THIRTEENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME

“Little girl, I say to you, arise!”

In today’s Gospel, as Jesus restores the daughter of Jairus to life, he gently commands her to rise from her bed. He speaks in his Aramaic language. “Talitha cumi.” This is one of the rare occasions when the actual Aramaic words come directly from Jesus to our ears through the scriptures. He says, “Little girl, arise.” The late professor William Barclay surmised in his book The Gospel of Mark that “Mark got his information directly from Peter.” Mark was writing the Gospel in Greek, but Barclay said that “Peter could never forget Jesus’ voice, and in his mind and memory he would that Talitha cumi all of his life.”