Luke 7:11-17
Third Sunday after Pentecost
5th June 2016
On the day
Jesus arrived in Nain—about six miles south of Nazareth, in Galilee—as he
approached the gate of the town, death crossed his path. Coming toward him was
a funeral procession. He saw the funeral
bier heading to the cemetery just outside of town, to the west. It was carrying the body of a young man. Near the body Jesus saw a grieving mother,
crying. Behind her was a large crowd of
mourners from town. Jesus soon learned something
about the dead man. He was his mother’s
only son. And he learned something else
about his mother. She was a widow.
A widow—a
woman without a husband meant no means of support and no real identity apart from
her husband. At least for a time she had
a son to care for her, but now he’s gone.
Sure, there’s a community supporting her, for a time. But she’s destined for a life of
poverty. Alone in a hostile world. The enormity of her grief and suffering are
beyond our ability to fully fathom and understand.
Luke tells
us, “When the Lord saw her, he had compassion for her and said to her, “Do not
weep.” He moved forward. Touched the bier. The pallbearers stopped. No doubt confused. And then Jesus said, “Young man, I say to
you, rise!” The dead man sat up and
began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother. Luke tells us that, “Fear seized them, and
they glorified God.” Word quickly spread
through Judea and beyond.
~ ~ ~
What are we
supposed to do with a text such as this?
What do we do with the miracle at Nain?
If we focus exclusively on the miracle it’s a very troubling story. It’s tough for us—tough for me—to approach
this text, especially this week, knowing there are people in this congregation
who would give anything to have Jesus show up and bring their loved ones back
to life. This text raises a lot of
questions, questions we don’t have answers to.
Is this text even relevant today?
Maybe we should just skip over it.
Is it true? Should we approach it
symbolically, not take it literally?
Taking it literally leads us into all kinds of problems.
One word caught
my eye this week; it’s the word “compassion.”
When Jesus saw the widow, he had compassion for her. Not pity. He didn't feel sorry for her.
He had compassion.
Splagchnizomai
the text says. It’s a rare Greek verb
meaning something like “torn up in the gut.” Splagchnon is the Greek word for viscera, internal organs,
intestines and bowel. When Jesus
considered the young man and his mother his stomach turned in knots. It tore up his insides. It was gut-wrenching. That’s where compassion originates—in the
gut. That’s where compassion begins to
emerge, not in our heads, but in the gut. That’s what
compassion feels like.
To feel in this way is to
suffer. Suffering is required. To suffer
means, literally, “to undergo.” It often has a negative connotation, but we can
suffer joy as much as suffer pain or sorrow.
To suffer means that we allow a situation to touch us deeply, to affect
us, to wash over us, to stir us, to move us; we allow a feeling to come upon
us. We might resist it, fight against
it. There are times when we don’t want
to acknowledge a particular feeling; perhaps we’re afraid where it might take
us. To suffer means we allow the feeling to flow.
Still, we can either acknowledge
the feeling or we can ignore it. We can
either honor what we’re feeling when we’re confronted with pain or grief or we
can deny it. Sometimes we prefer to keep
our distance. Judging often allows us to
do that. Judging people or judging a
situation is often a strategy that we use to protect ourselves from actually
suffering with or for others. Perhaps
that why theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1909-1945), writing from Tegel prison
in Berlin, 1943, said, “We must learn to regard people less in the light of
what they do or omit it do, and more in the light of what they suffer.”[1] Sometimes we intellectualize everything, keep
it all up in our heads, and never allow our humanity and the humanity of others
who stand before us and shape us.
In order to suffer with or for
another we need to be fully present. And we can’t be present without feeling.
One of my
favorite novelists and essayists is David James Duncan, a man with a deep,
mature faith with piercing insight into the human condition. Back in the 1990s he tried to absorb the
consequences of sanctions against Iraq—the deaths of thousands of
children—because of our destruction of water systems and our unwillingness to
allow importation of either plumbing or chlorine. A mentor once said to him, “If you don’t know
how to take something, take it on the physical level.” One day he took this advice, “with regard to
Iraq’s children.” He relied on:
…the physical senses, eyes, and
heart of a woman named Gerri Haynes. At
the time, Gerri, a nurse from Woodinville, Washington, headed a group called
Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility. She had been on three missions of mercy to
Iraq, and ten months before the most recent war in Iraq, she returned yet again.
Before this recent
trip—amid all the flag-waving and war-rumblings—Gerri’s oldest daughter tried
to persuade her to stay home. …after finally accepting Gerri’s sense of
mission, her daughter offered her mother an old-souled piece of advice. “If you do
go,” she said, “be completely present, wherever you go.”
These words
returned to Gerri in an Iraqi hospital virtually bereft of medicine and
hope. While her group moved from bed to
bed, Gerri approached a woman sitting next to her dying child. Gerri speaks no Arabic. The woman spoke no English. Trying to be “present” anyway, Gerri looked
at the child, then at the woman, and placed her right hand over her own heart.
The Iraqi mother
immediately placed her right hand over her own heart.
Gerri’s eyes and
the mother’s eyes immediately filled with tears.
The hospital was
crowded. Gerri’s visitation was short.
She started to move to the next bed, but then remembered her daughter’s words:
“completely present…” She and the mother were already crying, their hands over
their hearts. There was nothing Gerri could do, despite all her medical
training, for the child. ‘How much more
present,’ she wondered, ‘is it possible to be?’
She stepped
forward anyway. With no plan but vague allegiance to the commandment “completely present,” the nurse without
medicine stepped toward the bed of the dying child and inconsolable
mother. She then put both of her hands
out, palms up.
The Iraqi mother
fell into her arms.
“If only this
experience were unique!” Gerri told [Duncan.]
“But I can’t tell you, any longer, how many mothers I’ve now held in
this same way.”
Her voice grew
faint over the phone. [Duncan] heard her say: “…diseases that children would almost never die from in the U. S… Medicine
so basic.
Duncan said, “I’ve never taken
interview notes while sobbing before.”[2]
How much more present is it possible to be?
How much more present is it possible to be?
If Jesus was the fully human one,
then we need to look to him to discover what it means to be authentically
human. He was fully present to what crossed his path that day in Nain. He allowed his feelings to move him. That’s what feelings are supposed to do. His grief stirred him to take action. It’s true, he had the capacity to revive the
dead man and restore the well being of the widow. While we
don’t have the power to raise the dead, Jesus does show us what compassion
looks like, or, better, what it feels
like. It means facing what comes across
our path, suffering through the feelings and facing the grief in our guts,
allowing what’s before us to touch us, affect us. And the wisdom found in the gut will show us what
we can do or should do.
We
might not be able to raise the dead, but through compassion we can bring about
new life. Maybe that’s when the miracle occurs.
Image: Louisa Ann Beresford (1818-1891), Christ Raising the Dead, Tate Collection, London.
[1] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison (Touchstone, 1997), 10.
[2] David James Duncan, “When Compassion Becomes
Dissent,” Orion (Jan-Feb, 2001),
22-24, cited in Sharon Daloz Parks, “How Then Shall We Live? Suffering and
Wonder in the New Commons,” in Sam M. Intrator, Living the Questions: Essays Inspired by the Work and Life of Parker J.
Palmer (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007), 305-306.
[3] Christopher Fry, Sleep
of Prisoners (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951), 47.
2 comments:
thank you I have always had trouble with that passage and you have opened a new way of looking at it. Janet
Many thanks, Janet! Hope you're well.
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