Day: October 5, 2025

“That you, being rooted and grounded in love [may] know the love of Christ”

The powerful story of the raising of the only son of the widow of Nain 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. What we see and hear transforms our thinking and our doing. The operative word in the Gospel is the word, compassion. “When the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her.” It is the operative word and expression, too, in the Parable of the Good Samaritan.

That compassion is 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 is the motivating force in the story of the one leper who “turned back, giving him thanks and he was a Samaritan,” which is also the traditional Thanksgiving Day Gospel as well as the Gospel for Trinity 14 which we didn’t hear this year because of the Feast of St. Matthew. All these things mark the recurring theme of our “being rooted and grounded in love,” as Paul puts in the Epistle and which is movingly illustrated in the Gospel story of the widow of Nain.

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 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 her desolation, the utter emptiness and forlornness of her life.

What happens? We see compassion at work. The active love of God which creates now recreates. Why is there anything at all? Why creation? The best and 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.

But it is wanted that we learn and know this love. The raising of the only son of the widow of Nain reveals the love of Christ “which passeth knowledge,” not unlike “the peace of God which passeth all understanding” in the liturgy. What does this mean? It is the love which goes beyond what we can know humanly speaking and beyond what we can 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, 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 know or understand something of the wondrous extent and nature of the divine love which goes beyond our own devices and desires. To be aware of this is to be awakened to an ethic of action rooted in compassion.

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