Impressions of managed health care haven't changed in 2000 years. Next Sunday we meet a woman who "had suffered greatly at the hands of many doctors and had spent all that she had." Ouch. Mark goes on: "Yet she was not helped but only grew worse." Ouch again.

Small wonder she prescribed her own cure: "If I but touch Jesus' clothes, I shall be cured." It worked immediately. "She felt in her body," Mark says, "that she was healed of her affliction."

This wondrous story next Sunday serves as mere filler to one far more dramatic (Mark 5:21-43). Jesus raises the daughter of Jairus from death to life. Mark presents this story in two halves, partly to heighten the suspense, and partly to remind us by means of the hemorrhage miracle that Jesus has power over everything - even over managed health care.

The Jairus story is one of three miracles in all the Gospels that tell of Jesus raising someone from the dead. He also raises the son of the widow of Nain, and most famously, Lazarus. Only Jairus, though, appears in Mark.

Some elements of this story indicate it is one of the oldest in the Gospels. Rarely do we learn the name of someone who requests or receives a miracle, but here we do. Jairus gives the story an unusual air of authenticity. The same applies to the embarrassing behavior of the participants. Mark says the crowd "ridiculed" Jesus, and that Jesus "put them all out." Later writers sanitized such descriptions.

The vocabulary also indicates the story's antiquity. Jesus cures in Aramaic, "Talitha koum." As in the case of the deaf man with the speech impediment, where Jesus cures with the word "ephphatha," the appearance of Jesus' own dialect suggests the story is old. In fact, scholars say the grammar is wrong. "Koum" is how you tell a little boy to get up. To a girl, you say, "Koumi." But, in Jesus' day, some of these dialectic niceties may have been overlooked. In today's English grammar, we make precise distinctions between "like" and "as," "lie" and "lay," "shall" and "will." But in everyday speech we overlook the rules. We do the same when we blend singular and plural in a sentence like "Everyone did their best" and in the legendary civil rights manifesto delivered from the front seat by the bus-riding Rosa Parks: "My feet's tired." Nobody corrects grammar like that, even when it's wrong. So Jesus' bad grammar may be a sign that he actually spoke these words.

The story ends in an unusual fashion. Jesus asks people to give the girl something to eat. Mark already told us that she arose and walked around. That alone should prove the miracle. Perhaps due to the extreme nature of this particular miracle - raising from the dead - the reader needs more. Or perhaps Mark has something Eucharistic in mind: the girl "arose," foreshadowing resurrection. And she "eats," anticipating the messianic banquet.

Without question the most troubling part of the Gospel for the following Sunday (Mark 6:1-6) is the reference to three named brothers of Jesus and at least two (because of the plural form) unnamed sisters. Even though the rest of the text deals with the importance of having faith for the performance of miracles, Mark's presentation gets sidetracked in today's culture by the near voyeuristic curiosity over whether or not Jesus had natural siblings.

The tradition of the Catholic Church is clear. He did not. The reason pertains to our belief that Mary remained a virgin after Jesus was born. Many other Christian traditions dispute the Catholic interpretation on the grounds that the Bible appears to say rather plainly, here and in other places, that siblings existed.

In fact, the Catholic tradition itself was not always the same. Some of the very early fathers of the church, Hegesippus and Tertullian, believed that Jesus had a real brother in the person of James. The non-Christian historian Josephus states the same.

The most frequent explanation one hears is that the word "brothers" could also mean "cousins" or "relatives." That is true, but nowhere else in the New Testament does the word "brother" clearly mean "cousin." That is why the Christian religions cannot agree on whether or not Jesus had siblings.

Nonetheless, both Gospels the next two Sundays lead us all to agree on two points. Jesus has power to work the impossible. And faith opens the way to miracles.

Father Paul Turner is pastor of St. John Francis Regis Parish, Kansas City.