Sermon for the Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity
admin | 27 September 2009“And when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her”
The great poet, Dante, speaks of Luke as “scriba mansuetudinis Christi”, the scribe of the gentleness of Christ. The phrase has always stayed with me. Luke is our primary spiritual director, if you will, during the long green season of the Church year, the Trinity season. By far and away, the largest number of gospel readings are taken from his gospel for what amounts to almost half of the Church year.
Dante, it seems to me, has grasped the signal note of St. Luke’s gospel and perhaps, nowhere is that idea of the gentleness of Christ more wonderfully signaled to us than in today’s gospel.
There are only three times in the New Testament when Christ meets us as mourners. There is the story about the raising of Jairus’ daughter who had just died. There is the story about the calling out of Lazarus’ who had been buried for four days. “Behold he stinketh”, Martha cries out, alerting us to the realities of death and decay and as well to how far gone we are in our sins. And there is this story, the story of the widow of Nain when her only son is being carried to the burying ground. In short, the encounter with the newly dead, the dead and buried and the just about to be buried. But here, in Luke’s gospel, the encounter is with the chief mourner, the widow of Nain, whose only son has died and is being carried out of the city to the place of burying.
In all three scenes, Christ meets us as mourners. We are in the presence of death, after all. He enters into our grief and into the intimacy of our sorrows. But the point of all these encounters is that Jesus is not just another sorry soul, not just another weeping mourner, not just another voice to add the cacophony of our sorrows. No. In each case, where he meets us as mourners, there is a word of saving grace and glory, a word of resurrection in the place and in the face of death.
Each of the encounters with us as mourners is powerful and poignant but it is this Gospel story that brings out wonderfully and fully the principle that informs the action that follows in each encounter. In each encounter with us as mourners there is not only death but resurrection. This story shows us something of the moving force of that idea and principle. It is actually named here in a very explicit way.
“When the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her.” Our contemporary therapeutic culture is big on such words as compassion and empathy. And rightly so. But it takes more than words. This gospel story gives us both the word and the word in motion.
The word is compassion. It is more than a human emotion. Here it is the divine compassion made visible in the humanity of Christ. He meets a funeral procession at an obscure little town called Nain. The whole town, as it were, is with the widow as she makes her way to the graveside for the burying of her only son. An incredibly sad and touching scene is made even more touching by the gentle touch of St. Luke, signaling the gentleness of Christ. “And when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her.”
Compassion. Compassion for the complete stranger. Compassion that arises out of Christ who sees the widow of Nain. This gospel story names the principle. Out of the compassion of Christ comes resurrection. The compassion of Christ meets us in our time of death and sorrow and brings hope and joy, the hope and the joy of the resurrection.
In Christ, God has entered the human condition of our deaths. Here he speaks to our condition as mourners and souls bereft with sorrow. He speaks and his words are words of resurrection. “Young man, I say unto thee arise.” But there is another kind of resurrection than just this marvelous moment of the return to life of the young man and his being returned to his mother. It happens with the widow in her grief.
Christ’s first and only words to her are “weep not.” What? Don’t weep. How could she not weep? A widow and now a parent bereft of her only son? What could be more sad than the sorrows of a mother? But Christ’s words are actually the audible expression of his compassion. What he is saying actually is ‘don’t keep on weeping’, ‘don’t always be weeping’. Why? Because there is something more than suffering and death. Because we don’t need to be defined by our griefs and sorrows, by our deaths and dying. What is that something more?
Paul names it for us in today’s epistle. It is about our “being rooted and grounded” in the divine love. It is about an inner strength that comes by the power of the Spirit and that belongs to the presence of Christ in our hearts by faith. It means “know[ing] the love of Christ which passeth knowledge” which is to say that it is a divine knowing that we have been given by the grace of Christ. It is what we are given to see in this Gospel story in the gentle words of the gentle Christ. In Christ’s words and actions we see and learn the compassion of God for our wounded and broken humanity. In him we learn to be raised up out of our sins and sorrows, our griefs and our despairs.
The compassion of Christ is the “continual pity”, named in the Collect, that alone can “cleanse and defend the Church” from its idolatries and follies. Without it the Church “cannot continue in safety”. We have forgotten our need for the grace of God. We have lost that inwardness of the soul which knows the one thing needful, “the love of Christ which passeth knowledge”. But it is here for us to reclaim. It is here in the gentle words of the gentle Christ and in the gentle word of the evangelist St. Luke, the scribe of the gentleness of Christ.
“And when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her”
Fr. David Curry
Christ Church
Trinity XVI, ‘09