Grace, mercy and peace be to you from God our Father, and
from our Lord Jesus Christ.
Text: (Luke
7:11-17)
And when
the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her.
Prayer: Heavenly
Father, we come to you in boldness and confidence as your dear children,
calling on you, our dear Father. Let your Word be taught in its truth and
purity, and help us to lead holy lives according to it, through Jesus Christ
our Lord. Amen.
There is a missing word at the beginning of the English translation of
our gospel reading today, which is present in Greek. This word is ἐγένετο
(egéneto), which translates as “it happened”, or in the old King James
version, “it came to pass.”
So our Gospel reading begins today, by saying: “Soon afterward he went
to a town”, but if we want to be fussy, it should read: “And it happened (or it came to pass) that soon
afterwards he went to a town.”
We might think that this little detail isn’t really all that
important. But it’s very important at the beginning of a passage which tells
about the event where Jesus rose a man from the dead. The first thing we read
is that “it happened”. “It came to pass”.
Many people today don’t believe this little word, that what happened was
a real life historical event.
Some people believe that the purpose of this passage is not to tell us
that Jesus actually performed this
miracle, but rather it is simply there to make a point about who Jesus is. There are a lot of
similarities between our Gospel reading today and our Old Testament reading
which reports Elijah raising from the dead a widow’s son. Nobody had raised
anybody from the dead before Elijah, not even Moses. And after Elijah, the
prophets, like Isaiah, started to prophecy that the Messiah would rise people
from the dead, for example, where it says in 26:19: “Your dead shall live;
their bodies shall rise.”
In the passage just after our Gospel reading today, Luke writes about
how Jesus says to John the Baptist’s disciples: “Go and tell John what you have
seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are
cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead
are raised up...”
And so, some people might think that the purpose of this passage about
Jesus raising the widow’s son is simply to make a point: that the people who
wrote the gospels believed that Jesus was fulfilling the Old Testament, and was
replacing Elijah in some great way. This is true, but only half-true.
So someone might ask the question, “If this passage is so important,
why doesn’t this story appear in the other gospels?” Why didn’t Matthew, Mark
and John report this? Did Luke just make this one up?
We don’t know the reasons why different evangelists chose to write
down various events in the life of Jesus, or not. Luke may have had some
unusual privilege that gave him access to what had happened from certain
eyewitnesses that the other evangelists weren’t so confident about writing. But
before we start to pit one evangelist against the other, we need to remember
that it was only less than 100 years later before church writers report that
they were reading about Jesus’ life with these four writers together—Matthew,
Mark, Luke and John—as a unified and united witness to what people had seen and
heard.
The first thing that needs to be preached today when it comes to these
sorts of miracles of Jesus, and especially this one where he rose a man from
the dead, is that it actually happened.
Many people will simply hear today’s reading and say: “That’s impossible”.
“It’s not possible that a person should sit up in their coffin and start
speaking.” “Only simple-minded mediaeval people or fundamentalists would
actually believe that this is true!”
So then we might think: Maybe the man wasn’t really dead—maybe he
wasn’t dead in the sense that modern people might say. Sometimes we read about
people having a near-death experience, or being resuscitated, and things like
that. Maybe the people thought he
was dead but he wasn’t really.
All this sort of detail is very important because if this passage is
making any point at all, it is making a point based on fact, not on a whole
bunch of talk, however nice the words might be.
At the same time, when we preach the Bible, we believe that it is God’s Word. We believe that it was
inspired by the Holy Spirit and written down through human authors. But sometimes
people make the mistake that because there were human authors involved, that
this means that the bible is imperfect because it was written down by people.
But God’s inspiration doesn’t allow for mistakes—and even where there have been
apparent inconsistencies in the bible, Christians throughout the centuries have
always sought to take up the task to defend the Scripture.
We also say that Jesus Christ is fully human: but that doesn’t mean
he’s a sinner and imperfect. He’s also true God. In the same way, we could say
that the bible is a fully human book: but that doesn’t mean that it makes
mistakes. It’s also a word that is inspired by the Holy Spirit.
But when we first read the
bible, we don’t believe that it’s God’s Word at first. We pick it up with a bit of suspicion—we come scratching
our head and asking questions. And that’s fine! God gives us time and an
inquiring mind to search things out and to find out if the things in the bible
are true. God wants us to nitpick and ask questions.
Unfortunately, sometimes in the church there’s been a culture of
silencing people who have genuine doubts and who have some genuine difficulty
with the bible. People say, “God’s word says it—you have to believe it.”
This is sometimes not the most helpful thing that could be said at
this point. St Paul puts it beautifully, when he says: “If Christ had not been
raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain.”
In other words, test the
bible. See what you think! We’re not forcing
you to believe that Jesus rose from the dead. But if he didn’t, then the whole thing’s a hoax. We
need to search and test these things.
So when we first come to the bible, we often don’t believe that it’s
God’s word straightaway. But when we experience its power, and when we taste its goodness,
then we trust in it as God’s word and then we start to have a desire to want to
defend it as truth. And we say with
St Paul: “For I am not ashamed of
the gospel, for it is the power of God for
salvation to everyone who believes.”
So what happens in our reading today?
It says: Jesus went to a town
called Nain, and his disciples and a great crowd went with him. As he drew near
to the gate of the town, behold, a man who had died was being carried out, the
only son of his mother, and she was a widow, and a considerable crowd from the
town was with her.
The first thing we notice about this passage is the huge number of
people who were there on this occasion. There were people with Jesus and people
following the woman. We also read that the man was simply—dead. No explanation, no clarification: just good old-fashioned
“dead”! Also, his mother was a widow—in
those days, widows relied very much on their children to look after them, and
he was her only son. There were no social services back then! So when Elijah in
the Old Testament raised that widow’s only son, he gave her back her future and
her livelihood. The same happens here with Jesus.
Then we read: And when the Lord
saw her, he had compassion on her and said to her, “Do not weep.” Then he came
up and touched the bier, and the bearers stood still. And he said, “Young man,
I say to you, arise.” And the dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus
gave him to his mother.
Notice that Jesus is called “the Lord” here: when the Lord saw her, he
had compassion on her. The difference between Jesus and Elijah is this:
Elijah relied on God to be
compassionate and prayed to him, but here, Jesus
Himself is compassionate, and he felt
it very deeply. The word in Greek means to felt this very deeply in his
heart, in his gut. We might say, “his heart went out to her.” He also comforted
her and told her not to cry, because he
actually had the power to comfort her and raise her son. And so, in the
presence of all these people, he touches the coffin, and tells the man to rise.
Anybody who thinks that we are saved by any contribution of our own,
whether we choose eternal life by
our own free-will, or whether we are saved by our works or efforts, needs to
have a good think about this passage. This man is dead! He had nothing to offer
Jesus. He couldn’t rise back to live by exerting his will or making a decision
for Jesus.
At the same time, the man is not raised to life because of God’s
immovable counsel which has been appointed ahead of time, like some sort of
robotic predestination. Jesus is true God himself, but he was moved by this event, he felt for this woman, he listened to her crying, and he acted and spoke. And through the power
of this Spirit-filled words, he calls this man back to life, against all
scientific laws, against all our reason, and against every idea of what we
might think is possible.
And so at the end of the reading we read:
Fear seized them all, and they
glorified God, saying, “A great prophet has arisen among us!” and “God has
visited his people!” And this report about him spread through the whole of
Judea and all the surrounding country.
These words clearly show that Jesus is both a true human being and
true God. They say: “A great prophet has
arisen among us!” They say: Jesus is a great man, a great prophet, and he’s
one of us—he’s grown up as a little boy with his family in our midst.
And also they say: “God has
visited his people!” Through this event, it hasn’t just been a man who visited the city of Nain, but God himself has visited his people.
Whether the people on this occasion believed that Jesus himself was actually
true God is hard to know. But their words still apply to Jesus without their
knowing! Ever since Christ took on flesh in Mary’s womb, if God’s ever going to
visit us again, he’s either going to visit us in the flesh of Jesus Christ, or
he’s not going to visit at all. There is nowhere else on earth that day where
God should have been sought, except in the city
of Nain, in the flesh of Jesus Christ, rising a widow’s son from the dead.
Because as Christians we believe that Jesus has two natures in one person: truly human and truly God. So when Jesus
the man visited this city, we believe that God
visited it, and that God and man can’t be separated in the person of Jesus.
It was the pure compassion of God that was felt in Jesus’ guts, it was the pure
words of God that comforted the widow and it was the pure hand of God himself
that touched the coffin.
Jesus says in John’s gospel: Whoever
has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, “Show us the Father”? Do you
not believe that I am in the Father and
the Father is in me? The words that
I say to you I do not speak on my own authority, but the Father who dwells in me does the works.
Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me, or else believe on account of the works themselves.”
This is the point of this passage today. And so, we also believe that
today in our church, “God has visited his people!” Jesus Christ, our Lord and
our God, has spoken his living words of power and truth and love, he has
visited you in the flesh and baptised you into his own body, he raises you up
from the dead through his powerful absolution speaking the forgiveness of all
your sins, and he even gives you his resurrected and glorified flesh and blood to
eat and drink.
And so the fact that Christ visits his church today is no less real
than when he visited the city of Nain 2000 years ago. And he enters into our
own company today with one purpose in mind: to stand among those who are dead
through sin, and to give you by pure grace alone the resurrection of your body
from the dead.
A great prophet has arisen among
us! God has visited his people!
Amen.
Lord Jesus Christ, come to us, and with compassion hear our prayers
and our sighs and our tears. Raise us up from the dead, and begin eternal life
in us and through us through your living and active word, and through the
powerful working of your Holy Spirit. Amen.
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