In the bishop’s video message this week, he talked about how he was excited for the Gospel text for this morning, because it was the text he assigned to all his preaching students. As an aside, this was not the text he assigned to my class, we preached on Zacchaeus, but anyway. He liked the text because, he explained, “If you’re going to be true to the text, the preacher cannot tell the hearers to go and do anything. The widow doesn’t do anything to get Jesus to raise her son… The young man certainly doesn’t do anything to get Jesus to raise him from the dead, he is dead. And the crowds certainly don’t do anything to get Jesus to raise the widow’s son. The grieving crowd is grieving and the crowd with Jesus is rejoicing over what happened last Sunday with the Centurion’s slave.” The widow’s son, the bishop pointed out, was brought to new life solely from the compassion of Jesus. There was nothing anyone did, nothing we can do, because Jesus is moved not by our actions, but by his own deep sense of compassion.
And this word compassion is an interesting one. Because compassion is really too light of a word in English for what it is in the Greek. The Greek word is a great one, it is splagchnizomai. I’ll say that again, splagchnizomai. It literally means a churning in ones guts. Derived from the Greek word splanxna, or internal organs, it reflects the belief of Greek culture that the guts, rather than the heart or the brain, were the seat of emotions. Which, if you think about way your stomach feels when you are hurting for someone else; that twisted, knotted up feeling, it makes sense to think of your gut as being the place of compassion. This word compassion shows up two other times in Luke’s Gospel. The Good Samaritan, a story we’ll hear later in the summer, was moved by compassion to help the injured man. And the father of the prodigal son was so filled with compassion when he saw his son coming that he ran down the road to greet him. Compassion in scripture is an action word. It is not something we feel, but a feeling that leads us to action.
It’s a powerful image we are met with in this Gospel reading. Jesus followed by a large crowd of people approached the gate of the village of Nain. The crowd is like a parade moving down the road. Meanwhile, approaching the gate from the other side moved another parade of people. This second parade was like the mirror opposite of the Jesus parade. While the parade of those following Jesus was boisterous and joyful, shouting and singing praises to God for the miracle they had just witnessed of the healing of the Centurion’s servant; the parade of those following the man who had died was downtrodden and grief-stricken.
As these two parades collided together, the parade of life and the parade of death, something in the approaching crowd moved Jesus with compassion. Was it the widow’s wails of grief, at the death of her only son, echoing the death of her husband, and in many ways the death of herself. A woman whose husband and only son had died would be without any power or representation in the world. Any support she would have had would have passed from her husband to her son and now was gone. She would for the rest of her life be dependent on the community. The calamity which would have enfolded her is why the author of the book of James wrote so strongly about the faith community’s responsibilities towards widows and orphans. Or were the woman and crowd still silenced with shock, the death to recent to be real. By Jewish custom, the burial would take place on the same day as the death, so maybe the grief was too raw even for wailing.
Whatever it was, something in that crowd filled Jesus with compassion. As the two parades collided, they became one parade, a parade of death, grieving the loss of this young man and the mother he’d left behind. And then Jesus did a surprising thing. He reached out his hand to touch the bier where the young man was laid. Remember last week, when I talked about the Centurion’s concern over Jesus’ ritual cleanliness seemed suspect, because Jesus himself seemed to show no concern for ritual cleanliness himself. This is a classic example of that. A dead body, especially one you had no relation to, would render you ritually unclean for seven days, after which you had to wash and show yourself to a priest before you could once again be admitted into the community. The modern Jewish tradition of sitting shiva, of the family of the dead staying in their home to pray and wait for seven days following a death comes from this tradition. Today it is no longer about cleanliness, but about an understanding of the need for time to grieve, but this is where it gets its roots. As is true with so much of the Law, if we only take the time to dig into it, there is so much richness in this law that is deeper than the “ritual uncleanness” that we humans seem to take as the primary focus. What if instead, God’s primary focus for this restriction was this beautiful gift for those who are grieving, to intentionally be given time and space where all they are asked to do is grieve? What if, instead of the rushed sterility of modern funerals, we embraced this reality that grief is slow and messy, and allowed ourselves and our loved ones space and time and freedom to grieve?
But all of this is sort of an aside in this story, because as these two parades become one, Jesus reached his hand and touched the bier, and spoke the words, “Young man, I say to you, rise!” And all at once, the dead man sat up, and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother.
And here is where the text becomes hard to preach. Because precious few of us can relate to the experience of the widow and her son. I won’t say none, but precious few of us have experienced someone who has physically returned from death into life. And no one, and this I think I can say with some certainty, no one has experienced such a miracle hours or days after the moment of death, during the funeral procession itself. There is some comfort as a preacher in pointing out to you that since the woman, the son, the crowd, did nothing to prompt this miracle, so that when we do not ourselves experience the raising from the dead our loved ones, we do not need to blame ourselves that some prayer or promise or action on our part might have made the difference, might have induced God to save them. Life, after all, has a one hundred percent mortality rate. No one, not even the people Jesus raised from the dead, live forever. Not everything can be cured.
And that, I think, is the dangerous misconception of this and so many of the healing miracles. That this single event by Jesus totally returned the person’s life to exactly the same place it had been before, and nothing was ever wrong again. Because the raising of the widow’s son still left her a widow. And, given the short life-span of people in the first century, we can assume there were others in the crowd of mourners who were drawn not by the widow’s grief, but by their own, and their loved ones were not also raised. In fact, this was probably also true of the crowd following Jesus from the healing of the Centurion’s slave. There were probably revelers in that crowd who had their own illnesses to contend with, their own sick loved ones. When Jesus was moved with compassion to raise the widow’s son, he was not fixing every single thing that every person found wrong with the world. The question of how a good God can allow bad things to happen is what is known in theological terms as the question of theodicy, and quite frankly, it is a harder question then I have ever been able to explain or understand. My faith has always been one that is comfortable in the not knowing, so the question of how great tragedies can occur, and why God does not step in to prevent them, is one that I don’t spend a lot of time dwelling on. Because here’s what I do take from the story of the raising of the widow’s son in Nain. That in the middle of the deepest grief, God is always working to bring about healing. In the middle of the darkest moments, Jesus reaches across the barriers to touch the biers of our broken hearts to heal us. Not because of what we’ve done, not from some properly worded prayer or acceptable level of obedience, but because Jesus is moved with compassion in the presence of our suffering. Compassion always leads to healing. Not cure, there is a difference between healing and cure, but healing. Sometimes, like the widow, we experience the compassion of Jesus directly, but sometimes, like the man helped by the Samaritan, like the prodigal son, we experience the compassion of Jesus through others. It is the outstretched arms when we are grieving, the unexpected gift that gets us through, the kind word or comforting prayer. And sometimes we get to be the sign of Jesus compassion, and that in itself is healing for us and for those for whom we care.
Jesus is moved with compassion for us. So deeply does Jesus love us, that his insides ache out of his deep care for us. The promise of that love, more so even than the way in which that love is demonstrated, is the sort of good news that we can hold on to. Thanks be to God, who loves us with such deep compassion. Amen.
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