9 June 2013 Luke 11: 11-17
If you were to walk into this church today for the first time and heard the lessons that we just read, you might think that raising the dead was a fairly common occurrence amongst us—or at least in our foundational documents. As it happens, there are only a few reports of such a thing happening. Elijah and Elisha each did it once. The most famous of all was Lazarus, brother of Mary and Martha. Then there was the daughter of Jairus. The apostles are recorded as raising two folks from death: Tabitha and Eutychus. So it doesn’t happen a lot. Those who interpret the acts of Jesus as providing a model for the miracles his disciples ought to perform are brought up short by this, I think. There simply are no long lists of people raised from the dead by Jesus’ followers.
So what does the miracle mean, then? It seems obvious that one of the reasons it was recorded was so that we could be reminded that Jesus had authority over life and death. It was taken in that way by those who saw the miracle when it was first performed and by those who remembered it later. I don’t think we need to waste a lot of time fussing over whether such things can happen or not. That they don’t happen often is obvious to everyone. Of course, there are a lot of old legends which contain implausible reports about lots of strange things. But then, the world is filled with all kinds of strange and inexplicable things. You don’t have to believe them all, but we don’t have everything all wrapped up in scientific explanations that account for all possible outcomes. Jesus was known as a miracle-worker. The best evidence is that people witnessed them and were impressed by them. He never built a ministry around them, however, nor tried to make a lot of money out of them.
But is there a meaning for us in this miracle? You can see that I do not believe it teaches us to expect Jesus to raise our dead friends if we ask him. What then? What does it mean for us to follow as our Lord and Master One whom we believe to have authority over life and death? Especially when we know that his own story in this world ended with a horrible death on a Cross that was overturned by the Resurrection? I am not sure that I can properly express to you what I have in mind, but I will try.
There are many issues and circumstances in our lives in which death seems to be at work. Of course, there is our own physical existence and death wears us all down eventually, even if most of us are living a lot longer than we used to live. Senescence and decrepitude are inexorable. Only foolish people think they will live forever and refuse to face their own mortality, nor prepare for their own death.
Then there are the relationships we are thrown into, the troubles we encounter, the tests we endure, in which death seems to be at work. That is, we experience some people and some problems as threats which will suck the life out of us, if we let them. We cannot see that they are taking us anywhere but down. We walk for considerable time through the valley of the shadow of death.
Jesus tells us that if, in these situations, we try to save our lives, we will lose them. What does that mean? That if we try to take the approach of self-defense and self-preservation, cutting our losses and hedging our bets, we will lose something precious of what it means to be human.
What was hoped for, and sometimes experienced, in the psalms and prophets, and encountered in a definitive way personally in Jesus, was a different kind of life. It was a life rooted in God—in fact, it was a sharing in the divine life. In the midst of death, Jesus was a source of this life. He was the source of a new kind of life, a self-giving life which did not have to protect itself. It was not invulnerable to suffering, but it could not be defeated by death. It was a kind of reckless loving, that drew on resources beyond the normal human capacities.
The Scriptures call it eternal life, but we misunderstand it if we think of that life as something we inherit if we are good when we die and go to heaven. This eternal life is the life of God, the life which has founded the universe, which animates all things, and which has appeared in person here, in this world, in Jesus of Nazareth. No wonder that whatever Jesus touched became alive in a new way—his touch was that of the finger of God, which had called into existence everything in the beginning. As he said once to a critic who was depreciating his authority over the demonic element, [Luke 11:20] “If it is by the finger of God that I cast out the demons, then the kingdom of God has come to you.” I love that verse—the demonic is the realm of death: whatever makes for death in our world, that which opposes the eternal kind of life that belongs to the Kingdom of God. The demonic is a vast realm, and evidence of it is found everywhere that hatred, prejudice, contempt, pride, vainglory, and lack of empathy are in operation. Jesus’ touch was the life of the Kingdom of God, and it made for life wherever it reached—where he was physically during his earthly journey here but now everywhere His Spirit is encountered.
People who have followed Jesus persistently over the years have found that where Jesus is, by the power of the Spirit, there is life, even in the midst of death. The problem persons, the tests and trials, the attacks of the evil one, the struggles and temptations—wherever death is at work, there also life is present if Jesus is there. And Jesus is there if we call upon him.
I admit to you that finding the life in some complicated and almost hopeless situations, is a challenge. The situations themselves, the people themselves, may be beyond our fixing, and they may be such things that we care about so deeply that we cannot escape a profound sadness and grief. Jesus must have felt that way about Jerusalem—remember Him weeping over it because He was the only hope, God’s plan to save it from its enemies, and it rejected Him.
So I am not saying that following Jesus will give you a way to bring life into every situation. But Jesus will make you alive in every situation, even in the most awful and hopeless circumstances, so that you can know life in the midst of death. And in that knowledge, you can find the kind of peace that rests on knowing that more is going on than can be seen and that the last chapter about those circumstances and about yourself has not yet been written.
The story from the Gospel today has another odd quality. Usually when Jesus performs a miracle, somewhere in the account there is a word about faith. Not here. He may already have known this woman. Nain was only about five miles from Nazareth, Jesus’ home town. He may have understood when he saw her that this was her only son and now she would be a widow, with all of the frightening realities that went along with widowhood in those days. There was no social security, and if there was no family to take her in, there was left only slavery or prostitution, often enough. Jesus understood all this, and simply stepped in and rectified the situation. He just did it, no questions, no tests about faith, no attempt to see if she might qualify for assistance, no worries about whether she was worthy, no request for an identity card to see if she was an illegal immigrant, no audit of her finances to see if maybe she actually had some money hidden away.
The early Church took Jesus’ example to heart. Most of the funds it raised went to the maintenance of widows in those first decades—before there were regular clergy salaries and church buildings and ministries to maintain. It became such a ministry that eventually there had to be rules about who qualified—so that the ability of the churches to support these widows was viable. But with time the outreach of the Church to other classes of the poor increased and extended out into the pagan community as there were resources.
It seems to me that one way that we can see ourselves as part of the same story that Jesus was telling by raising to life again the son of the widow of Nain, is to engage with those who are in situations like that widow—those who have fallen into poverty and have no way to help themselves. In that action, we may not be able to raise the physically dead to life again, but we can inject into situations of death the life of the Lord, that outgoing, caring love based on the divine, eternal kind of life, that won’t let those who can be helped be left behind through simple negligence or lack of caring or blaming them for their own poverty. Jesus didn’t say, “Well, that young man ought to have taken better care of himself—imagine dying and leaving his mother in such a perilous position—he was probably on drugs.” He just stepped up and did what he could do.
And isn’t that what we do, also? In all my years as a priest, I have never heard of someone who could raise the dead. But often those who loved the Lord could help out with food or find someone lodging or, as we are doing now, offer hygiene and cleaning and personal care supplies that other programs leave out. In that process we can be a sign of new life, the eternal kind of life that doesn’t give up on people, blame them for their problems, or abandon them because of their personal history. That is so like Jesus.