by CCW | 20 September 2026 10:00
Jesus meets us as mourners several times in the Scriptures. In every encounter something happens that speaks to human suffering and to human dignity. As today’s Gospel story illustrates, there is something uniquely human in the very act of burying the dead. It means that we are more though not less than our bodies and our experiences; a counter to the various reductionisms of ourselves whether it be to genes or hormones, to culture or history, to cosmic or climate forces real or imagined, to class or economics, to social constructs or political agendas; in short, the problems of the ‘natural sciences’ as transposed and magnified in the ‘human sciences’.
These are all things that happen to us, to be sure, but are we reduced to such things? Or does the pathos, the pathétic, of life in its self-affectivity mean that we are more than these reductive externalities? Suffering has its fullest and deepest expression in death and mourning; in short, in the forms of our self-awareness as living beings. Thus these encounters highlight the gathering of all human suffering into the compassion of Christ, and thus to the redemption and restoration of the dignity of our humanity through suffering.
Jesus encounters a funeral procession on their way to a burial. A young man has died and is being carried out of the city of Nain. He is “the only son of his mother, and she was a widow,” as Luke poignantly tells us. We feel her loss, as we commonly say, in an effort to comfort both the grieving and ourselves. But what does that really mean?
I have pondered that question in the realization that there is something profoundly and uniquely human about the burying of the dead precisely at the time in our culture when there is a very real danger of losing this sensibility, and thus losing what it means to be human. Reflecting on this requires looking into what Shakespeare calls “the dark backward and abyss of time” (Tempest). historically and in literature itself, one of the greatest witnesses to human culture and so to human suffering and dignity.
You probably know the image of a ‘Neanderthal’: thick brow, hunched over, knuckles dragging on the ground. It has become a classic image of our pre-human ancestry and a cliché for what is barbaric and primitive; in short, something negative, and insulting. ‘You Neanderthal, you!’ Yet it is all quite mistaken, the image is a caricature. The name Neanderthal comes from the skeletal remains of a ‘humanid’ found in the Neander Valley, hence Neanderthal, in Westphalia, Germany. But further research has discovered that far from being prototypical of the species, it is the remains of an elderly figure who suffered, as many of us do, from arthritis and so was bent over, twisted, and distorted. Yet this reveals two interesting and significant features of what it means to be human. First, this primitive culture took care of the elderly, and second, they took great care in the burying of the dead.
This is something unique to our humanity. In literary terms, it looks back to the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the earliest literary works of our humanity. Gilgamesh’s greatest journey happens because of the death of his friend, Enkidu. In Enkidu’s death he encounters his own mortality; “As Enkidu is, so shall I be.” It launches him on his quest for wisdom in seeking to question Utnapishtim “concerning life and death,” the search for meaning, we might say. The German poet Rainer Marie Rilke noted about the 19th century discovery in the sands of Iraq of clay tablets engraved in cuneiform script (meaning wedge-shaped marks) subsequently translated into English and other languages, that the story of Gilgamesh is “the epic of the fear of death,” todesfurcht. At the very least, it belongs to the long literary and philosophical tradition of wrestling with the concepts of mortality and immortality and of Christianity’s place in that story.
Who and why Utnapishtim? He is the ancient Sumerian predecessor to the figure of Noah in Genesis. He, like Noah after him, survived a great flood. Unlike Noah, however, Utnapishtim was granted, by the caprice of the gods, ‘immortality’. Noah only lived nine hundred and fifty years! Utnaphishtim is a mortal who became immortal. That is why Gilgamesh wants to question him.
He embarks on his remarkable quest, a spiritual journey of the understanding that means the overcoming of many obstacles. Siduri, the wine-woman, or if you prefer the ale-wife(!), advises him to give up his quest and simply embrace and enjoy the good things of life; in short, hedonism, the philosophy of pleasure, as if that were the ultimate definition of what it means to be human. He rejects her advice and continues on his quest to see Utnapishtim, called ‘the faraway’. Why? Because he dwells alone, albeit with his wife, in the land of Dilmun, at the ends or beyond the ends of the world. That raises the great question. What kind of immortality is it that removes you entirely from the human community? Stuck at the ends or beyond the world?
Gilgamesh literally punts his way across the waters of ocean and death using great wooden poles but without letting his hands touch the waters until he runs out of them and then ingeniously uses his lion skin garments as a sail, his arms as a mast. All testament to his determination, it also signifies some of the amazing practical skills of the ancient peoples of Mesopotamia such as irrigation, sailing, walled cities, metallurgy, beer and wine, and, most importantly, writing; developments unmatched in their extent until the modern industrial revolution. They all belong to human creativity that makes use of nature without being simply defined by it. Yet they were cultures that remained fearful and uncertain about nature, thinking that chaos might erupt and destroy everything at any moment, that chaos might be greater than order. This sense of fearful uncertainty is symbolized in several ways, notably in the figure of Humbaba, a pre-rational force of nature, but as chaos; of nature as chaos. The uncertainty principle long before Heisenberg we might say!
Utnapishtim tells Gilgamesh that for humans “there is no permanence.” And therein lies the great paradox in the tension between the mortal and the immortal. Why? Because Utnapishtim, now immortal, is saying that mortality is the human condition. It marks the beginning of a long tradition of literary and philosophical thinking seen, for example, in Homer’s Odyssey with Odysseus’ descent to the underworld to learn from Teiresias, in Plato’s Myth of Er with its thousand year cycles of souls at the end of the Republic, in Aristotle’s Ethics about contemplation as the highest good of our humanity because it is most like the life of the gods, in Vergil’s Aeneid who draws upon both Homer and Plato, to name but a few great works that ponder the relation of mortal and immortal. This brings us to the Christian idea that as Paul puts it, “this mortal must put on immortality” (I Cor. 15. 53) and to such poetic and theological masterpieces as Aquinas’ Summae and Dante’s Divine Comedy building on the idea that we are “ordained to an end that exceeds the grasp of our human reason,” as Thomas Aquinas puts it. Through grace we become “like to God and the Son of God,” Christ.
How? Through the redemption of our humanity in the sufferings of Christ who gathers all human suffering into himself and thus into the heart of God. Divine compassion is highlighted in his encounters with us as mourners. Christ goes to the house of the ruler of the synagogue, Jairus, whose daughter has died, it seems. Christ meets a funeral procession of a dead young man on the way to his grave. Christ goes weeping with Mary and Martha to the tomb of his friend and their brother, Lazarus, dead and buried for four days. “Behold, he stinketh,” Martha warns him.
In each case, he meets us as mourners; the grief of the widowed mother and the community, the grief of the Jairus’ family and household, the grief of Mary and Martha, and even Jesus’ own grief. Yet, perhaps the greatest example is his meeting Mary Magdalene who comes in her early morning grief to his tomb expecting to find his corpse. Yet in all these stories, Jesus is more than just another mourner in the company of grief. Something happens. There is resurrection: the raising of the young man and his being restored to his mother, the raising of the young girl, Talitha cumi, the raising of Lazarus, “Lazarus, come out”; all resuscitations, to be sure, but all pointing to the risen Christ who speaks to Mary Magdalene. All pointing to the radical meaning of divine compassion as resurrection: the resurrection of Christ and the hope of our resurrection.
What does it all mean? Simply that death is changed. It is no longer or simply the terminus ad quem of our humanity, the end of the story. It has become the transitus, the means or transition to life in God. How? Through Christ’s embrace of the human condition of suffering on account of sin. Thus the whole human story of our gathering to bury the dead is ultimately testament to the radical dignity of our humanity, movingly illustrated for us in this story.
It shows the meaning of compassion that the Epistle teaches about “being rooted and grounded in love,” and “knowing the love of Christ which passeth knowledge,” meaning that it is not a human construct or invention. And once again, faith and hope are gathered into love; “Christ dwelling in our hearts by faith” in the hope of our being gathered into the fullness of God into glory. All through him “who is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think;” something more and greater.
This is the point of Jesus’ words to the widow of Nain. “Weep not,” meaning “don’t always be weeping” because suffering and death are not the whole story. The greater story is the pageant of life and love made visible in Christ who “when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her.” In Christ all human suffering is gathered into the innermost being of God, into the heart of divine life and love. We feel not just the loss but the life and love of Christ.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 16, 2026
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2026/09/20/sermon-for-the-sixteenth-sunday-after-trinity-15/
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