Pentecost 2 (Lectionary 10) “Why me?”
6 June 2010
Luke 7.11-17
It’s a wonderful story, full of drama, painting Jesus as a man of great compassion, and Luke tells it well. But if you’re like me, when you read the story, or hear it, of Jesus raising to life the dead son of this poor widow of Nain, the thought that goes through your mind is, “Why that woman’s son?” For me, the thought is starkly personal: Why did not Jesus bring my son to life, my son who died? Maybe that is your thought, too, if you have ever faced the terrible grief of burying your child. But even if you have not, the question is still there: If Jesus could do that for her loved one, why not for mine? Why did my loved one die?—child or parent, spouse or friend—why did they have to die?
It takes us right into the depths of Christian faith to ask such a question, for it has to do with who God is and why God does what he does. Perhaps it is an uncomfortable question to consider. Most of the commentators on this passage restrict themselves to nice platitudes about Jesus as miracle-worker. They do not want to consider the question that nags at our hearts, you and I, as we struggle to understand why God doesn’t make everything all right in life. But I think Jesus intends for us to ask the question, and to struggle through the Scripture in search of answers.
I’m sorry to tell you that I don’t have the answers for you. I have more questions than answers about death and life and the reasons for them. But this passage has some important guideposts, and I’d like you to look at them and see what comfort or understanding they might offer.
The first is the reaction of Jesus. Luke says that when he saw this funeral procession, with the dead man’s body being carried through the streets, his poor mother following behind, along with the crowd of mourners, Jesus had compassion. The Greek word there is a very powerful one. It means that he shared this woman’s pain and anguish from the very depth of his being. That is a priceless truth we must learn and contemplate.
In the Greek world, the world in which St. Luke was at home, the gods were regarded as being above human suffering. When people were in pain, the gods didn’t much care because they had no human feelings. The Christian gospel proclaimed the absolute opposite of that. We see, in Jesus Christ, a God who shares our pain and our suffering. We see a God who shares even the pain of death, who identifies himself so completely with us that his own Son suffered and died. That must have been a startling idea to St. Luke—who, incidentally, is the only gospel writer to include this story. I suspect it was Jesus’ deep compassion that moved Luke to record this for us. It was not what a Greek, a Gentile like Luke, would expect of God.
Yet it is what we get in Jesus Christ. In him we have a God who stands by us, even in suffering and pain. When we grieve the death of one we love, he grieves with us. When we struggle with pain and illness, he struggles with us. When we find ourselves distressed or discouraged or lost, he is there with us, sharing our tears.
Did you hear about the little girl who was late getting home from school? Her mother asked her why she was late, and she reported that one of her friends had lost her favorite doll, and was crying. “I had to stop for few minutes and cry with her,” she explained. A simple thing, but often the very best we can offer someone in need. Knowing that there is someone who grieves with us can help us know that we are not alone in the world.
And that is what Christ does for us. I do not know why in this instance his compassion moved him to bring this young man to life. But we must know that, whatever the circumstances that surround our own troubles, our own griefs, if God in his mercy and wisdom chooses not to intervene and save a life, still it is certain that his compassion surrounds us. We can weep, we can be angry, we can cry out, knowing that our pain and our loss is shared fully by him. He weeps with us. Sometimes, for reasons we cannot understand, that must be enough.
The second guidepost here is the
fascinating scene where Jesus touches the funeral bier. In ancient
In a sense, I think that law was a kind of cultural denial of death. A dead person, even the cot on which the body lay, was unclean, untouchable. Jesus’ willingness to touch was, in a sense, a confrontation of death. He was saying by his action that death must be faced, and faced with faith. Far from compelling us to avoid touching anything related to death, our faith must impel us to do so, for death is part of our reality, and our faith is useless if it does not allow us to confront death.
That is a word we need to hear. Our culture, too, has its taboos about death. For us it is not so much the physical aspects of death we are not to touch, but the spiritual and emotional. Death is not a polite subject of conversation, even within families, even, often, within the church. We would prefer to avoid thinking about it.
People with terminal illnesses often report that one of the most difficult aspects of their situation is that they desperately need to talk about what they are feeling and going through, and yet so many friends and family members prefer to keep the conversation away from the reality of death. They are uncomfortable with such talk. But Jesus’ action in touching the bier and violating the taboo says to us, “Hey, look, death is part of the reality of life. No one avoids facing it. But if we have faith, we can look at death, talk about it, think about it, deal with it. We not only can, but we should. It is part of the life God has given us. We need not be afraid of it.”
The last guidepost comes not only from the gospel lesson, but from this morning’s Psalm. The Psalmist writes, “Weeping may spend the night, but joy comes in the morning.” Jesus says to the widow of Nain, “Do not weep.” Now it is not that weeping is forbidden. Tears are a wonderful gift of God, and Scripture reports that Jesus himself wept at the death of his friend Lazarus. But the idea here is to reassure us that weeping is not all there is. There is joy. And joy follows grief just as certainly as down follows the night.
Now this is not simply a statement that “everything is going to be all right eventually.” If it were that, it would be useless to people of faith. Rather this is reassurance of a deeper kind. This says that God is promising a joy that will surpass all our sorrows. It is pointing to the future—maybe not tomorrow or next week, but the ultimate future that we will face at the time of our own death. It is promising us that the grief and sorrow that we have experienced in life will be transcended in our Father’s house, in our heavenly home. There, the Scripture promises, there will be no more weeping. There will be joy. Death will no more be a barrier between us and those we love. That is the promise made here—that just as Jesus has removed that barrier in this story with this mother and this son, so will he remove it for us—not in the same way, perhaps, or under the same circumstances, but it will happen nonetheless. There will come a day when death will have no dominion. And that, I think, is the deepest purpose of this story. It is to point us to that future. It is to give us hope—not for miracles here and now, but for confidence in a God who keeps his promises—a God who is with us in our grief, who helps us to confront our fears, and who promises that the final word for us is not death but life!
Richard O. Johnson
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