A Need's a fine thing that all people need.

“13 And when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her and said to her, “Do not weep.” 14 Then he came up and touched the bier, and the bearers stood still. And he said, “Young man, I say to you, arise.” 15 And the dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother.” (Luke 7)

This is not the first person to be raised from the dead.  Elijah and Elisha both raised children back up for their mothers… or more accurately, prayed and asked God to raise them back to life (Notice Jesus doesn’t pray or call out to anyone, he simply says, “I say to you…”).  This is not even the first time we read of Jesus raising anyone.  Jairus’ daughter was awakened just a few chapters ago.  Jesus doesn’t make a big deal about the resurrection of this young man like he does when it’s time to raise Lazarus.  There’s no production, no asking relatives whether or not they believe in Him, no waiting for the proper moment when no one could dispute whether or not ol’ Lazzy was really dead or just taking a really long nap… without breathing.  Jesus is just taking a walk, sees the procession and takes pity on a poor widow.  It’s as random an incident as can happen in a world completely under the Father’s dominion.  So I submit to you that this incident is not about resurrection…

It’s about compassion.

Oh sure, it demonstrates God’s power.  And yes, it is pre-runner of all tears being washed away through the restoration of all things lost.  But the final resurrection when Jesus brings us all to himself, the wedding supper of the Lamb, the big Shindig in the sky is a drawing of the sheep before their shepherd.  We rise and immediately take our place before the Throne.  We rise to worship Him!  Not to take back up our earthly positions and duties.  “30 For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven.” (Matt 22)  Instead, here Jesus gives the boy back to his mother.  He returns him to his earthly service, his mortal concerns, his old life.  He is not resurrected to something new.  He may very well have a newfound respect and outlook on his life, but it’s still the same life: same B.O., same mom, same job in the same small Podunk town.  He will still need to answer the same questions we all have to answer the minute our feet hit the floor next to our beds each morning.  He will still have the same need to figure out what to do with the life he’s been given…twice.  How should he spend his days?  What is worth doing?  What isn’t?  What should he be about?  What is his life for?

And that’s what this story is about.

If Jesus is the Son of God, if Jesus really is a perfect, sinless man, then it stands to reason his life would be the model of a perfect, sinless life.  A life well lived.  Life as it is meant to be lived.  And when we boil it down to its essence, Jesus’ life can be summed up in one word.

Compassion.

We are sons and daughters of God.  Not of the same stuff as Him, not begotten but made, adopted into His Holy Family, Father, Son and Spirit.  The perfect wheel of love.  However, we, being given the ability to choose holiness or evil, chose evil, forever alienating ourselves, stepping out of the wheel and separating ourselves from our Holy Family. 

Or we would have, if our older brother, Jesus, had not had compassion on us from the very start and even before.  He was willing to give up his place in the family to draw us back in, to make a way.  To BE the WAY!  To take all of the sin and filth and rebellion pulling us down to death upon His self and give us His righteousness, His obedience, His purity so we could again enter into the perfect wheel.  Somehow clothed in His begotteness.  His God stuff!

Jesus’ life, even before He came to Earth, is all about compassion!  He took all he had, every minute of every day and gave it away to all those who had the greatest need.  The blind received sight, the lame walked, the deaf heard, the captive was freed and the dead were raised!  And greatest of all, our sins were forgiven!

This is how we are to live.  Loving God with all our heart, soul and strength.  Loving each other as Christ loved us.  Giving all the Father gives us away to those who have need.  Aid to the poor, healing to the sick, companionship to the lonely, forgiveness to those in debt to us.  “18 Truly, I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” (Matt 18)  If we do this, if we truly try to give ourselves away like this, we will come up against an abrupt stone wall of truth…

We are not Jesus.

Jesus is our model in the story but the fact is, we are the widow.  We have as much need as the needy we will try to help.  But fear not, she has shown us the way as well!  Cry out!  Cry out to God and He will hear; He will have compassion on us!  Do not cry alone!  “19 Again I say to you, if two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. 20 For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them.” (Matt 18)  The widow was not alone; she had a considerable crowd of her friends and neighbors with her.  The disciples were not alone, they had each other and they had a crowd following Jesus as well.  The crowds were mixed.  There was likely no common language; Aramaic, Hebrew and Koine Greek were probably all being babbled about.  There was no common affinity.  There was no common home.  They had but one thing in common.  One thing to draw them together.  One thing taking them down the road this day…

Their Need!

There is where God met them.  This is where God meets us!  “18 “I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. 19 Yet a little while and the world will see me no more, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live. 20 In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. 21 Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me. And he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him.”” (John 14)

Dead Woman Walking

“11 Soon afterward he went to a town called Nain, and his disciples and a great crowd went with him. 12 As he drew near to the gate of the town, behold, a man who had died was being carried out, the only son of his mother, and she was a widow, and a considerable crowd from the town was with her. 13 And when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her and said to her, “Do not weep.”” (Luke 7)

Before the gecko, before you were in good hands, before the corporations were on your side, before we made a profession of caregiving, before we expected the government to take care of us there was another system in place to insure people would be provided for in adversity, illness and their elder years…

It was called a family.

You didn’t have to find one; God had set it up so you were in one at birth.  A boy would be schooled and cuddled and scolded and trained up until the age of thirteen in one and then he’s ready for the workforce.  He would be apprenticed, either to his own father in the family business or farm or possibly to another man in town who needed a helper or in whose trade the boy had shown a talent.  Perhaps he may be a scholar and continue his education with the scribes, still a form of apprenticeship.  After a time, say five to seven years, he should be established.  He would now know his trade and be ready to take the next step of adulthood: to establish a family of his own.

For the daughter it would begin very similarly.  In the home, some schooling but mostly spending time with her mother and sisters and aunts and grandmother and cousins until she too reached the age of around thirteen.  By this time, she knows her trade; she has spent the last thirteen years learning the ins and outs of the household.  Her body has now told her she is able to bear children and so her father finds for her a suitable husband if he hadn’t had the lad picked out already or he and a friend hadn’t made arrangements much earlier.  This lad is most likely, or ideally a fellow around eighteen to twenty who has recently completed his apprenticeship for you see, the main point of the family unit is to provide!  To insure that his little girl is taken care of.  The cynic, the feminist may bemoan the patriarchal, archaic, authoritarian yea even despotic system that subjugated the will of the woman (remember, she may be thirteen but her body betrays her as an adult now), but if the father loved his little girl (and what kind of real father doesn’t?) and we see in the Bible many instances of fathers who doted and loved their little girls, he would obviously be trying to find the best man he could for her.  Someone from a good family, a hard worker, a lad going places.  This is the ideal of course, towns were small and so selection was most likely limited.  Some years there may be a good crop of raven locked, ruddy rascals to pick from and some years there may just be little Moishe the meager fishmonger.  Oy vey!

To our coddling culture that has extended adolescence right up to the Mid-life Crisis, full of boomerang kids playing videogames in their mommies’ basements and producing a generation of men who not only expect women to take care of them, they are so emotionally handicapped, they need them to, this ancient system sounds strange.  Regardless of how we feel about it, it had merits and it worked much of the time.  A woman was in a system of provision initiated by her father, was handed to her husband and in her declining years would be the purview of her children, most notably an eldest son.

But what if the woman were a widow?  What if she only ever had one son and then he died too?

It doesn’t take even much of a search of the Bible to see God the Father takes a serious view of how sojourners (aliens, immigrants, homeless), the fatherless and widows are treated.  Without even going into Deuteronomy, Psalms, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and those guys affectionately known as the minor prophets, we have God’s original manifesto given in Exodus….

“21 “You shall not wrong a sojourner or oppress him, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt. 22 You shall not mistreat any widow or fatherless child. 23 If you do mistreat them, and they cry out to me, I will surely hear their cry, 24 and my wrath will burn, and I will kill you with the sword, and your wives shall become widows and your children fatherless.”” (Ex 22)  Pretty straight forward, pretty cut and dried.  God may or may not help those who help themselves but He most certainly saves the helpless! 

“5 Father of the fatherless and protector of widows


    is God in his holy habitation.” (Ps 68) 

And God has come in the flesh to Nain.  A city where a widow follows the bier of her only son.  A young man on whom all her protection and provision and hopes lie dead.  She wails.  Does she wail the words of this very Psalm?  Does she wail the words of Exodus and Deuteronomy to her neighbors on whom she must now trust for aid and alms.  Can she trust them or will she have to resort to the only two trades now left open to her: begging or prostitution?  Both of which will cut her off from community and communion with God!  Her wail, whether of words or guttural howls, is not a request for aid; it is the last cry of a woman at the end of her means looking over the precipice of her doom.  She is undone.  She is a dead woman walking.

Except, God does see.  God does hear.  God is moved!  God does ACT!  In this case, He acts in a way no one could have predicted, no one could have believed, no one could have been praying for.  He stops the funeral procession.  The perfectly pure touches the unclean corpse and says to the mother, “Do not weep.” 

“3 And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. 4 He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”” (Rev 21)