September 13, 2016
Today’s Gospel features a widow and her son, first dead then resurrected by Jesus. What can we learn from this? At first glance this seems to be about God’s power and glory, and the identity of His son, Jesus Christ. But look closer- within the text lies an even more powerful statement of who God is, his relationship to Israel fulfilled in the New Testament and Jesus’ relationship to the whole world. The power and glory of God are there, but to me this passage screams of His humanity, His empathy, and His saving grace.
The curtains open on a man named Luke, a non-Palestinian gentile Christian and prominent scholar among the second generation of followers of Jesus Christ. The year is sometime shortly after A.D. 70, and he writes a two volume work, the first of which becomes the Gospel of Luke, the second the Acts of the Apostles, to explain the historicity of Jesus, the new Christian religion, and how the fulfilment of the promises to Israel brings salvation to the whole world. Writing to a Roman audience, he emphasizes such motifs as Jesus’ feministic tendencies, His mercy, and the Spirit of God working through all humanity, and not just the Israelites- “This was not done in a corner,” (Acts 26:26). In Luke chapter 7, Jesus comes to a place called Nain. There he sees a procession carrying the dead son of a widow (her only son). Moved with pity, he raises her son from the dead.
We must understand a few things here. First is the connection to the Old Testament. In the Jewish writings, especially early on, Israel writes itself into the stories and identifies itself with the lowly, the powerless, and the marginalized, specifically women, and especially widows. This is perhaps because Israel knew itself to be a tribal culture in the land of Canaan, surrounded by greater civilizations- the Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, ect.. Even those cultures across the Mediterranean would rise to greater heights. This is part of why the Bible seems to be in many places early feministic literature- women play key roles throughout, such as Rachel, Ruth, Hagar, and Sarah. This tradition continues into the New Testament, specifically with Mary, but also into Jesus’ ministry, and especially there with Mary Magdalene.
In this story we see a fulfilment of this ideology. The Widow can represent Israel, and indeed in the fulfilment, all of mankind. Her only son is dead, her grief tragic, and Jesus, the God who loves, sees her and is moved. He goes to her and says “Do not weep.” He raises her son and gives him back to his mother. Why does he do this? The Gospel gives no indication as to His motivation, except that He was moved with pity for this widow. He did not travel to Nain to raise the boy, he did not seek out pain so as to glorify himself, nor did he see them and opportunistically seize the occasion to prove his identity as the Son of God and Son of Man (two separate titles, one referring to the inheritance of the Kingdom of David and the other to the prophesied Messiah). No, instead, he saw a woman, felt for her, and gave her back her only son, whose death she grieved. This is a relational God. This is the God whose love created the world and cared so deeply He desired to connect with it in an intimate way through the incarnation. He gives the son to the widow not because of a pre-designed plan, not because He as king saw fit to meddle with Human affairs to prove His own power, but because He saw fit to become human, because He loved her, because He saw her and His spirit reached out to her.
We are the widow. What is our son? Remember that women then depended on men for everything. Without a husband, a widow needed sons to take care of her. Without sons, a widow would have little choice but to turn to begging or prostitution. The widow in our story faces the very real threat of death, starvation, and dehumanization. She did not just lose her son, she lost everything. As the widow lost her son, Israel lost its kingdom, its temple, its faith. God saw the pain, the grief, and in His love gave it all back. What have we lost? Have we lost our identity? Our worldly success? Have we lost love, joy, community? Have we lost our ability to connect to others? These questions require definitions- what is our identity? What is worldly success? Do we know? Or perhaps is what we have lost the definition to these concepts that we pursue with our entire life? Have we lost what it means to be human?
We are the widow. What is our son? God desires to give it back.
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