Our Lord reproved the excessive lamentations of the people, and encouraged them to expect the restoration of the child; but he would not suffer those who had derided him to be spectators of the miracle. He took with him, however, persons sufficient to attest it: he favoured the believing parents with admission to behold it, and restored their daughter, as it had been from sleep, in their very presence. The child arose instantly, and walked as in perfect health. For their further conviction he ordered food to be given to the child. By this also he intimated, that though she was restored by a miracle, she was to be kept alive by natural means. What a rich reward was this to the believing suppliant!]
Nor shall any one who asks in faith, be disappointed
[Our Lord has commanded us to ask in faith [Note: Mar 11:24.]; and has assured us that petitions, so offered, shall be answered by him [Note: Mat 21:22.]. Things the most impossible to man, shall, if they will conduce to our good and to Gods honour, be effected by the prayer of faith [Note: Mar 9:23.]: crimes the most atrocious that ever were committed, shall be pardoned [Note: Act 13:39.]: lusts the most inveterate that ever enslaved a soul, shall be subdued [Note: Isa 59:19. 1Co 6:11.]. The dead in trespasses and sins shall be raised, like Christ himself, to a new and heavenly life [Note: Eph 1:19-20. with 2:5, 6.]: nor shall they fail of attaining eternal happiness in heaven [Note: Joh 3:15. Isa 45:17.].]
Application
[Every man must expect trouble in this vale of tears: the dearest friends must look forward to a day of separation; but let every trouble drive us to the compassionate Jesus, and every want be spread before him in prayer [Note: Php 4:6.]. We are not now indeed to expect miraculous interpositions; nor ought we to ask for temporal blessings in an unqualified manner. We should commit the concerns of this life to his all-wise disposal; but for spiritual blessings we cannot be too importunate, nor can our faith in his word be too strong. What he said to Martha he still says to us [Note: Joh 11:40.]. The advice of Jehosaphat is the best direction we can follow [Note: 2Ch 20:20.]. Let us not then limit his tender mercies. If we resemble the Samaritan lord, we shall fare like him [Note: 2Ki 7:2; 2Ki 7:17.]. Let us not in renewed troubles be like the unbelieving Jews [Note: Psa 78:20.]; but let us bear in mind that encouraging declaration [Note: Eph 3:20.], and determine henceforth to live like the Apostle [Note: Gal 2:20.].]
Fuente: Charles Simeon’s Horae Homileticae (Old and New Testaments)
50. ] . is only here.
Fuente: Henry Alford’s Greek Testament
Luk 8:50 . : Mk. has , the message being spoken not to Jesus but to Jairus: He overheard it. , etc., only believe and she shall be saved Paulinism in the physical sphere.
Fuente: The Expositors Greek Testament by Robertson
Luke
CHRIST TO JAIRUS
Luk 8:50
The calm leisureliness of conscious power shines out very brilliantly from this story of the raising of Jairus’s daughter. The father had come to Jesus, in an agony of impatience, and besought Him to heal his child, who lay ‘at the point of death.’ Not a moment was to be lost. Our Lord sets out with him, but on the road pauses to attend to another sufferer, the woman who laid her wasted finger on the hem of Christ’s robe. How Jairus must have chafed at the delay, and thought every moment an eternity; and perhaps said hard things In his heart about Christ’s apparent indifference! Delay seemed to be fatal, for before Christ had finished speaking to the woman, the messenger comes with a word which appears to me to have in it a touch of bitterness and of blame. ‘Trouble not the Master’ sounds as if the speaker hinted that the Master was thinking it a trouble, and had not put Himself much about to meet the necessity. But one’s gain shall not be another’s loss, and Christ does not let any applicant to Him suffer whilst He attends to any other. Each has an equal claim on His heart. So He turns to the father with the words that I have read for my text.
They are the first of three sayings of our Lord round which this whole narrative is remarkably grouped. I have read the first, but I mean to speak about all three. There is a word of encouragement which sustains a feeble faith: there is a word of revelation which smooths the grimness of death; ‘She is not dead but sleepeth’; and there is a word of power which goes into the darkness, and brings back the child; ‘Maiden, arise!’ Now, I think if we take these three, we get the significance of this whole incident.
I. First, then, the word of cheer which sustains a staggering faith.
Jesus Christ is saying the very same things to us. His fundamental commandment is ‘Only believe,’ and there effloresce from it the two things, courage that never trembles, and hope that never despairs. ‘Only believe’-usually He made the outflow of His miraculous power contingent upon the faith, either of the sufferer himself or of some others. There was no necessity for the connection. We have instances in His life of miracles wrought without faith, without asking, simply at the bidding of His own irrepressible pity. But the rule in regard to His miracles is that faith was the condition that drew out the miraculous energy. The connection between our faith and our experience of His supernatural, sustaining, cleansing, gladdening, enlightening power is closer than that. For without our trust in Him, He can do no mighty works upon us, and there must be confidence, on our part, before there is in our experience the reception into our lives of His highest blessings; just because they are greater and deeper, and belong to a more inward sphere than these outward and inferior miracles of bodily healing. Therefore the connection between our faith and His gifts to us is inevitable, and constant, and the commandment ‘Only believe,’ assumes a more imperative stringency, in regard to our spiritual experience, than it ever did in regard to those who felt the power of His miracle-working hand. So it stands for us, as the one central appeal and exhortation which Christ, by His life, by the record of His love, by His Cross and Passion, by His dealings and pleadings with us through His Spirit, and His providence to-day, is making to us all. ‘Only believe’-the one act that vitally knits the soul to Christ, and makes it capable of receiving unto itself the fullness of His loftiest blessings.
But we must note the two clauses which stand on either side of this central commandment. They deal with two issues of faith. One forbids fear, the other gives fuel for the fire of hope. On the one hand, the exhortation, ‘Fear not,’ which is the most futile that can be spoken if the speaker does not touch the cause of the fear, comes from His lips with a gracious power. Faith is the one counterpoise of fear. There is none other for the deepest dreads that lie cold and paralysing, though often dormant, in every human spirit; and that ought to lie there. If a man has not faith in God, in Christ, he ought to have fear. For there rise before him, solitary, helpless, inextricably caught into the meshes of this mysterious and awful system of things-a whole host of possible, or probable, or certain calamities, and what is he to do? stand there in the open, with the pelting of the pitiless storm coming down upon him? The man is an idiot if he is not afraid. And what is to calm those rational fears, the fear of wrath, of life, of death, of what lies beyond death? You cannot whistle them away. You cannot ignore them always. You cannot grapple with them in your own strength. ‘Only believe,’ says the Comforter and the Courage-bringer. The attitude of trust banishes dread, and nothing else will effectually and reasonably do it. ‘I will forewarn you whom ye shall fear.’ Him who can slay and who judges. You have, and you cannot break, a connection with God. He ought to be one of two things-your ghastliest dread or your absolute trust. ‘Only believe then,’ ‘fear not.’ Believe not, then be afraid; for you have reason to be.
Men say, ‘Oh! keep your courage up’; and they contribute no means to keep it up: Christ says ‘Fear not; only believe,’ and gives to faith the courage which He enjoins. Like a child that never dreams of any mischief being able to reach it when the mother’s breast is beneath its head, and the mother’s arms are round its little body, each of us may rest on Christ’s breast, and feel His arm round about us. Then we may smile at all that men call evils; and whether they are possible, or probable, or certain, we can look at them all and say, ‘Ah! I have circumvented you.’ ‘All things work together for good to them that’ trust Christ. ‘Fear not; only believe.’
But on the other hand, from that simple faith will spring up also hope that cannot despair. ‘She shall be made whole.’ Irreversible disasters have no place in Christian experience. There are no irrevocable losses to him who trusts. There are no wounds that cannot be stanched, when we go to Him who has the balm and the bandage. Although it is true that dead faces do not smile again upon us until we get beyond earth’s darkness, it is also true that bonds broken may be knit in a finer fashion, if faith instead of sense weaves them together; and that in the great future we shall find that the true healing of those that went before was not by deliverance from, but by passing through, the death that emancipates from the long disease of earthly life.
Brethren! if we trust Christ we may ‘hope perfectly.’ If we do not trust Him our firmest hopes are as spiders’ webs that are swept away by a besom; and our deepest desires remain unfulfilled. ‘Only believe,’ then, on the one side, ‘Fear not,’ and on the other side ‘Hope ever.’
II. We have here a word of revelation which softens the grimness of death.
But notice that our Lord never forbids weeping unless He takes away its cause. ‘Weep not,’ is another of the futile forms of words with which men try to encourage and comfort one another. There is nothing more cruel than to forbid tears to the sad heart. Jesus Christ never did that except when He was able to bring that which took away occasion for weeping. He lets grief have its way. He means us to run rivers of waters down our cheeks when He sends us sorrows. We shall never get the blessing of these till we have felt the bitterness of them. We shall never profit by them if we stoically choke back the manifestations of our grief, and think that it is submissive to be dumb. Let sorrow have way. Tears purge the heart from which their streams come. But Jesus Christ says to us all, ‘Weep not,’ because He comes to us all with that which, if I may so say, puts a rainbow into the tear-drops, and makes it possible that the great paradox should be fulfilled in our hearts, ‘As sorrowful yet always rejoicing.’ Weep not; or if you weep, let the tears have thankfulness as well as grief in them. It is a difficult commandment, but it is possible when His lips tell us not to weep, and we have obeyed the central exhortation, ‘Only believe.’
Note, further, in this second of our Lord’s words, how He smooths away the grimness of death. I do not claim for Him anything like a monopoly of that most obvious and natural symbolism which regards death as a sleep. It must have occurred to all who ever looked upon a corpse. But I do claim that when He used the metaphor, and by His use of it modified the whole conception of death in the thoughts of His disciples, He put altogether different ideas into it from that which it contained on the lips of others. He meant to suggest the idea of repose-
‘Sleep, full of rest from head to foot.’ The calm immobility of the body so lately racked with pain, or restless in feverish tossings, is but a symbol of the deeper stillness of truer repose which remaineth for the people of God and laps the blessed spirits who ‘sleep in Jesus.’ He meant to suggest the idea of separation from this material world. He did not mean to suggest the idea of unconsciousness. A man is not unconscious when he is asleep, as dreams testify. He meant, above all, if sleep, then waking.
So the grim fact is smoothed down, not by blinking any of its aspects, but by looking deeper into them. They who, only believing, have lived a life of courage and of hope, and have fronted sorrows, and felt the benediction of tears, pass into the great darkness, and know that they there are rocked to sleep on a loving breast, and, sleeping in Jesus, shall wake with the earliest morning light.
This is a revelation for all His servants. And how deeply these words, and others like them which He spake at the grave of Lazarus and at other times, were dinted into the consciousness of the Christian Church, is manifested by the fact, not only that they are recurrently used by Apostles in their Epistles, but that all through the New Testament you scarcely ever find the physical fact of dissolution designated by the name ‘death,’ but all sorts of gracious paraphrases, which bring out the attractive and blessed aspects of the thing, are substituted. It is a ‘sleep’; it is a ‘putting off the tabernacle’; it is a ‘departure’; it is a pulling up of the tent-pegs, and a change of place. We do not need the ugly word, and we do not need to dread the thing that men call by it. The Christian idea of death is not the separation of self from its house, of the soul from the body, but the separation of self from God, who is the life.
III. So, lastly, the life-giving word of power.
But the life-giving word itself; what can we say about it? Only this one thing: here Jesus Christ exercises a manifest divine prerogative. It was no more the syllables that He spoke than it was the touch of His hand that raised the child. What was it? The forth-putting of His will, which went away straight into the darkness; and if the disembodied spirit was in a locality, went straight there; and somehow or other, laid hold of the spirit, and somehow or other, reinstated it in its home. Christ’s will, like the king’s writ, runs through all the universe. ‘He spake, and it was done’;-whose prerogative is that? God’s; and God manifest in the flesh exercised it. The words of the Incarnate Word have power over physical things.
Here, too, are the prelude and first-fruits of our resurrection. Not that there are not wide differences between the raising of this child, and that future resurrection to which Christian hope looks forward, but that in this one little incident, little, compared with the majestic scale of the latter, there come out these two things-the demonstration that conscious life runs on, irrespective of the accident of its being united with or separated from a bodily organisation; and the other, that Jesus Christ has power over men’s spirits, and can fit them at His will to bodies appropriate to their condition. Time is no element in the case. What befalls the particles of the human frame is no element in the case. ‘Thou sowest not the body that shall be.’ But if that Lord had the power which He showed in that one chamber, with that one child, then, as a little window may show us great matters, so we see through this single incident the time when ‘they that are in the graves shall hear His voice, and shall come forth.’
Brethren! there is a higher lesson still; He that gives and gives again, physical life, does so as a symbol of the highest gift which He can bestow upon us all. If we ‘only believe,’ then, ‘you hath He quickened which were dead in trespasses and sins . . . and for His great love wherewith He loved us. . .. He hath raised us up together, and made us sit together, in heavenly places in Christ Jesus.’
Fuente: Expositions Of Holy Scripture by Alexander MacLaren
believe. App-150.
Fuente: Companion Bible Notes, Appendices and Graphics
50.] . is only here.
Fuente: The Greek Testament
Luk 8:50. , and she shall be saved [made whole]) from death. The word was one suited to give hope.
Fuente: Gnomon of the New Testament
believe: Luk 8:48, Isa 50:10, Mar 5:36, Mar 9:23, Mar 11:22-24, Joh 11:25, Joh 11:40, Rom 4:17, Rom 4:20
Reciprocal: Gen 18:14 – Is
Fuente: The Treasury of Scripture Knowledge
Luk 8:50. Hearing it. See Mar 5:36 : not heeding, or, overhearing.
Made whole (lit. saved). Peculiar to Luke. The promise asked large faith from the father, but the miracle just wrought doubtless quickened Jairus confidence.
Luk 8:51. Not any man to go in with him, where the damsel was. He was already in the house. He had already stopped the crowd outside (Mar 5:37), but meeting another within (as described in Luk 8:52-53), those who could enter the chamber of death are singled out