Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity, 2002
Luke 7:13-20

Greg Rose worked as a bank-teller in New Jersey. One day a gunmen walked into his place of work and held up his colleague at the next window. Everyone was told to freeze, while his co-worker handed over bundles of bills. The thief stuffed the money into a bag and fled. Greg immediately ran around the counter giving chase. As he dashed through the doorway, the police squealed into the parking lot. Mistaking Greg for one of the holdup men, they shot him. He died within minutes.

Greg's widowed mother, Ada Rose, was notified. At his memorial Greg was eulogized as a hero. In a book, Ada Rose tells how the death of her son filled her with a desolate, an almost desperate, feeling. This mother and son were as close as a mother and son get. Though they didn't look alike, they shared similar interests. Their favorite composers and authors overlapped. The same incongruities of life struck them as humorous. They had some of the same friends. Their goals and struggles were kindred. Hence, for Ada Rose many of the trivial happenings of daily life shared with another person evaporated, creating an aching vacuum.

Here's an example of her agony. She writes, "in the early days of being without one's beloved, it was painful to dispose of the clothes that once covered the dear familiar shape. In this task I remember feeling compelled to kiss a pair of my son's shoes before giving them away. I knew it was a foolish thing to do, but they were his shoes ­ his shoes!"

Our Gospel text for this 16th Sunday after Trinity presents a widow who lost her son. Luke 7:11 relates, "Now it happened, the day after, that [Jesus] went into a city called Nain; and many of His disciples went with Him, and a large crowd. And when He came near the gate of the city, behold, a dead man was being carried out, the only son of his mother; and she was a widow. And a large crowd from the city was with her."

If we were to look down on the city of Nain from a hot air balloon that day, we would see two large crowds moving toward each other. The one crowd is outside the city walls, the other inside. The one band is arriving; the other departing. One group follows the Lord, the other a casket. Hope and joy mark the one crowd; death and despair the other. At the gates the two groups meet.

Pall-bearers are carrying a casket to the tombs. A young man has died, the only son of his widowed mother. The widow has depended upon her son for companionship and economic assistance. With the passing of her only son she is left lonely and destitute. Death can be cruel. The text implies that she was not expecting her son's end; it was premature.

A few months ago I took my son to the cemetery. After placing flowers at my father's marker, we wandered among the other gravestones. We found a good number of infants and children. A two-month-old baby lay here, a six-year-old girl there, an adolescent, a man twenty-seven years old, and so on. Over the graves of toddlers parents sometimes place toy trucks, dolls, plastic balls, blocks. Their children once played with these items. It is enough to break your heart. What parent is not haunted by the possible death of his own children? The cemetery is a good place to visit, if only to remind us of the frailty of life.

Monks of old were permitted few possessions in their barren little cells; perhaps a bed, table, chair, a candle, a crucifix on the wall, and a few books. On the table they were encouraged to place a skull. Why a skull? To stare them in the face and remind them that their own demise was unavoidable. To remind them that life is but a vapor. Thus, their hearts must not be set on what is vulgar, trivial, and transitory, but what is joyful, enriching, and eternal.

Those were healthy thoughts for the monks of the Middle Ages and they are good for us today. If we die in Christ we die well. The 18th century Anglican Jeremy Taylor wrote a book with two sections: Holy Living, and Holy Dying. Both are important. So let us expect to die, prepare ourselves for it, and trust in the Cross of Christ that allows us to face it with readiness and confidence.

The two crowds meet at the gates of Nain and Jesus observes the widow's bereavement. Verse 13 says, "When the Lord saw her, He had compassion on her and said to her, "Do not weep." This funeral was a sad occasion. In those days, a poor widow without children to support her faced a hard future. Jesus had compassion on her. He was not indifferent to her plight. This woman with a broken heart, an empty home, and a hard life ahead, moved Him to the core.

Our Lord is our model. We are to weep with those who weep. For some people this comes naturally. They easily identify with the pain of others. I remember my brother poking a wasp nest with a long bamboo pole. All of a sudden one of the yellow jackets soared down and stung him in the eye. It seemed that the fear, swelling and temporary blindness were happening to me as well. So much so that I got confused and later thought the wasp had stung me.

For some people, empathy is natural; for others it is not. They have to work at it. Are you cold-hearted when you shouldn't be? I am too often that way. We sometimes have a hard time understanding the pain and loss of our neighbor. Our self-centeredness freezes over our hearts. We therefore need to ask God's Spirit to melt our ice.

Christ was compassionate walking on earth, He is compassionate sitting in Heaven, and He never lets His compassion to smother justice. He is the Consoler of the bereaved. What is the consolation He offers? First, the certainty that He understands. The writer to the Hebrews said, "we do not have a High Priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but was in all points tempted as we are" Our Lord is fully man and fully God in one Person. As man, Jesus experienced everything we suffer. He knows our sorrows, is touched with the feeling of our infirmities, and identifies with our weaknesses. As God, Jesus gave us the assurance of His presence in our darkest hour, so that we can say, "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for you are with me" (Psalm 23:4).

Moreover, our Lord's compassion for the widow suggests His own hatred for death. At the grave of Lazarus He wept, for He regarded death as an enemy, indeed a catastrophe. There are people who celebrate death. This is not proper. The wrenching apart of soul and body is undesirable.

Yet, despite its horror, we have the promise that in Christ death is a defeated foe. In reality it is the gate to everlasting life, the gateway into something far better. This truth may not remove all fear, but it can assuage exaggerated panic and trembling.

When Jesus told the widow, "Do not weep," it was a signal that He was about to do something big. He was about to remove the cause of her tears and give the spectators a glimpse into the future, when God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; when there shall be no more death, nor sighing, nor crying" (Rev. 21:4).

Next, Luke informs us that Jesus touched the coffin. That brought everything to a halt. Contact with a coffin was not kosher. According to Jewish law contact with the dead made you ceremonially defiled. As Jesus held the coffin, the two large crowds stopped and watched in suspense. They had seen Jesus do many miracles, but never raise someone from the dead. It was the rarest of feats. Eight hundred years had passed from the last time it was done, when Elisha had raised the son of the woman from Shunem.

The Lord's command was simple and majestic, "Young man, I say to you, arise." Immediately, his death was reversed; his pulse returned. The youth sat up, got out of the coffin and started speaking. What he said, we are not told. We are naturally curious about a couple matters. Did the young man enter into Hades and experience the world of the dead? What became of him in later years? There is no information. Jesus simply presents him to his mother, which suggests that the Lord wanted him to care for her.

What was the reaction of the onlookers? Luke tells us, "Then fear came upon all, and they glorified God, saying, "A great prophet has risen up among us"; and, "God has visited His people." And this report about Him went throughout all Judea and all the surrounding region."

Basically, the reaction was fear; fear of the transcendent, fear of the numinous, fear of the Holy Almighty. Though Elijah, Elisha, Peter and Paul all raised individuals from the dead, theirs was a delegated authority. Their power came from God. In contrast, the fear of the people after Christ's miracle reflects their belief that His skill was not derived from anyone else. It was plain to them that He Himself was the source of divine power. Does the presence of divine majesty make one breezy and flippant? Hardly. The transcendent is dreadful. Fear came upon all. In reverence they glorified the God-man, acknowledging Him as the Great Prophet, God Omnipotent in the flesh.

This miracle, along with the raising of Lazarus, fulfilled prophecy. We find it in Isaiah 26:19. Isaiah prophesied to the Church, "Your dead shall live; Together with my dead body they shall arise. Awake and sing, you who dwell in dust; For your dew is like the dew of herbs, And the earth shall cast out the dead." According to Isaiah, a King would one day establish a righteous kingdom, a kingdom that would lead to the raising of the righteous from the place of death. The miracle pointed to the arrival of Christ's Kingdom, and resurrection would be part of that kingdom.

Resurrection is God's tool to forge the death of death, not only for the redeemed but for the entire creation. Soon after this miracle at Nain, Christ would raise from the dead two more people: Jairus' twelve-year-old daughter and Lazarus, then He Himself would rise from the dead and ascend into Heaven with a glorified body ­ the first-fruits of all believers. Our resurrection follows the pattern of Christ's resurrection, and is bound up with His (1 Corinthians 6:13-20; 15:20). Therefore, with the raising of the widow's son, we have a tiny flicker of the liberation of creation. The catastrophic damage sin and the Fall wreaked on the world, is being, and will be overthrown. C.S. Lewis described the resurrection as, "the first movement of a great wheel beginning to turn in the direction opposite to that which all men hitherto had observed."

How does the raising of the widow's son relate to Christ's resurrection and the general resurrection? C.S. Lewis gives the answer in his book Miracles . He writes,

The raising of [the widow's son] differs from the Resurrection of Christ Himself because the widow's son, so far as we know, was not raised to a new and more glorious mode of existence but merely restored to the sort of life he had had before. The fitness of the miracle lies in the fact that He who will raise all men at the general resurrection here does it small and close, and in an inferior ­ a merely anticipatory ­ fashion. For the mere restoration of the [widow's son] is as inferior in splendor to the glorious resurrection of the New Humanity as five little barley loaves to all the waving bronze and gold of a fat valley ripe for harvest.

The redemption of man and nature will mark the New Heavens and New Earth. This is God's agenda, an agenda that begins in history and ends in eternity. The death and resurrection of the widow's son is a foreshadowing of death and resurrection for Christ, for us, and for all of creation. What are the differences between the resurrection of the widow's son and our own future resurrection? They are significant.

First, the widow's son came back to life but died again. We will come back to eternal life. The widow's son came back to life in a body weighed down by sin and depravity. We will come back to life in a dimension free of sin and Satan, the glorified humanity of Jesus Christ setting the pattern for what we shall become. The widow's son came back to a world still traumatized by the curse. We will come to Paradise, a New Earth unshackled from the curse. The widow's son came back to a life marked by bitter sorrow and disappointment. We will come back to a life where there is no more depression, nor crying, nor pain, for the former things have passed away (Rev. 21:3-4). The widow's son came back to enjoy Christ in the flesh, then His presence in the Lord's Supper. We will go up to the Marriage Supper of the Lamb, to feast and enjoy the Lord forever. Thanks be to God for these Gospel advantages.

Come now to the table of the Lord with thankful hearts. King Jesus offers you a meal that strengthens you during this your tenuous earthly pilgrimage. It is a foretaste of Glory, hors d'oeuvres in advance of the Marriage Banquet of the Lamb. Christ stated that He gives His flesh for "the life of the world." Taken in faith, this sacrament spells the death of death. Come now to the life of Christ.

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