The Scandal of Compassion (Rev. Patrick Hamrick)
“May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, our strength and our redeemer.”
Have you ever driven in a funeral procession? Pastors are often directed to pull in behind the police car up in front. From that vantage point I’ve seen what effect the funeral procession has on traffic. Driving near the front of the procession I am always a little wary as we get to run red lights at busy intersections, blow through stop signs, and merge as a big group onto highways as we make our way to the cemetery. These days, as old courtesies fade away, I notice that fewer and fewer drivers pull over as a sign of respect for the deceased and the grieving family.
We’ve all had experiences with death. We’ve been to the funeral home, to the church, driven in a procession to the cemetery. We’ve reflected on end-of-life care and suffered the loss of people we love; and if we have allowed ourselves, we have thought about our own dying.
Our scripture from Luke is an account of a funeral procession:
Not long after that, Jesus went to the village Nain. His disciples were with him, along with quite a large crowd. As they approached the village gate, they met a funeral procession—a woman’s only son was being carried out for burial. And the mother was a widow. When Jesus saw her, his heart broke. He said to her, “Don’t cry.” Then he went over and touched the coffin. The pallbearers stopped. He said, “Young man, I tell you: Get up.” The dead son sat up and began talking. Jesus presented him to his mother. They all realized they were in a place of holy mystery, that God was at work among them. They were quietly worshipful—and then noisily grateful, calling out among themselves, “God is back, looking to the needs of his people!” The news of Jesus spread all through the country.
(Luke 7:11-17 Peterson’s The Message)
Funerals and customs surrounding death were certainly different in that day. And those who were present that day no doubt left saying, “I have never seen a funeral procession like this one.”
This was not the kind of procession that we are accustomed to, with a hearse and limos, vehicles moving in line with their lights or hazards on and maybe those little funeral flags on the hood of the car. Funerals in first century Palestine were considerably different. It was truly a community event. Each village had its own professional mourners— women who helped to express the sense of loss felt by the community, especially the loss felt by family members. They would wail and cry. They would sing loudly and mournfully. They would play cymbals and flutes and other instruments. They did not hold back on the emotion.
Walking behind the mourners—everyone was walking—was the mother of the young man who had died. There might have been friends with her. There might have been extended family members. There might have been neighbors. There might have been folks from the synagogue. But make no mistake: This mother was alone. She had already lost her husband. Now she had lost her only child. These people might be here for the funeral, but as a widow with no male family member to support her, she faced a bleak future.
The procession moved through the village of Nain, not far from Nazareth, Jesus’ hometown. The pallbearers were carrying the body of a young man on a funeral bier, which at that time and place was something like a stretcher. The body was covered with a shroud. First-century Jewish folks generally buried their dead outside of town, and quickly, usually on the day of death or the next day. Embalming was not practiced.
It was a dramatic scene already—the throng of mourners making their way to the graveyard, the death of a young person, a grieving mother, all alone in the midst of this crowd. But there was more. Jesus approached the funeral procession with a crowd of his own in tow. He had just healed the servant of a Roman centurion, and he was growing in popularity and reputation.
Jesus approached the village of Nain and outside the city gates came upon the funeral procession. It was a happenstance meeting. He did not know these people. He was not from this village. He did not know this grieving mother. But he noticed her. He saw her tears, tears for this son she had lost and tears for her husband she had lost and tears for herself, who would now find herself in a desperate situation. To be a widow was to be vulnerable. Economically, it was an untenable position. Women had no legal rights and a widow like her was subject to losing property, which would not be in her name, and she would not be allowed to testify in court. To be a widow without a son was to be very vulnerable.
Jesus saw this mother, a widow, grieving yet another loss. The text says that when Jesus saw her, his heart broke; he had compassion for her.
“Don’t cry,” he said. And then, when he reached out and touched the stretcher, touched the body, the procession stopped abruptly. By doing this, Jesus signaled that he was about to say something, about to do something. And by reaching out and touching, he had made himself ritually unclean. At some personal cost, if nothing else risking ritual purity, Jesus was acting on behalf of a stranger.
He said, “Young man, I tell you: Get up!” And the next line is one of the most amazing in the Bible: “The dead son sat up and began talking.”
To be honest, if you had asked me to list the times in scripture when Jesus raised a person from the dead, I’m not sure I would have thought of this story first. By raising this widow’s only son, by giving this boy back to his mother, it is clear to the people that Jesus is a great prophet in the tradition of Elijah and Elisha. But of the instances in which he raised a person from the dead, this seems the most obscure. We remember Jesus raising his friend Lazarus. And then there is the daughter of Jairus, the synagogue official.
But this story is different from the other two. Lazarus was a good friend of Jesus; in fact, the verse in the Bible that people remember because it’s the shortest verse—“Jesus wept”—describes Jesus’ reaction to Lazarus’ death. With Jairus’ daughter, Jairus comes and tells Jesus that his daughter has died but that he believes Jesus can yet bring her to life. Lazarus was one of Jesus’ best friends; Jairus comes with great faith asking Jesus to act.
We don’t find anything like this in this scripture. Jesus just happens to come upon a funeral, much as if we were driving down the street and came across a funeral procession. He doesn’t know this woman or her son. And she has not asked him to do anything. Jesus does not raise this young man because of the mother’s faith. The scripture says nothing about anybody’s faith.
It is simply a matter of compassion. Jesus saw her and had compassion. Perhaps Jesus saw this woman and thought of his own mother, who by tradition was widowed at a young age. Joseph is a figure in the gospels only until the story where the family goes to the temple in Jerusalem when Jesus is twelve years of age. After that, Joseph is not mentioned again. The presumption is that Joseph died while Jesus was a teenager.
This widow would be doubly hurt by the loss: she would not only lose her son whom she loved; she would also lose her source of income, her provider. In losing her son, she had lost her Social Security and Medicare.
Jesus heals a lot of people in the Gospel of Luke. A woman approaches him at a dinner party and pours perfume on his feet. Another woman battles through a crowd to touch the hem of his garment. Just before this story, a centurion sends word through his friends that his servant is ill. “Just give the word,” the man says, “and I know he will be healed.” Jesus praises all three people and attributes their healing to their faith.
But the woman in today’s story doesn’t ask Jesus to raise her son. She doesn’t fall on her knees and beg for her son’s life. She doesn’t express faith in Jesus’ ability to raise her son.
And when Jesus does raise her son, she doesn’t bother to say, “Thank you.” Now, we expect she probably did, but Luke does not report such a response. The same with the woman’s son, the one who is raised. Luke reports, “The dead son sat up and began talking,” but we don’t know what he said. Maybe one of the things he said was “Thank you,” but the scripture doesn’t say.
In other stories in Luke, people’s healing is attributed to their faith. Or if the healing happens without a request for it, like the bent-over woman whom Jesus heals in chapter 13, the person at least says thank you or begins praising God.
Here we have none of that. Not a word about faith, not a word of gratitude or praise. Just a mother’s tears before the raising and a son’s unknown speech following.
And so, it seems that this story is not about faith. And it seems that this is not about gratitude. This can only be a story about grace—pure, undiluted, unearned, un-asked-for grace. This raising doesn’t happen because of a mother’s faith or her son’s worthiness; it happens solely because of Jesus’ compassion.
The mother didn’t have to act faithfully. The son didn’t have to live gratefully. It could be that both mother and son were faithful and grateful. But that is not the point of the story. This is about Jesus’ compassion.
Carson was a 15-year-old who was diagnosed with leukemia. The doctors told him in frank terms about his disease. They said that for the next three years he would have to undergo chemotherapy. They didn’t sugarcoat the side effects. They told him he would be bald and that his body would become bloated. He heard all of this, and Carson went into a deep depression, as many of us might.
His aunt called a florist and sent him some flowers. She told the clerk that they were for her teenage nephew who had leukemia. When the flowers arrived, they were beautiful. Carson read the card from his aunt, and then he saw a second card. It said, “Carson, I took your order. I work at the florist shop. I had leukemia when I was seven years old. I’m 22 now. Good luck. My heart goes out to you. Sincerely, Abbie.”
Carson’s face lit up. Somehow, this note lifted his spirits in a way that nothing else had. Here he was in one of the best hospitals in the country. He was surrounded by state-of-the-art medical equipment. He was being treated by expert doctors and nurses. But it was a sales clerk in a flower shop who took the time to care, who identified with him, who did what her heart told her to do, who gave Carson the hope and the will to carry on.
This is a story about Jesus’ compassion and a call to us to be compassionate. You might say, “I can’t raise the dead like Jesus did.” Well, we’re all in the same boat on that one. And we could spend a lot of time asking why Jesus raised some people and not others. Why did he heal some, and not others?
I don’t know the answer to that. I do know that this was resuscitation and not a resurrection. While this boy lived, he would not live forever. Jesus’ healings were not permanent. So far, every person who has ever lived has died, even those who received divine healing.
The point of this story—what we are given to see—is Jesus’ compassion. Jesus’ compassion brings this boy back to life, and our acts of compassion are life-giving to those who are suffering. The word compassion literally means to “suffer together.” Sharing someone’s suffering means sharing life in such a way that we share in another’s joys as well as sorrows. We don’t have to be able to raise the dead to act compassionately.
To know that you are loved and cared for—to receive compassion—is a major contributing factor in being restored to wholeness. Those recovering from illness will often say that knowing people were praying for them and caring for them gave them hope and played a large role in their recovery. Those who do not recover from their illness often find peace knowing that they are loved and cared for by others, and the one expressing compassion likewise receives a sense of peace and fulfillment in the experience, in the “suffering together.”Rather than being a story about a miracle that happened long ago, this is a story for us. There is someone in your life who needs your compassion. It may be someone you know and see every day. It may be a stranger, like this grieving mother Jesus comes across or the young man with leukemia whom the florist sent a note. This story is a call to compassion, and compassion is life-giving for both the giver and receiver.
Jesus saw a human need—in this case, a widow burying her only son— and he responded with grace. His compassion upset the prevailing order. One biblical commentator has noted that Jesus offended not because of blasphemy but because of compassion. He put the need of this woman above his own piety, above following prescribed ritual behavior around death.
For a time, the early Christians shared that scandal of compassion. The Christian movement grew by leaps and bounds because of the way early Christians cared for the poor and marginalized and sick and dying. We are here today because the early Christians demonstrated great compassion. But in time Christians gained power, and compassion gave way to doctrine and hierarchy and control and respectability.
I heard about a church that sought planning permission from the city to build an addition on the church grounds. It was to be a big beautiful new building, and the city leaders approved it on one condition: That the church not feed the homeless out of it.
Compassion was scandalous in Jesus’ day, and it can still be a scandal. But it is a wonderful, life-giving scandal.
And let’s not make the mistake of thinking we have a lot of time. The situation is urgent. There’s a group photograph taken in Harlem, a neighborhood in the borough of Manhattan, back in 1958. The picture was recreated in 1996, with the people standing in the exact places they had before, but by then, many of them had already passed away.
This reminds us of an important truth: in 40 years’ time, most of us will also be gone. And it is already happening little by little, year by year. Life is short, but compassion makes us more like Jesus.
So let’s take the time now to be like Jesus, offering compassion and love to one another. Are there “untouchable” places in your life or community? Who needs comfort today? What dead places in your heart need to hear his voice of compassion?
Let us pray: O God, we thank you for the life and ministry of our Lord Jesus Christ, and we are grateful for the message of Luke’s Gospel we have heard today, a message that challenges us to notice as Jesus noticed, to offer an outstretched hand as he did, to share the compassion of Christ with all we meet this week. Give us the strength and conviction to offer compassion even when it’s not convenient or easy. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.