Sermon for the Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity
“That ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend … what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height; and to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge…”
Paul’s words in Ephesians are powerfully and wonderfully illustrated in the Gospel (Luke 7.11-17). The raising of the only son of the widow of Nain reveals the love of Christ “which passeth knowledge,” the love which goes beyond what we can know and do simply on our own. Something is being shown to us that belongs to the deeper truth of our humanity; a truth found in our engagement with God. Without the love of God, the suggestion is, we are utterly incomplete, bereft and empty.
What Paul seeks for us is what Christ provides for us, namely our being “rooted and grounded in love” and being able to comprehend – to understand – the wondrous extent of the divine love which goes beyond our human capacities. To be aware of this is to be awakened to an ethic of action rooted in compassion.
The last several Sundays of the Trinity season have presented us with this underlying concept: our human actions as rooted and grounded in God’s love. Compassion was the operative word in The Parable of the Good Samaritan. That compassion is ultimately the love of Christ, the Son of God who became man for us and who engages us in our brokenness and hurt to heal and restore and to set us in motion towards one another. That compassion of Christ is the motivating force in the story of the one leper who “turned back, giving him thanks and he was a Samaritan,” too. Thanksgiving is ultimately rooted in the divine love which perfects our human loves. Thanksgiving is a form of love at work in us.
This morning we have the powerful story of the raising of the only son of the widow of Nain. It is one of three stories where Jesus meets us as mourners and each time something happens that is transformative. “Be ye transformed in the renewing of your minds,” as Paul says elsewhere. And, indeed, what we see and hear transforms our thinking and our doing. The operative word here in the Gospel is once again, the word, compassion. “When the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her.” Compassion is deep love, the deep love of God in Jesus Christ which reaches out to our humanity, at once to the sorrow and loss of the widow and to the death of her only son. We are meant to feel her pain, to use a much abused expression. To put it better, we are meant to empathise with her loss and to feel its depth. She is utterly bereft – a widow who has lost her husband and now a mother who has lost her only son. We sense and feel her desolation, the utter emptiness of her being.
