Sermon on Luke 7:11-17, for the 16th Sunday after Trinity (1 Yr lectionary), "God in the Picture"

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. Earlier this week I was watching two famous professors debate—one an atheist, the other a Christian. They talked about suffering and the problem of evil. The widow in our reading was a real example of suffering. The Christian in the debate, John Lennox, said that everyone senses that there is too much suffering in this world. You can imagine the widow saying: “There’s too much suffering in my life—how can I bear it all?” When suffering strikes close to home—a husband, a son, or another loved one—we ask “why does God allow this to happen?” “How can God be good, when my loved one is dying?” Many turn away from God or simply say that He doesn’t exist, because of tragedies. But getting rid of God gets rid of the greatest hope and answer to suffering—while still leaving us with the suffering. If there is no God in the world, suffering is just a brute fact of existence, and the universe doesn’t care. If there is no God, life has no higher purpose than what you give it, and without God, who’s to say there’s such a thing as good and evil? The problem of evil and suffering only gets worse for you if you try to “get rid of God.”

But contrast that with Jesus. He comes upon this funeral procession—weeping mother and sympathetic neighbors. But sympathy won’t bring back her child. She carries a double wound, because not only is her only son dead, but she was also a widow, meaning she had lost her husband some time before. In any age of history, that would be a great burden to bear. But in our age of social security, life insurance policies, and other safety nets to care for the poor and the grieved, we don’t grasp how devastating this was for a woman 2,000 years ago. Without the men of the family to provide her income, she faced certain poverty. All traditional supports were gone, and she was left with only her grief and her friends. But when Jesus meets this crowd, and sees her, “He had compassion on her and said to her, ‘Do not weep.’”

Christians cling dearly to this truth—that God came into the world in the person of Jesus Christ. Right into our suffering existence. Not watching from the outside; not safe from suffering; not clean from contact with the messiness and pain of our lives. But He entered right up into our broken world, right into our suffering, and joined with us in it. Jesus experienced death, blood, pain, and grief. He knew human suffering intimately, personally. He grieves in our losses, with a heart that truly knows. Compassion stirred up deep inside Him—the compassion of God, but now also the human compassion of God in the flesh. Seeing, knowing, and understanding our suffering from the inside out. We see that God cares.

But if sympathy couldn’t bring back her child—Jesus can. How electric it must have been, when Jesus interrupted the pallbearers and grabbed hold of the stretcher on which the dead man was being carried. Can you imagine that at a funeral? Chicken skin! People must have thought He was crazy, when He said, “Young man, I say to you, arise!” Wouldn’t you be afraid when the boy actually sat up and began talking?! Skepticism turned to amazement. How did He do it? Not with medical equipment; not a resuscitation for someone who had just died—but He spoke the word. “Young man, I say to you, arise!”

The Bible tells us the spoken Word of God has tremendous power. God’s Word can actually perform the action that He commands. God said, “Let there be light” and light sprang into existence. God commanded through the mouth of Moses, “Let my people go!”, and all the armies of Pharaoh and Egypt couldn’t stop Him. In the gospel of Luke, just before this story, a Roman soldier asks for Jesus’ help, but is too modest to bring Jesus to his home, so he tells Jesus, “But say the word, and let my servant be healed”. He knew the power of Jesus’ Word. Jesus praised the man’s faith, and healed the man that very hour by the power of His Word. Everyone saw how powerful Jesus’ Word was—clearly He was God, not an ordinary man. Our words don’t have that kind of power. Sure we can do great good, or great damage with our words, but we can’t simply call things into existence, or perform miracles by our word. Imagine how power hungry we’d become! But we are given the privilege to speak and to spread God’s Word. And His Word has His power to do the thing it promises.

With His Word, Jesus brought this young man back to life and gave him back to His mother. She was among the lucky few, even in Jesus’ ministry. At least 3 people were raised from the dead by Jesus. But they all went on to again die eventually, like all other people through human history. Even in Jesus’ ministry, this was rare. So what does that teach us, or how does it comfort us? Well, first of all, we aren’t promised a miraculous intervention in the lives of all our loved ones. That didn’t even happen to most people in Jesus’ own ministry. But it does teach us that Jesus is the One who holds power over life and death. Jesus raised the dead, not by magic or any special medical technology, but by His Word, which shows that God is able to reverse the otherwise irreversible laws of nature and death. Jesus commands unique power over death, and He is a genuine force for good.

But also, what’s the difference between Jesus raising these people from the dead during His ministry, and Jesus’ own rising from the dead? These little miracles were a trailer, a preview, for the main event—Jesus’ own resurrection. What was the difference? They were raised to a body that was still mortal, a body that could still die again. But Jesus was raised with an immortal body, a body that can never die again. The book of Romans makes this clear when it says, (6:9) “We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him.” He will never die again, death has no dominion over Him. Dominion means rule, power or authority. Death was unable to hold Jesus in the grave. Why? #1, because He is God, and #2, because He was innocent of any sin. When Jesus rose from the dead, He had His disciples check and see that His body was still real flesh and bones, same as before. But it was also different—He was able to pass through locked doors and walls, He transported Himself instantly from place to place when He wanted. This was His glorified body. A body no longer weakened and subject to suffering, but an imperishable body.

Jesus’ body when He rose from the dead was imperishable. He rose, to never die again. The young man in our story, son of the widow at Nain, and others who Jesus raised, still had their perishable bodies—Jesus raised them back to their natural life. The comfort to us from this miracle is not that we hope for a temporary return to natural life for us or our loved ones—that death would be delayed or stalled for a little longer—but that the One who defeats sin and death for us has promised eternal, imperishable life, in a risen body like His. A body no longer weakened and subject to suffering, but an imperishable body. This is the Christian hope of the resurrection. Our flesh and bones, our body—not someone else’s—but a body free from sin, disease, aging, suffering and death. When we confess in the Apostle’s Creed: I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy Christian church, the communion of saints, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting, Amen, that’s what we mean. We believe that Jesus has promised our bodies to be raised pure and perfect, made as God intended them, to life everlasting with Him.

All the grief and death and loss that we will experience in this life will come before that. Life can grind us down and most of us do feel like there’s too much suffering in this life. But you know what the Bible says about that? It says that we don’t lose heart “Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, (2 Corinthians 4:16–17). In other words, however heavy the suffering we experience now, it’s going to seem light and temporary in comparison to the eternal weight of glory. The heaviness of that glory outweighs anything we’ve experienced thus far. That goodness and joy of God is beyond all comparison.

That day when the widow’s son was raised by Jesus, she got a little foretaste, a little advance preview of the glory that was in store in the kingdom of Jesus. The crowds celebrated with her: “A great prophet has arisen among us!” and “God has visited His people”, and the news spread like wildfire. She saw Jesus was not helpless in the face of death, but commanded power by His very Word, and spoke life back into existence. She saw the One who would one day carry all our sins and griefs to His cross, where God would become one with our suffering in a way previously unimaginable. That He would be pierced for our sins, mocked, abandoned, beaten and dead. But Jesus was not helpless in the face of death. He laid down His life willingly, and then three days later, He took it up again.

The widow’s foretaste became the main event, when Jesus walked out of His grave with a renewed, glorified, living body that death could no longer hold. Our Christian faith hangs on His promise that whoever believes in Him, though he die, yet shall he live, and whoever lives and believes in [Jesus] shall never die (John 11:25-26). Jesus will raise us too, even after our death, to eternal life with Him, if we believe in Him. Jesus’ miracles show us He has the power over life and death. They show God’s deep human compassion and unity with our suffering. Jesus teaches us depend completely on Him—that is, to believe in Him—as the Way to eternal life. Evil exists. Suffering exists. God exists. That’s a lot to wrestle with, and it has been for millennia of human history—but it doesn’t make the problem any better by taking God out of the picture. With God in the picture, we see His human compassion in Christ Jesus, and we see Him enter our suffering. With God in the picture we see that evil and death is His sworn enemy to be defeated, and that suffering is to end forever when He returns one day to judge the living and the dead. With God in the picture we face an eternal weight of glory that is without comparison. Believe and rejoice! In Jesus’ Name, Amen.

Sermon Talking Points

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1. Luke 7:12 reveals that this dead young man was his mother’s only son, and that she was also a widow. How does this increase our human interest/sympathy in her story? Why are we often left with the feeling that there is too much suffering in this world? How does that affect our attitude or belief toward God?
2. All people through human history experience the human loss and grief of death. Only a handful, of those described in the Bible, experienced the miraculous raising of their dead. What are these few recorded miracles meant to teach us about Jesus? Acts 2:24; John 10:18.
3. A similar miracle by the prophet Elijah, in 1 Kings 17:17-24, has the prophet questioning why God has “brought calamity” upon a different widow, by killing her son. What are other common conclusions people draw when they experience suffering or loss?
4. Jesus commands the young man to rise, simply by the power of His Word. How does the Bible repeatedly teach the power of God’s Word? See Genesis 1:3, 6; or Psalm 33:6 or Luke 7:7. What reassurance does Jesus’ power over death bring to us, against the constant occurrence of suffering in human life?
5. This miracle was a temporary reversal of death. How is that different from Jesus’ own resurrection from the dead? Luke 24. What is different about the body of Jesus after His resurrection, than this boy from Nain? Romans 6:9 What is the same? Hebrews 2:14-17.