“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.
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. “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, 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 is not 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 ourselves over and against others. The woman never speaks, only weeps. Jesus’ compassion extends to her in another way. “He delivered him to his mother.” It is a powerful 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 equally about another; in this case, the mother. The young man is raised up for the sake of his mother.
What does this act of compassionate love by 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.
What is happening here? We are 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.
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 and in communion with God and with one another.
It will not be about answers in any kind of simple and practical way. It will be 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 and one another 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. Here is the love 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, restores and perfects. It makes visible a great theological truth captured in the priest’s prayer at the preparation of the eucharistic elements: “O God who did so wonderfully create, yet more wondrously restore the dignity of our humanity.” As Anselm says “God has restored human nature even more wondrously than he created it.” Such is the transforming power of divine compassion.
“That you, being rooted and grounded in love [may] know the love of Christ”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity XV, Oct. 5th, 2025