June 9, 2013 -- Third Sunday after Pentecost

When the Lord saw her, he had compassion for her and said to her, "Do not weep."

• What is compassion? What does it consist of? What does it look like? Have we ever received it? Have we ever felt it?
• In this portion of Luke's Gospel, Jesus is seen as compassionate. Notice that he appears to have compassion for the widow and that is what he acts on. In his day as in ours, the death of a person would be considered a tragedy and it would also be considered a normal thing. What really make the difference here is that the dead man is the widow's only son. She is now without place in the world. In Jesus' day, a woman had to depend on the men of her family for her life. A father, a husband, a son – all had the responsibility to take care of her, each depending on the relationship. A widow had to depend on her sons to take care of her. This woman had lost both her husband and now her only son to death and she would have no place in society and no support for her life. She would be beyond the margins of that society – invisible, unnoticeable, and without any advocate or resource.
• This is the situation Jesus has compassion on. The double tragedy of personal loss and loss of community would be too much to be borne. In this, Jesus is moved to act in a very powerful way. The English translation says “He had compassion for her.” This sounds sort of clinical, especially when we see that the Greek word used in the Gospel - the word we translate as “compassion”- is a very visceral one. It can't be translated directly, but the word is related to the Greek word for a person's internal organs – for lack of a better, more polite term, the guts. One translation puts it “His heart went out to her.” This is rather close, but the real sense of the word is more of being moved from the depth of one's guts. This word is found in the Gospels a number of times and only in the Gospels.
• So we see Jesus moved from his depths in compassion and restoring the young man to his widowed mother. Not just restoring him to life, but restoring them both to the community. That is why Luke notes that the young man sat up and began to speak. In that, he was restored to his mother and to the entire community.
• Luke also notes that Jesus touched the bier “and the bearers stood still.” It could be that the bearers were shocked by what Jesus did, because what he did made him unclean. By touching the body, Jesus became ritually impure and liable for ritual purification before resuming his place in society. But it appears that Jesus was not worried about such things and the requirements of compassion took priority.
• Jesus was not afraid of ritual impurity nor was he afraid of criticism from those around him. No doubt many of his contemporaries wished he were more scrupulous in following the strictures of the Law. They would want him to be more particular about who he spent his time with and whom he associated with.
• This was (and is) not how Jesus worked. He was not afraid of meeting people where they were in the exact circumstances of their lives, no matter what those circumstances might have been. His compassion extended to any he met and finally to all the world, were we to look at the meaning of his sacrifice on the cross. This is how the Gospel in general and this passage of the Gospel applies to our lives today.
• Jesus is not afraid to “get his hands dirty” with any aspect of our lives. He is not waiting for us to clean up our act, as it were, before coming to us as our Savior. No, he takes us as we are. That is the meaning of salvation by grace, the cornerstone of the Lutheran understanding of justification and salvation. In short, Jesus is not scared of our sin and is greater than our sin.
• There is no hidden agenda or subterfuge with Jesus. If his work in our lives appears to be hidden, it is because it is subtle and what he does is often hidden in plain sight.
• Once we learn to see them for what they are, we will see the miracles and daily grace of Jesus as signs of the Kingdom of God present. They are the first rays of the glorious dawning of what our Father has in store for us. Still, the dawn is not the whole day and none of us lives for the sunrise alone. To concentrate on miracles alone without seeing their larger and deeper meaning is to miss what might be seen as the real light of day.
• In concentrating only on the raising of the widow's son, we could miss the reality that both are restored to their place in the larger community. We could miss the response of the crowd, who gave glory to God and thanked God for the presence of a prophet beyond imagining and for God's favour to his people. We could miss the acceptance of this miracle as a healing and reconciliation for the whole people. In the hoopla of the miraculous even, we could even miss the powerful presence of God, manifested for God's people in need.
• Jesus has power over all that troubles us, whether or not he solves all problems or heals all ills. His compassion is very real and comes from deep within.
• Our place then is at the side of Jesus in his compassion for his chosen. Our place is with his chosen – not the self-proclaimed righteous but the poor and the people on the margins of life. If we're honest with ourselves, we'll know that we've spend a lot of our lives there as well.
• That's not a bad thing – after all, that's were Jesus can most often be found.