Welcome to today's edition of Things Unseen. This week we've been thinking about what Jesus

is really like, not how we imagined Him to be or even would like Him to be, but how the

New Testament describes Him. Some time ago I was reading a once quite well-known book by

an older Scottish professor of theology by the name of James Stocker. It's called

Imagal Christi, the image of Christ. And it's got chapters and such topics as Christ as a friend,

Christ as a man of prayer, Christ as a student of scripture, Christ as a sufferer, and so on.

It's a little different from most books on Christ that are written today. But there's value in

the chapter titles alone, I think, because they make us think about the Lord Jesus, not in terms

of categories, but in terms of personal descriptions, in terms of what He was really like in our humanity.

I say this, of course, because of that great verse Hebrews 13 verse 8. Jesus is the same

today, as He was during that yesterday, those days described in the Gospels.

Towards the end of Professor Stocker's book, there's a chapter title that really has arrested

my attention. It is Christ as a man of feeling. It's a subject that has interested and fascinated

me for a long time, what the American Theologian Benjamin B. Warfield called, the emotional life

of Jesus. So I was interested to see how Professor Stocker would approach it. And he does so in a very

simple way, by looking at the gospel narrative of the raising of the daughter of Jairus, the synagogue

gruler. Now, this passage comes at the end of a section in Mark chapter 4 verses 35 to chapter 5

verse 43. And there's a kind of standard way of preaching that section that students are often

taught and rightly taught. In this section, Jesus reveals his authority in a whole series of ways.

He comes the storm and gallantly and shows his power over nature. He exercises the demons and

shows his power over the kingdom of darkness. He heals the woman with the issue of blood and

shows his power over disease. And he raises Jairus's daughter and shows his power over death.

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