Four or five generations ago, death was understood to be a natural part of life.  People usually died at home.  Now, we rarely do.  Today, if our young children and grandchildren encounter death it may only be through pets dying, rarely people.  I regularly encounter people in their twenties and thirties who have never been to a funeral.  There is nothing more helpless and awkward than a group of college-age students contending with the loss of a contemporary having been so insulated and isolated from death’s reality by a culture of denial.  When loss does come the shock is palpable; the struggle to find meaning so primitive.  The ubiquitous “I never thought it could happen” is so telling.  We live in a culture that denies death, yet the last time I checked the mortality rate is the same as it was in Biblical times: 100%.

The bright point in our culture is the church, synagogue and temple, the intimate community we have as brothers and sisters together in one family of faith.  For those of us who have made this community and others like it central to the rhythms and habits of our life, death, while hardly ordinary, is not the paralyzing power it can be for others.  Thank God.  When I contrast church folk encountering death and loss with people who do so without a community of faith, I must say I cannot imagine how life could be possible without this type of loving community.  For those bereft of such community, I simply cannot fathom how others make it when death comes.  

Today, we’re going to look at this brief passage from the Gospel of Luke where Jesus faces death head on.  And, in another example of Biblical reversal and paradox, when death is faced, life is affirmed.

Jesus and his disciples have been traveling across Palestine, making their way to Jerusalem.  The day before, Jesus had miraculously healed the Centurion soldier’s slave.  Today, he and his entourage come across a funeral procession while they are traveling through the town of Nain.  To come upon a funeral procession would not have been unusual, but ordinary.  The relegation of “arrangements” to funeral directors would not occur for another nineteen centuries.  Instead, the whole extended family or clan would be engaged.  Women relatives would wash the body.  Male relatives would carry the body.  Some wept on behalf of others, keening it’s called, a form of wailing that expresses the depths of communal grief.

Jesus and his disciples came upon the funeral procession and the expectation would have been to stay back, not only to be respectful, but to keep a ritually pure distance between them and a passing corpse.  That’s not what happened. Jesus looks at the woman who is walking beside the corpse being carried and rather than keeping distance he is moved deeply to compassion and he goes to her.  The original Greek uses the word σπλαγχνίςομαι splagcnizomai to describe the visceral nature of Jesus’ compassion.  Splagcnizomai literally means compassion from one’s intestines, from the gut.  Jesus had gut-wrenching compassion for the dead man’s mother. 

I had been a pastor a little over a year when I first experienced the intense grief of a parent losing a child.  Bob and Liz had two children.  Doug, their son, was twenty-two and recently licensed as an electrician when he fell to his death while working on a high transmission tower.  The raw emptiness of losing your child is some of the deepest pain imaginable.  I facilitated a grief group in our church in Dayton and the grief that Liz brought to that group was excruciating.  Yet every week she showed up.  Often she was unable to talk but she showed up time after time and that little group of the broken and the grieving, meeting in the library of Westminster Church week after week, somehow brought her back to life.

With gut-wrenching compassion and with the full power of God in him, he says to the woman “Don’t cry.”  He touches the coffin and speaks, “Young man, I say to you, get up.”  The son arose and Jesus gives him back to his mother.  He resuscitates the son—he also resuscitates the mother, the widow.  He gives her life back.  He gives life to the living and the dead.

What does this miracle story have to tell us about death and its avoidance, death and its facing, death and the diminishment of its power to mesmerize and hold us captive?  What does this miracle story tell us about God’s relationship to the living?

The mortality rate, the last time I checked, is the same as in Biblical times: 100%.  Yet there is good news here.  The Gospel lesson leads us to confront death, stare it in the face, and reengage in the consideration of life.  Unequivocally, the message of the entire Biblical witness, the grace imbedded in our faith, is that God ultimately is not interested in death.  Death is a power, for sure, but it is a defeated power.  God is interested in bringing life, new life to God’s people.  In the creation story, God breathes life (ruah) into chaos and creation and order are born.  God breathes spirit into prophets and justice and righteousness are proclaimed and nations totter.  God breathes the Holy Spirit into the church at Pentecost and the good news is spread to all peoples.  In the same way, Jesus breathed new life into the dead son in the village of Nain, saying, “Young man, I say to you.  Arise!” and a widow’s life is restored.  He neither avoids death nor seeks insulation from it.  He does not let death’s funeral procession go on as though death were in charge, but he breaks through social scruples and faces death squarely and he breaks its grip.  He defeats its power.  In the end, Jesus’ life and his death will be about one thing: overcoming the power of death and sin and bringing new life.

God does not keep children from dying before their parents.  God does not keep us from killing or violence.  God does not keep us from warfare or greed.  God does point us to choose life in all things.  God is for the living and not for the dead.  “So whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s” (Romans 14:8).  

In the words of the Apostle Paul, “I have become absolutely convinced that neither death nor life, neither messenger of heaven nor monarch of earth, neither what happens today nor what may happen tomorrow, neither a power from on high nor a power from below, nor anything else in God’s whole creation has any power to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (from Romans 8, Phillips).  “I say to you. Arise!” (Luke 7:14b).  Amen.

(c) Copyright 2007 by Mark K. Smutny.  All rights reserved.  Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution.