“And when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her.”
In the Gospels, Jesus Christ seems to come and go constantly as a visitor, a man of no fixed address and one who is always, it seems, passing through. He is the babe of Bethlehem, but apart from his birth there is no mention of his birthplace. He is the boy of Nazareth, but apart from his boyhood, Nazareth is only the city to which he returns once and then, only to be rejected. He is by the sea and on the sea; upon the mountains and in the desert places; in the fields and on the roads. He passes through all the countryside and every region of that ancient promised land. He comes to innumerable villages and towns. He makes his way to Jerusalem. He is constantly drawing near and passing through. And yet, he is constantly in our midst, the abiding presence of God with us.
He comes and goes, strewing blessings on his way. But the blessings are not the passing moments of God’s visitation. They are the signs of his abiding presence.
In the gospel story for today, Christ comes to the city of Nain. It is really a little town or village. If I am not mistaken, this is the only time that it is mentioned in the Scriptures. And “as he came nigh” – as he came near – to the gate of the city, he meets a funeral procession. Christ is the stranger who becomes a neighbour to those who mourn. He enters into the sorrows of the mourners and, most especially, into the grief of the widow of Nain whose only son lies dead and is being carried to the grave.
It is a most extraordinary and touching encounter. “And when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her.” Compassion. The word is strong; it refers to his inmost being. He takes her sorrow into his abiding love for the Father. “Weep not,” he says to this woman who has lost everything. What he means is, ‘do not weep forever’; ‘don’t always be weeping’; ‘don’t keep on weeping’. The weeping is not to be forever, for in the compassion of Christ we see the abiding love of God for us. That love means resurrection and life in and through the conditions of sorrow and death. That love means fellowship and joy. “Young man, I say to thee, Arise. And he that was dead sat up, and began to speak: and he delivered him to his mother” (Luke 7.14,15). He delivered him to his mother for whom he had already carried him into the heart of his abiding love for the Father. He delivered him to his mother even as we have fellowship with the Father through the Church.
God is glorified for this act of restoration but it is not because “a great prophet is risen up among us” as some said. Nor is it that the God who has “visited his people” is passing through, here today and gone tomorrow. No, the point is this: the sojourning Christ communicates an abiding love. But we don’t get the point except through the cross. The Gospels want to show us that we don’t get the point except through the experience of the cross. The Evangelists would bring us to know what they have learned under the shadow of the cross in the light of the Resurrection.
It is not by accident that the last of the great seven “I am” sayings in St. John’s Gospel signals our abiding in that love by being grafted into the living tree of faith. “I am the vine, ye are the branches”. “Abide in me, and I in you”. And as with the Widow of Nain, Christ does not just come and go. He comes to draw us into his abiding love. “I am the Lord your God”; “I am the vine, ye are the branches”. He is the God who has not simply visited and redeemed his people and then gone merrily on his way. He comes and goes in order to draw us into the truth of his abiding love.
St. Paul gets the point and sets it before us. We need the Epistles for just this reason. Paul’s prayer for the Ephesians is about the abiding love of God opened out to us through the compassion of Christ. He prays to the Father that they (and we) might “be strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man; that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith” (Eph.3.16,17). The Holy Spirit is the abiding love of God for us by whom Christ dwells in us and we in him. True compassion is something “rooted and grounded” in the deep and abiding love of God.
God does not come and go in and out of our lives. It is we, more often than not, who are the visitors, the sojourners. We come and go before the abiding presence of God. After all, it is we who have made ourselves strangers, we who have alienated ourselves from God through our sins. He has become the stranger in our midst to bring us near to him again and to open us out to the truth of his abiding love. It is simply the story of the Fall and our Redemption, the story of our lives in the greater story of God. The Lord God walked about in the Garden in the cool of the day, but where were we? We had hidden ourselves from the presence of the one who is always near and “from whom no secrets are hid”. God was not a visitor to that Garden of Paradise. He was at home with the creation he had made and he would have us dwell with him in the heaven of his love. But we would not.
Yet, out of the refusals of his truth, God has used our wayward ways to bring us back to him again. He has himself become a sojourner with us. The divine love is an abiding love. It is always there. The compassion of Christ means healing and joy even in the midst of suffering and sorrow. The good news is the abiding love of God for us.
“And when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her.”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity XVI, 2010