Magic Words, Magical Thinking

I know preaching experts warn you against talking too much in a sermon about the original languages of Scripture. You’re just showing off, they say. Your audience’s eyes will glaze over. But today’s Gospel reading kind of forces my hand with the topic where, in verse 41, Mark records Jesus speaking words in a foreign language…within the otherwise originally Greek text of his Gospel. Talitha kumi, our Savior says. Fortunately, the evangelist provides us with a verbal footnote at this point. He writes: “which means, ‘Little girl, get up!’”

This is one of a couple of instances in the Gospel of Mark where the evangelist reports on Jesus speaking his native tongue of Aramaic while performing a healing miracle. The other is when Jesus heals a deaf man in the gentile-heavy Decapolis in Mark 7:34. So it would be easy for a Greek audience to get the idea that somehow Jesus’s “foreign” words spoken during these miracles themselves carried a kind of magical power, like incantations. Indeed, the second-century AD pagan Greek and Syrian satirist Lucian of Samosata pokes fun at credulous religious people of his day who think that, as he says, “at a divine name or foreign phrase a fever or tumor takes a fright and flees the glands” (Philopseudes 9). This is the stuff of charlatan faith-healers and the suckers who fall for their schtick.

In Acts 9:40, Peter uses words quite similar to Jesus’s from our Gospel reading in order to miraculously raise a dead disciple in Joppa: “Tabitha, get up.” Only there, the sole Aramaic spoken over the body is the name, which Luke translates into Greek as Dorcas, “gazelle.” The rest of Peter’s words—word—is just good old serviceable Greek. The overt similarities of the scene and even of the name Tabitha to the Aramaic term for “girl” Jesus says in Mark, talitha, only underscore the “magical” impression given by Jesus’s words in our Gospel passage. Though both Savior and Apostle raise someone from the dead, only Jesus speaks the Aramaic. And it’s the words that seem to provoke the action.

Of course, Jesus is no faith-healer. He’s not some charlatan. That’s the core tenet of our Christian belief: Jesus is Lord. The power by which he healed the synagogue leader’s daughter flowed from his person, not his speech. Wishing to emphasize this point, Anglican priest and New Testament scholar Dick France argues that Jesus’s “words themselves are so ordinary that any idea that a ‘magical’ formula is thus offered is quite without foundation” (R. T. France, The Gospel of Mark: A Commentary on the Greek Text, New International Greek Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI; Carlisle: W.B. Eerdmans; Paternoster Press, 2002), 240). Jesus’s words were so ordinary, they couldn’t possibly have been magical.

In a footnote, France mentions that, since the Aramaic word talitha and its Hebrew relative ultimately descend from a root term meaning “tender” often used to refer to young lambs, Jesus’s command might be better understood as something more prosaic like “Get up, kid!” Now that doesn’t sound much like a mystical, magical formula, does it? It even speaks to the quiet confidence our Savior shows earlier in the passage, when messengers arrive from the synagogue leader’s house to inform him that his daughter has died and he needn’t bother Jesus further. In the Revised Standard Version, verse 36 reads: “But ignoring what they said, Jesus said to the ruler of the synagogue, ‘Do not fear, only believe.’” Jesus acted like he hadn’t heard what the messengers reported. His response? Don’t worry. Just believe. Get up, kid.

There’s something else unusual about Jesus’s utterance at Mark 5:41 and the Greek translation Mark provides for us. In many English versions like the New Revised Standard Version popular as the pew Bible of choice in many Episcopal churches like ours, a pair of words is missing from the English translation of the evangelist’s Greek translation of Jesus’s original Aramaic. Where it says “which means, ‘Little girl, get up!’” in between “little girl” and the command to rise, Mark’s Greek text actually includes the phrase “I say to you” (in Greek, that’s just two words, not three as in English). The reason many English Bibles don’t bother translating this bit is because it provides a meta-comment about the grammar of the Aramaic verb form, letting the audience know that Jesus is using an imperative or command form. Our own printed Bibles get this idea across to us by punctuating the sentence with an exclamation mark.

Scholar Robert Guelich argues, though, that this small “hidden” Greek phrase (“I say to you”) is a big part of how we know that the evangelist means us to conclude that “the healing power lay with the speaker” Jesus and not with any magic formula in his specific words (Robert A. Guelich, Mark 1–8:26, vol. 34A of Word Biblical Commentary (Dallas: Word, Incorporated, 1989), 302). That’s because the extra Greek words of commentary serve to emphasize that Jesus’s utterance is what linguists since the mid-20th century and the ground-breaking work of philosopher of language J. L. Austin call a “speech act.”

You may not have heard that technical term “speech act” before, but you intuitively know what one is. Sometimes, folks use words to actually accomplish something and make a change in the reality around us, like when the officiant at a wedding says “I now pronounce you husband and wife” or when a judge declares “This court finds the defendant not guilty.” When you hear these kinds of declarations, you know something has happened that fundamentally alters the social situation. Somebody’s not going to prison. Two folks are about to embark on the most maddening, marvelous journey together. You also know that the power to effect that kind of change rests in the authority, the position, and the social stature of the speaker. Not just anybody can declare a defendant at trial guilty or not guilty. Not just anybody can pronounce a couple married “until death do us part.”

The big difference, of course, is that our human speech acts rest on human social roles and only change how we humans perceive and relate to other humans and situations in our collective social reality. Jesus’s speech act, though, alters reality reality, even the cold hard facts of life, even death. Just like the awesome “Let there be” declarations in Genesis, a new physical reality has been brought to pass. Where once there was nothing, now there’s something; where once there was death; now there’s life.

No matter how wonderful Jesus’s speech act, even though Mark quotes his utterance in this striking Aramaic form written out into the Greek of his text, the words themselves weren’t the crucial ingredient in effecting the change. They were “so ordinary.” No big deal. Don’t worry. God’s got this. Just believe. Get up, kid.

Those who know me know I’m something of a linguist by training. And before you go asking it in your head: no, linguists don’t necessarily speak a lot of languages. We learn about languages more than we just learn languages. And one of the aspects of world languages that fascinated me as a linguist and got me to learn more about it was the way that many tongues all over the world have grammatical ways of indicating that the will or expectation of the speaker in the situation at hand has not worked out according to plan, has not come to pass as foreseen. English doesn’t exactly have specific grammar for this, but we do manage to indicate our frustration with situations all the same, like when something particularly crazy and maybe even catastrophic occurs and you just watch it unfold, stunned, before you wryly observe in a deadpan tone: “That happened.”

Think of the synagogue leader, who convinces Jesus to come with him to heal his little daughter. Hurray! But then Jesus and party get waylaid by a large crowd pressing in from all sides and a woman with a twelve-year medical issue—involving bleeding, no less!—and Jesus doesn’t seem in the least hurry. He even stops to investigate the “power [that] had gone forth from him” (Mark 5:30). And then the unthinkable happens. Not just frustration, but tragedy. “Your daughter is dead. Why trouble the teacher any further?” Talk about things not working out like you expected.

I know many of you here have experienced such bitter—and if we’re not careful, embittering—twists of fate, when it all just didn’t happen according to plan, going not merely off the rails but into something that feels like endless plummeting into complete and total darkness. When I think about my dad’s death at the height of the Pandemic, when I couldn’t go see him or be with him in his final moments, I get a feeling in my stomach like I’m falling and I can’t catch my breath, like there’ll never be an end to the depths, and absolutely no coming back.

Even though during his earthly ministry, Jesus explained how everything would go down, that he would one day return to us in glory—”and his kingdom will have no end” in the magnificent words of the Nicene Creed—it still feels to me, the average believer on the ground, like he’s been waylaid again. I know, this very minute, he’s seated at the right hand of the Father, interceding for us as Paul says in Romans 8:34. And he’s sent us his Spirit, the Comforter, in the meantime. Nevertheless, it still feels like Jesus is missing in action. And we’ve all been in need of healing for the past two thousand years.

One of the prayers in our Book of Common Prayer that’s suggested for use before receiving Communion—I pray it silently to myself most every Sunday—says: “Be present, be present, O Jesus…as you were present with your disciples…” (The Episcopal Church, The Book of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments and Other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church (New York: Church Publishing Incorporated, 2007), 834). I love how frank an admission that prayer makes that, however much we feel we have Jesus in our lives, we don’t have him as his disciples did. In flesh and blood, eating, drinking, praying, crying with us face to face. How I wish I could make that prayer into a speech act worthy of divine proportions. But God, Jesus, isn’t at my beck and call. And that’s frustrating.

Even Jesus has felt such frustration, though. One of the other places in Mark where the Savior speaks his native Aramaic is at Mark 14:36, where he prays in Gethsemane: “Abba, Father, for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me, yet not what I want but what you want.” As it says in Hebrews 4:15: “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin.”

There’s no magic formula, brothers and sisters. No incantation will protect or save us. Just like no magic words saved the synagogue leader’s daughter. It was Jesus. Jesus saves.

So why include the Aramaic at all then? If Mark the evangelist’s decision to report the Savior’s words in Jesus’s mother tongue ran the risk of Greek readers potentially coming to invest those words with magical properties, viewing them almost as a talisman that a second-century pagan critic could then ridicule for simple-mindedness, why expose believers to the temptation? Of course, like Jesus’s enigmatic action in the story of the woman caught in adultery, where he bent down to write something—what?—on the ground, Mark’s choice invests his Gospel story of the synagogue leader’s daughter with vivid local color. It makes you feel like you were there, present with Jesus. Yet it also tempts us, as readers and believers desperate for a little bit more of Jesus’s presence in our lives, to glom onto those words, to that language, rather than holding fast to the Savior himself. This is the same temptation in the opening chapters of Genesis: the sinful confusion of Creator and creation, loving and desiring what is right before your eyes instead of honoring and reverencing the one who is responsible for it all in the first place.

Spend a few moments on YouTube, and you’ll find lots of content featuring folks praying Psalms in Aramaic or reciting the Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic. The presumption behind such content is always that these words are special, extra sacred because Aramaic is the language Jesus spoke. Similar subtext accompanied Mel Gibson’s 2004 film The Passion of the Christ. This despite the fact that complete Bible versions in Aramaic don’t come into existence until between the second and the fourth centuries AD, and the ancient Aramaic form of the New Testament contained in the Christian Aramaic or Syriac Bible known as the Peshitta doesn’t contain select portions of the Gospels and Acts, or even the entirety of the books of 2-3 John, 2 Peter, Jude, or Revelation because the early Syrian church didn’t recognize those writings as authoritative. The language you hear in Gibson’s film wasn’t actually quoted from any ancient text. It was reconstructed Aramaic, put together by modern scholars.

So the point here, brothers and sisters in Christ, is don’t go grasping after the Savior’s “original” words. It isn’t the utterances themselves that hold the power, but Jesus the healer, our Savior, who spoke them. Just as it’s not the Bible itself—the physical collection of documents, the specific linguistic form of the texts—that holds authority in the Christian life, it’s God who, in the words of the collect for Proper 28 from the BCP, “caused all holy Scriptures to be written” (The Episcopal Church, The Book of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments and Other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church (New York: Church Publishing Incorporated, 2007), 184).

While we wait on a waylaid Jesus to come again, it’s easy to fall victim to magical thinking about magic words. Frustration feeds our fervor for more than we’ve been given in the here and now. When we get discouraged by it all, as is only natural, we need only think back to what Jesus had to say in today’s Gospel: Don’t worry. Just believe. Get up, kid. Get up!