Luke 7.11-17

when compassion comes to town

June 10, 2007

In the calendar of the Church, today we return to the season of ordinary time.

We have celebrated Christmas, with the stunning news of God-come-down in-flesh. We have welcomed with Easter trumpets blaring the resurrection of this Merciful One put to death for our sins, whom death could not hold.

We have remembered with jazz the descent of the Spirit and we have praised the God who is Three in One. We have stood on all these high peaks dazzled.

Now, dazzled enough, we begin the longest season of the year when the colors of the church are green and the texts tell us stories that show us how to live faithfully when life is, well, pretty ordinary. Dishes and duties, grading papers and studying for exams, pulling up weeds and watering flowers, enduring the heat and yearning for the pool or some body of water nearby. Of course, in some very real ways – like changing diapers and taking out the garbage, rising early and coming home late, taking pills on time and holding cancer at bay – all time is ordinary but it’s punctuated by grand celebrations.

I happen to like this long season we call ordinary because it pretty much matches life as I know it. It’s about getting up when the party is over and living out the celebration day by day. Auden said, “For those who have seen The Child, the mean time is the most trying time of all.” Why? Because we live knowing the wonder of God, yet knowing it is not yet complete.

The gospel stories of this time help us ask who is this Jesus who has come among us in the flesh? Just what is his life all about and what does it have to do with me and the way I live my life? The gospel writers keep our eyes focused on him and invite us to consider what it means to follow him in real life that is pretty ordinary.

For instance, take the story from a little village in Israel called Nain some five miles from Nazareth and about twenty five miles from Capernaum where Jesus had been earlier. I can’t speak for you but I think twenty-five miles walk is a pretty long walk and my poor doggies would be hurting by the time I was in site of my destination. Jesus has walked the distance with his disciples and was about to enter this village when he was interrupted by ordinary life.

Listen to Eugene Peterson’s translation of this story in the seventh chapter of Luke’s gospel.

Not long after he left Capernaum, Jesus went to the village Nain. His disciples were with him, along with quite a large crowd. As they approached the village gate, they met a funeral procession – a woman’s only son was being carried out for burial. And the mother was a widow. When Jesus saw her, his heart broke. He said to the mother, “Don’t cry.” Then he went over and touched the coffin. The pallbearers stopped. Jesus said, “Young man. I’m telling you: Rise up!” The dead son sat up and began talking. Jesus presented him to his mother.

Then the people all realized they were in a place of holy mystery, that God was at work among them. They were quietly worshipful, in awe – and then they were noisily grateful, calling out among themselves, “God is here, looking to the needs of His people!” Then the news of Jesus spread throughout the country. (Luke 7.11-17)

Funeral processions are not uncommon. In most of the world today they happen in much the same way as this one in the village of Nain. The mourners follow behind the casket walking through the town all the way to the burial site. Usually the mourners are accompanied by songs of grieving and loud lamentation, occasionally, as in Louisiana, there is lively music and dancing in the streets to carry the dead to the final resting place. Most of us are familiar with a more domesticated version of the funeral procession where we gather in our cars, roll up the windows, and travel alone, barely connected in a snake like crawl to the cemetery. If you are not in that procession of cars when you unexpectedly encounter it on a way to a meeting, your first thought is not always pretty.

Funeral procession are not uncommon.

What Jesus did is.

After a twenty-five mile walk and nearing his rest, he encounters the crowd walking alongside this grieving mother who, having lost her husband and now, losing her son, is in the most precarious place possible for a single woman. The standard translations say, “he had compassion on her.” But that is a tame translation of what really happened. The Greek word is “splagchnizomai” and it means to be moved from your guts – what the ancients called your bowels. It is the strongest word possible to convey this moment when Jesus feels the woman’s grief. Peterson’s translation is the best: “his heart broke.”

Who is Jesus?

He is the One whose heart breaks over the suffering of the most vulnerable.

Not content only to pay his respects or pass on to his rest, both of which would be customary, Jesus allowed his heart – the deep place within us all – to be broken by the suffering of this mother. No grief is greater than a parent experiencing the death of a child. Jesus did more than grieve with her at a distance. With his heart broken, Jesus, like Elijah and Elisha before him, embraced the mother and restored life to her son.

Who is Jesus?

Let’s put it this way: when compassion comes to town, the dead are raised, the grieving are consoled, life is restored and in its wake, the people are filled with awe, shouting praises to God and telling the Good News. As Peterson say, this is the Jesus way.

The Jesus Way

If this is the Jesus way what does it mean for you and me and the community that lives the Jesus way? I understand that the dead are not going to burst their coffins at our command. Of course. We can’t raise the dead, only God can and will on the last day.

Not all the dead are lying in coffins are they?

Some of the dead are among us:

Those whose grief is deep enough to puncture the bravest soul

Those who are sensing life is at the dead-end of everything dear, marriage, job, faith, hope

Those who are living under the relentless assault of modern living – early up, late to bed, in car and nearly dead with the pace of it all.

The war weary and the war torn, the battered and bruised who hearts are dying for love having known only the darkest illusions of it.

The young who wandering in a sea of sexual suggestions everywhere where boundaries are blurred and few things are as they seem on the internet.

Those who are closer to dying than being born and are terrified at the prospect of letting this life go.

Those who can’t climb out of the neck of a narrow bottle that has trapped them in its addictive grasp.

These are the dead and the dying who are not in coffins, but everywhere among us and truth be told, right within us. Death is the place that Jesus comes to bring life, always and everywhere.

So what about the community that seeks to live the Jesus way, where Spirit and service come together? What is the Jesus way for us?

I think this is the Jesus way:

to allow our hearts to be broken by the pain of mothers and their children

to touch the grieving, the dying and the wounded

to make room for the holy mystery that God is alive among us.

to give thanks for this mystery

to tell the Good News everywhere we go.

Shall we walk this path together?