I love the point that Barclay makes here, derived from the actual language used in the gospel. It makes an already amazing scene turn into a touching scene of love that Peter has kept alive in memory.
There is a very lovely thing here. In the gospel itself, "Maid! Arise" is "Talitha Cumi," which is Aramaic. How did this little bit of Aramaic get itself embedded in the Greek of the gospels? There can be only one reason. Mark got his information from Peter. For the most part, outside of Palestine at least, Peter, too, would have to speak in Greek. But Peter had been there; he was one of the chosen three, the inner circle, who had seen this happen. And he could never forget Jesus' voice. In his mind and memory he could hear that "Talitha Cumi" all his life. The love, the gentleness, the caress of it lingered with him forever, so much so that he was unable to think of it in Greek at all, because his memory could hear it only in the voice of Jesus and in the very words that Jesus spoke.
The Gospel of Mark
(The Daily Bible Series, rev. ed.)
I have thought just this thing many times without reading it. :)
ReplyDeleteI pointed the passage out to an Arab Muslim girl I know. She ended up getting baptized on a trip to America.
What struck her very much was that this was just how her mother used to wake her up:
Nora, qumi!
It remains the way to wake someone in Arabic to the present day.