by CCW | 20 September 2015 14:42
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.
What happens then? We are allowed to see compassion at work. It is the active love of God which creates and now recreates. Why is there anything at all? Why creation? The best and perhaps the only answer is love, the love which manifests love (to paraphrase Jacob Boehme). And that love is so powerful, so great, that it extends to the restoration and redemption of all that is broken and dead, empty and bereft.
Jesus speaks first to the widow in her grief and sorrow, bidding her, strangely, it must seem, not to weep. Only then, does he turn and touch the bier upon which lies the young man and says, “Young man, I say unto thee, Arise.” “And he that was dead sat up, and began to speak.” It is a miracle, to be sure, but one which speaks to the greater miracle, as all miracles do, the miracle of creation itself. Redemption recalls us to the radical conditions of the created world. Nothing exists apart from the Word and the Will of God who speaks all things into being and sustains them in the order and nature of their being. That creative Word now goes forth in the incarnate reality of Jesus Christ; a Word spoken in the midst of our being and to the forms of our loss and sorrow. Weeping need not be forever.
The emphasis here is upon our humanity. The young man sits up and speaks. Speech is a function of our self-awareness, the awareness of our selves over and against others. The woman never speaks, only weeps – at least at first. Jesus’ compassion extends to her in another way. “He delivered him to his mother.” It is a powerful and poignant moment and one which challenges us about the idea and the nature of Resurrection. His action suggests that the raising of the dead man even as he is being carried to his grave is about the other; in this case, the mother. The young man is raised up for the sake of his mother.
What does this act of compassionate love on the part of Jesus teach us? That our love is and must be for others. Here compassion leads to a kind of Resurrection or to put it in another way, the compassion which is the love of God in Jesus Christ is the life that is greater than death, the life that conquers death even through death and sorrow.
What is happening here? We are constantly being drawn more and more into the mysteries of Christ, into the mysteries of the divine love which restores and redeems, which binds up and heals, which touches and speaks to our humanity.
Paul is alive to the transforming love of Christ. It makes all the difference with respect to how we face and deal with the hardships and the difficulties of our lives and our world and day. We are opened out to true compassion. It will mean to feel the sufferings of our world and day as belonging to the sufferings of Christ, to his encounter with the forms of human misery in all of their sorry and sad disarray. Only in him can we face the sufferings of our world and begin to try to find ways to respond thoughtfully and prayerfully.
It will not be about the answers in any kind of simple and practical way. It will be more about “the breadth, and length, and depth and height” of the divine love which knows no measure. It will be about knowing ourselves in Christ and placing our world in his love. Far from doing nothing, this is everything, the root and ground of our actions. If we are not rooted and grounded in love, we are nothing and worse than nothing. It is “love divine, all loves excelling” that makes all things new and lovely, the love that calls us to wonder and praise, to sacrifice and service; the love that alone transforms; the love that makes all the difference.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity XVI,
September 20th, 2015
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2015/09/20/sermon-for-the-sixteenth-sunday-after-trinity-5/
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