Luke 7:11-17
Ordinary 10
June 5, 2016
William G. Carter
Soon afterwards [Jesus] went to a town called
Nain, and his disciples and a large crowd went with him. As he
approached the gate of the town, a man who had died was being carried out. He was
his mother’s only son, and she was a widow; and with her was a large crowd from
the town. When the Lord saw her, he had compassion for her and
said to her, “Do not weep.” Then he came forward and touched the
bier, and the bearers stood still. And he said, “Young man, I say to you,
rise!” The dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him
to his mother. Fear seized all of them; and they glorified God,
saying, “A great prophet has risen among us!” and “God has looked favorably on
his people!” This word about him spread throughout Judea and all
the surrounding country.
To hear Luke tell it, Jesus is on a
roll. Momentum has been building in Galilee. Jesus has speaking the truth about
God and gathering enormous crowds. He has healed a man with a terrible skin
disease, lifted up and restored somebody whose bones didn’t work, and healed a
young servant of a Roman centurion who was near death.
Now he interrupts a funeral. There is a
procession moving out of the village that he is passing. There is a large crowd
of people following a casket. Jesus pushes his way through the crowd. He sees
the body of the man who has died. He says to the man’s mother, “Don’t cry.” Then
he stops the whole thing, and you heard what happened.
That’s not the sort of thing that
happens every day. Sometimes there are interruptions in the middle of a
funeral. I’ve told some of you about a moment that I endured at a local funeral
home. I’m up front, trying to find something nice to say about the deceased,
and one of his relatives pulls out his cell phone and answers the call. I mean,
there’s a funeral going on, and this guy is having a conversation. He doesn’t
stop, so finally I stop. In a funeral, you only need one person talking at a
time. When he was done, I sprinted toward the benediction.
Trust me when I tell you, the man who
interrupted us was definitely not Jesus.
But today, we have a Bible story about
Jesus stopping a funeral in its tracks. He stops it. And if I am honest, I can
think of any number of reasons why. There is no fun in funeral, not at least if
you take the death seriously.
We are living in a season when a lot of
baby boomers are facing the final curtain. So to avoid their anxiety, they may do
whatever they can to soften the experience of an actual loss. Stand at an open
microphone and tell some jokes. Pipe in some classic tunes from the Doobie
Brothers. Pull out a glass, lift it, and propose a toast to Brother John,
“wherever he is.” Presume that the afterlife is only a continuation of this
life, and declare sister Sarah, the scratch golfer, is now teeing off on a
cloud. Fill the casket with knick-knacks and a bottle of booze, just like the
Egyptian pharaohs. I’ve seen all these things.
They sound like fun, but all of them are
an enormous distraction from what is really going on: that somebody has died.
Somebody has ceased to live any more. They aren’t coming back, not in this
lifetime at least. The familiar voice is silenced, the companionship has been is
cut off. We don’t like that. Nobody likes that. A lot of people want to soften death
or pretend it isn’t real … and six months later, one of might stop by to see
the pastor and confess., “I haven’t been sleeping very well.”
Death is hard. Let me tell you how hard
it was for the woman in our Bible story. She had a son, her only son, and he
died. She was a widow. Not only does that mean she had experienced death
before, and quite possibly the current loss is stirring up the feelings of the
previous loss. It also means she was about to lose everything – not just her
son, not just her father, but her entire livelihood.
That’s how it was in the time of Jesus.
Women could not hold jobs in ancient Israel, unless they were disgraced and
worked in the shadows after dark. They had no income, there was no such thing
as life insurance, and nobody had a savings account tucked away just in case.
For most people, it was a hand-to-mouth existence. And if your husband died,
you better have a kid to earn some money, because otherwise you weren’t going
to eat.
And if you only had one child and he
passed away, you had nothing. Yes, that sounds grossly unfair, but that’s how
the culture was. So for centuries, the Bible had taught, “Take care of the
widows and the orphans.” They are the most vulnerable people in the whole town.
So here’s this woman who has lost her
only son, and Jesus said to her, “Don’t cry anymore.” The Gospel of Luke said
it’s because he had compassion. He knew what it was like. His feelings were
impacted by her feelings, and he suffered with her. That’s the definition of
compassion: “com” (with) “passio” (suffer). He suffered with her – and he probably
didn’t even know her name.
The compassion was deep inside his gut,
says Luke. He was deeply moved. So what does the Lord do? He stops the funeral,
touches the case of the casket, and says, “Young man, be raised.” With that,
the man in the coffin sat up and started to talk, so Jesus gave him back to his
mother.
It caused quite a ruckus. We can imagine
that. I’m pretty sure the mother stated crying again, but she was crying a
different kind of tears. Some of the people standing nearby didn’t know what to
do: they came prepared to weep, but now the situation is changed.
Back at that time, too, there were
professional mourners. Did you know about that? In Middle Eastern cultures, there
were people employed to weep and grieve,[1]
especially if the family was small or the deceased person was unpopular. For
some people, that would come in handy. Don’t have any friends? Call 1-900-Tear-Jerkers-R-Us,
and a team of professionals will show up in black, carrying wet Kleenex. Some
of these people are there when Jesus disrupts everything; are they going to get
paid?
The text gives us plenty of reactions. Some
people saw the whole thing. They gasped and started stammering out words about
God. “God has raised up a new prophet,” was one of the exclamations. What did
they mean by that? Well, centuries before, the prophet Elijah had raised from
the dead the only son of a widow (1 Kings 17:8-24). Here, Jesus had just done
the same thing. He gave that grieving woman a new future by giving her son back
to her, completely alive.
So some said Jesus is a new prophet,
while others present burst out with a different exclamation: “God had looked
with favor upon his people.” That’s the sort of thing that a lot of people said
when Jesus came to their town. Good things started happening when there was no
other reason for good things to happen. It was a sign of grace, a sign that God
loves his own people and does good by them.
Grace is the work of God’s good
heartedness, and that’s precisely why Jesus doesn’t ask permission to interrupt
the funeral and raise the boy from the dead. He simply does it, for this is a
sign of God is toward us. God gives life, specifically or spiritually. God
doesn’t wait until we shape up before acting with kindness toward us. God doesn’t
wait until we are perfect before feeling compassion for us and then doing
something with that compassion. This is what Jesus reveals about God as he
stops a funeral from proceeding.
But here’s what I want to know: how come
the first response from the people standing by is fear? Sure, there is a lot
going on at the moment. The widow mother is hugging her boy and sobbing for
joy. The townspeople, at least the religious ones, are blurting out good words
about God. Yet the first and most visceral response is “phobia” – fear! It “seized
all of them.”
They were immobilized, not out of
reverence, but of terror. Why do you think that is?
Certainly it was a creepy moment. Seeing
a dead person sit up in a casket is a good bit terrifying, and then hearing him
talk again is probably going to make you scream. Any of us who have lost a
loved one to death still want to hear that voice one more time. Sometimes I
call a family a week or two after a funeral to see how they are doing, and they
haven’t taken the old voice off the answering machine. It can set you back a
little bit… and I understand why they haven’t deleted that voice – because it
would be like deleting the person, and we wouldn’t want to do that.
When it comes to death, there is a whole
lot of creepiness in our culture these days. We don’t have to wait until
Halloween to see it. Every year or two, we survive a few more zombie movies. Or
there’s an end-of-the-world scenario and death sneers at us with yellow teeth.
Or what’s up with our ongoing flirtation with deadly drugs? They lie about
making people feel better and enslave them with a kind of despair that is worse
than death.
So my hunch is that the powers of
destruction were served notice that day, as Jesus interrupted the funeral. The
fears and phobias and spine-tingling feelings that get into us all were told
loud and clear that there’s another player on the field. “They were paralyzed
by fear” says Luke. I think that’s the Gospel writer’s way of saying Jesus has
come to town and he won’t have any of it.
He has no time for this addiction to deadliness
that we’ve never been able to shake. So he comes to interrupt it. He comes to
chase away the professional grievers and doesn’t care if they don’t get paid.
He comes to confront an unjust economic system that robs a poor widow of living
when her only son passes away. He comes to serve notice on Death with a capital
“D” that it does not rule over us. No more fear, no more
God has come into our world in the
person of Jesus Christ. He is the One through whom all things were created and given
life. That’s why he will not give in to death. Not now, not ever. Even when the
powers of destruction nailed Jesus to the tree, he breathes forgiveness that
cancels fear (Luke 23:34). There is always a new beginning available wherever
Jesus is.
For those addicted to fear, Jesus comes
to break the chains that paralyze us. He embodies that great line from a sermon
in the early church: “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out all
fear.” (1 John 4:18). He comes on the lips of the Harlem poet Zora Neale
Hurston, who said, “Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding place”
Anybody here want to live by fear? No,
it’s not for us. We are the people that Jesus brings alive.
And I suppose that’s why Christian
people do some of the things they do. They take seriously those old
commandments about caring for the widows, and they confront an economic system
where most women are still paid a lot less for doing work identical to men. Because
that’s what we do if Jesus brings us alive.
Christian people sit with those who grieve.
They don’t flood them with empty words. They don’t tell them stupid jokes.
Before they say anything at all, they go along side in compassion, to “suffer
with.” Some losses can’t be fixed, but every loss can be accompanied. Our
compassionate presence with others is a visual announcement that death has not
won. Because that’s what we do if Jesus brings us alive.
Wherever there is hunger, Christians
offer food. Whenever someone has no bed, Christians open their homes. Whenever
a victim is demeaned, Christians lift them up. Whenever a person is abandoned,
Christians go alongside. Whenever death laughs its hellish cackle, Christians point
to the empty cross of Jesus and say, “Death, you have no more power over us.”
Because that’s what we do if Jesus
brings us alive.
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