Luke 7:11-17 11 Soon afterwards he went to a town called Nain, and his disciples and a large crowd went with him. 12 As he approached the gate of the town, a man who had died was being carried out. He was his mother's only son, and she was a widow; and with her was a large crowd from the town. 13 When the Lord saw her, he had compassion for her and said to her, "Do not weep." 14 Then he came forward and touched the bier, and the bearers stood still. And he said, "Young man, I say to you, rise!" 15 The dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother. 16 Fear seized all of them; and they glorified God, saying, "A great prophet has risen among us!" and "God has looked favorably on his people!" 17 This word about him spread throughout Judea and all the surrounding country.
An amazing story, a miracle story. Unexplainable by normal science, with the usual explanations. It is just there. To give us hope, perhaps? Or to remind us that the certainties of this life aren’t as certain as we tend to think, maybe? Luke would tell us that his job wasn’t to answer our questions about life, the universe, and everything, as much as we might wish it. No, he would argue that his intention was simply to tell us about this person. An orderly account, he says in the preface to his most remarkable book. An account of what? Of these things, he says mysteriously, the events that have been fulfilled among us (Lk 1:1). The events, these things that have happened. Luke investigated, like a detective, a researcher, to find out what happened. So that you may know the truth, he says. The truth. What is truth? Sorry, that’s John’s question in the mouth of Pilate at the end of that story.
Or maybe it’s our question. What is truth? What is the truth that I can claim from this story? Am I called to hold out an impossible hope? To rage against death, that great equalizer of us all? Is this story to be normative for true Christian experience? Is that the proclamation we receive from this text?
Imagine a character not mentioned in this brief story. Someone in the crowd, one of the many mourners coming out of the city with the widow and pall bearers. Just another face in the crowd, who walked alone even in the midst of the many. She felt the sadness of the gathering, it was in her bones, because she too had walked at the head of this procession not all that long ago. It was her only son, following on the heels of her husband. She too marched with a feeling of despair for the widow of Nain, because she knew only too well the grief that had struck, she knew how hard this journey was, how every breath was drawn in pain as though even the body refused to function, how every step was as though walking on glass, uncertain, unmoored, feet about to slip from underneath her. Oh, yes, she knew. She came along in solidarity to this new recruit to the ranks of the unloved and forgotten. Maybe she thought that at last there will be someone to talk to, someone to share the burden of grief that still bore her down.
So, the disturbance from the front caught her by surprise. And shock. The words filtered back through the crowd passing by her as though she wasn’t there, she had to snatch at them to hear. “Do not weep.” Do not weep? What else was there to do but weep? Weeping has been her whole existence since the day she strode out of the gates of Nain to the burial caves that lined the main road. Weeping defined her. She was the one who weeps. Do not weep? Absurd. Unreal.
The stranger moved toward the bier carrying the last hope of the widow. He touched it. No, wait, her eyes must deceive her. He touched it? No teacher, no country preacher no matter how wild, would come that close to death. Close enough to touch. It just didn’t happen. He must be crazy. We’ve stumbled across a crazy man. He’s going to do something odd, something embarrassing. He’s going to compound the grief of this moment. Get him away! The words almost came to her lips, but then died there in her head. Because the wind carried the words her spoke to the dead man being carried, carried to be buried, to be sealed away and forgotten over time. Like her own husband and her own son that no one remembers but her, no one mentions for fear of starting the flood of tears all over again. Carried and buried and sealed away. But the crazy man spoke to him. “Rise.”
Rise! Rise? She would have laughed if only she remembered how. Rise. No, rot. Decay. Fade away. Those are the words to be spoken to the corpse lying on the open bier. Not ... not rise. Rise. It’s what He said, the wild stranger with the eyes that saw what no one else could see. Rise, it’s what He said. And what it, no what he did. He got up. As though he had only been asleep. As if he had nodded off after a hard day’s work and his mother wrapped him up and laid him to rest and they carted him off to bed. To sleep. Forever.
The rumble in the crowd around her was palpable. She could feel it in her bones. Fear and shock, making way for glory and wonder. Songs of praise broke out from the makeshift choir that had been singing dirges and laments. It is incredible, unbelievable, incomprehensible. Unfair. She feels alone again, our imaginary back of the crowd widow. Where was this crazy holy man when her son died? Why didn’t she get the miracle? Why is she left to weep?
Luke didn’t write the gospel so that we can base our lives on miracles. He wrote it so that we can follow the one for whom life looks different. Jesus doesn’t see life and death the same way that we do. He sees bigger, He sees farther, He sees more deeply. And part of what he sees is us. That’s the message here. That whether a miracle occurs and we receive the one we lost in an unexplainable way or not, He sees us. Sees our grief, sees our pain, sees our limited vision and short-sighted hope. He sees us and has compassion for us. He sees us and cares about us. And tells us not to weep. Not because there is something wrong with weeping, but because we are apt to get lost in the weeping. And not be able to see what He sees. That life is bigger than we know. What we think we’ve lost is not lost, just out of reach temporarily. And He invites us to lean into His arms when the one we want to lean on isn’t there any more. We are seen and we are loved. From that fundamental truth we can embrace a world of uncertainty.
Then, here’s where it gets immeasurably harder, He goes to the one we’ve lost and says “Rise.” And though we can’t see it, we can trust it. We can live in that hope. See, here’s the thing, we can get in the mode of praying for and being disappointed by the availability of a miracle; we can read every account of an unexplained resuscitation and start counting on that when death strikes too close to home for our liking, and more likely than not have to face the disheartening reality of the frailty of this existence. Or we can believe every life is a miracle and every death is a continuation of that miracle. That in life and in death we are in the Lord.
Life is indeed fragile. And fleeting. And full of woe so that we are the ones on the bier being carried down the hill from the front gate of Nain. Which means we are also the one over whom the Lord leans and whispers: Rise! We follow the Lord of life even as we dwell in a land of death. What else can we do but Rise? When we make the choice to believe in hope, when we strive to bring justice to a broken world, when we choose not to rely on statistics but on the promise that all things are possible in Christ, then we hear the call to Rise. When we embrace the stranger and try something new even though it feels odd even to us, when decide to be a people of joy when our culture tells us to mourn and to fear, we respond to the one who tells us to Rise. When we gather in the house of the Lord to sing our praise and offer our hearts, when we give out of the sheer joy of pouring ourselves out, when we pray knowing that we are seen and loved, we are heard and embraced, then we begin to Rise. Rise up and live. Rise up and hope. Rise. Rise.
Shalom,
Derek
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