Christ Church

“And when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her”

The great poet, Dante, speaks of Luke as “scriba mansuetudinis Christi”, the scribe of the gentleness of Christ. The phrase has always stayed with me. Luke is our primary spiritual director, if you will, during the long green season of the Church year, the Trinity season. By far and away, the largest number of gospel readings are taken from his gospel for what amounts to almost half of the Church year.

Dante, it seems to me, has grasped the signal note of St. Luke’s gospel and perhaps, nowhere is that idea of the gentleness of Christ more wonderfully signaled to us than in today’s gospel.

There are only three times in the New Testament when Christ meets us as mourners. There is the story about the raising of Jairus’ daughter who had just died. There is the story about the calling out of Lazarus’ who had been buried for four days. “Behold he stinketh”, Martha cries out, alerting us to the realities of death and decay and as well to how far gone we are in our sins. And there is this story, the story of the widow of Nain when her only son is being carried to the burying ground. In short, the encounter with the newly dead, the dead and buried and the just about to be buried. But here, in Luke’s gospel, the encounter is with the chief mourner, the widow of Nain, whose only son has died and is being carried out of the city to the place of burying.

In all three scenes, Christ meets us as mourners. We are in the presence of death, after all. He enters into our grief and into the intimacy of our sorrows. But the point of all these encounters is that Jesus is not just another sorry soul, not just another weeping mourner, not just another voice to add the cacophony of our sorrows. No. In each case, where he meets us as mourners, there is a word of saving grace and glory, a word of resurrection in the place and in the face of death.

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“Be not anxious”

What is Jesus saying here? He wants us to look at the world with new eyes. “Behold, the fowls of the air”. “Consider the lilies of the field”. “Seek ye first the kingdom of God”. It makes a difference for us in our lives. To behold what he wants us to behold, to consider what he wants us to consider, to seek what he wants us to seek counters the paralysis of our fears, the terror of our anxieties and even our anxieties about our anxieties.

Jesus says “be not anxious” more than once in this gospel. He knows our anxieties and how prone we are to being anxious, quite literally, about “a multitude of things”. It is what we might call “The Martha Syndrome” as diagnosed elsewhere by Jesus: “Martha, Martha, thou art anxious and troubled about a multitude of things” (Luke 10.41). We all have our fears and our worries, our troubles and our concerns, our heart-aches and our despairs. And we can worry ourselves, quite literally, to death about them. What are we anxious about? What are our anxieties? Quite simply, they are our cares, the things which, quite literally, occupy our thoughts; indeed, they can actually possess us.

Our anxieties are the cares which choke and oppress us, the cares which give us great anguish of soul. Our problem, it seems, and the cause of our anxiety is that we are often too careful, quite literally, too full of cares about the wrong things and/or in the wrong way. The cares of this world beset us and overwhelm us. Jesus would have us view the world and its cares in a new way.

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