This year will be painful, but Jesus will be faithful (Luke 7:11-17)

At this time of year, we look back and we look forward.  We are reminded of those who died this year and we may feel a certain anxiety for the year to come.  We are not promised that the coming year will be without sorrow.  There will be tears ahead.  But as we look at this passage, we can be assured that Christ cares about our pain and that he is bringing us through this life of suffering to an eternity of joy.  

The Lord is close to the broken-hearted

This is a devastatingly sad scene that we have portrayed for us.  This woman has already buried her husband.  She is a widow.  Now she is burying her son.  In that society not only was she left with her sorrow, she was destined to poverty.  It was the men who were the main providers and she had no one to care for her.  This was the sort of funeral where people didn’t know what to say.  This was the sort of occasion that rocks the foundations of our faith.  

Funerals generally took place around six in the evening.  Earlier that day, the widow would have taken the body of her only son, laid him out, groomed his hair, put him in the best clothes she had available and placed him on an open wicker basket.  He would have been face-up with arms folded.  A crowd would have gathered, and they would have proceeded out the city-gates towards the graveyard.  Most of the town’s five-hundred people would have been there.

The graveyard at Nain was east of the city, along the road to Capernaum.  Capernaum was where Jesus had his base.  Jesus happens to arrive down that road and meets the funeral.  There is a crowd with Jesus.  Apparently, the Greek wording implies that the crowd with Jesus was even bigger than the funeral.  Perhaps there were a thousand people with him.  They give way to let the funeral pass.  

What is the first thing that Jesus does?  He looks!  The gospel writers mention Jesus looking at people about forty times.  Often that looking is followed by a description of how he felt.  Matthew tells us that Jesus looked at a crowd and had compassion on them because they were harassed and helpless like sheep without a shepherd.  Mark says that Jesus looked at the rich young ruler and loved him.  John shows Jesus looking down from the cross, seeing his mother, and making sure that she would be looked after.  Luke tells us that when Jesus saw this grieving widow, his heart went out to her.

Brokenness teaches us how to show compassion

What Jesus sees touches his heart and surfaces his infinite compassion.  He would have looked with a tender, concerned and engaged look.  Because he was compassionate, her pain affected his emotions.  As one writer says, ‘Jesus enters this woman’s world, feeling what it’s like to be in her place’ (Paul Miller).

The word translated compassion is a word that implies deep, gut-wrenching emotion.  The four gospel writers only ever use this word with regards to Jesus, and people in his stories that were like him, such as the father of the lost son and the Good Samaritan.  Jesus’ compassion stood out in a harsh world.  His compassion also showed his family likeness with his Father.  The apostle Paul calls God, the Father of all compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God (2 Corinthians 1:3-4).  The more we allow Jesus to shape our hearts, the more compassionate we will be.  Intimacy with Christ will make us feel for the needs of others.  Brokenness is an essential ingredient for maturing.  As God helps us through our suffering, we are to become more understanding of the suffering of others.  Suffering people will avoid us if all we do is tell them to snap out of it or give trite answers to complex questions.  We must learn the importance of patient listening. 

The gospel enables us to face death with hope

Jesus steps forward and says to the woman, ‘don’t cry.’  Then he gently places his hand on the open coffin and commands the young man to get up.  The dead man sat up and began to talk, and Jesus gave him back to his mother.  I imagine that there was initially silence and reverent shock, people then looking at each other to confirm that what they saw really did happen, and then there follows an eruption of delightful chattering.

Luke, whose aim is to show his readers who Jesus really is, records that they were all filled with awe and praised God.  “A great prophet has appeared among us.”  After four hundred years of silence, since the close of the Old Testament, God is speaking again.  “God has come to help his people.”  Yet their conclusions about Jesus are not complete.  He is a prophet—this scene echoes a time when Elijah raised a widow’s son—but he is more than a prophet.  Luke will show that Jesus is the promised Christ, the Son of God and the true Lord of life.

You see, I am glad that just as Jesus is compassionate to this widow, he is compassionate to us.  I am glad that we can think of those we have lost, be honest about our grief and be sure that Jesus cares.  I once spoke at the funeral of a friend’s sister, she was the daughter of a widow, and I did not know what to say.  I chose to speak on this passage and said that although Julie’s death leaves us with a lot of questions, we can be assured that Jesus cares.

Yet Luke isn’t just reminding us that Jesus was compassionate, he was telling us that Jesus has power over death.  After Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, he exclaimed, ‘I am the resurrection and the life.  He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever believes in me, will never die.  Do you believe this?’  We will die.  The young man in this story later died.  But he had met the Lord of life who gives us life after death.

I don’t like getting older.  I must be going through my midlife crisis because I am struggling with thoughts of how quickly life is passing, and that I am heading for the grave.  But Jesus has taken care of our funeral arrangements.  This incident happened when Jesus was on the road to Jerusalem.  There he died for our guilt so that whoever believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.  

Conclusion

I can’t promise that this year will be easy.  We follow a Saviour who was a man of sorrows and familiar with grief.  We live in a creation that is groaning and decaying until the Lord of glory returns.  Jesus wept and so will we in the year to come.  But I can promise you that the Lord is close to the broken-hearted.  I can remind you of the compassionate heart of Jesus.  I can promise you that one day God will wipe the tears from our eyes.  Death has been swallowed up in victory.  We are on our way to see Jesus and ‘one sight of Jesus as He is, will fill our hearts, and dry up all our tears’ (John Newton).