Luke 7:1-14
Today we have received two stories of miraculous healing, and this time it wasn’t just a “withered hand.” Both of the people Jesus healed were near death or at least perceived as already dead. For those of us raised with these stories of faith, sometimes these stories become all too easy to read and to hear without question, but I have to say that they are hard for me to hear today.
I don’t know about you, but I find the healing stories of the Bible some of the most difficult to reconcile with our ever-expanding understanding of the complexity of the created order, and that is particularly true when it comes to death.
Before going any further, I’d like to say to those who may have lost a loved one due to COVID–19 that this passage is not intended to trivialize your loss. Death is, unfortunately, a part of life, and when the scale of loss is as high as it is today we need to be clear in stating that every loss is still significant – not just to you and to me, but also to God.
I say all of these things having experienced loss recently in my own family to an event that was relatively natural, but absolutely unwanted. I also have friends and colleagues, particularly in the African American community who have experienced multiple losses due to COVID-19, and many of our children are reeling from the news that we have now lost more lives to this disease than we did in World War II.
Having said that, I also want to be clear that we have to be careful with those comparisons, too. There’s a big difference between those who have fallen because of a disease that we can’t seem to manage and the casualties of war. In war, there are always those who willingly put their bodies in the line of fire for others. Some may have been drafted into service, and some die as casualties of the fallout of war from battlefields in their minds, crumbled infrastructures in war-torn regions, or just being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Even so, the language of war is what we use when we talk about front-line workers and supply chains as we battle this “unseen enemy” together. In fact, I’m often reminded of the phrase, “there are no atheists in foxholes” every time I hear someone say that they believe that this pandemic is bringing us closer to God, and I have to say that I hope they are right!
I’d like to say that this passage is about turning to God in times of crisis, and to some extent it is. I certainly believe that God hears us when we cry out in our times and places of need – and I can testify that I’ve seen the results of prayer to restore and to heal – but that’s not actually what this passage is about either. If it was, then there would be no difference between Jesus and “Miracle Max” in The Princess Bride who said the “Man in Black” was mostly dead and made a pill to bring him back to life.
Jesus restores life, to be sure, but there’s more to it than that. One thing that is clear as we read the various stories of healing and restoration, and that is that Jesus doesn’t heal and restore everyone. Mostly that’s because he was limited by his own physical state. He just could not physically get to them all, yet here we have two stories that demonstrate the importance of faith and the reality of our common need before God.
It would be too easy to say that faith is summed up by the Roman Centurion’s actions, but we also cannot deny how clearly they define what it means to believe. At the same time, we have the story of a widow, whose faith is not the issue but whose loss is even greater.
Luke likes to tell stories in pairs like this to balance one another out, so we need to hold these two in tension with one another – whether we like it or not. In the first story, we never actually see the Centurion or the slave who is near death. Admittedly, it’s hard to hear the word “slave” without some bit of cultural baggage, and the fact that Jesus doesn’t challenge slavery here doesn’t mean that he blesses it. In fact, slavery at that time was a means to an end for some that did not mean that they would never be free. Even slaves had some level of agency – the ability to make choices that have beneficial results.
What matters here is that the Centurion is someone that you would think has absolute agency, yet in the face of death he is powerless. We’re also told that whatever else he does or does not do that is in service of Rome, he’s a person of character – perhaps he’s even one of the goyim (non-Jews) known as “God-fearers.” He clearly supports the local customs, even going so far as to contribute to the establishment of a synagogue. He would at least be known today as a “mensch,” a person who is a good person and an example to follow.
His example, for us, is one of deep understanding and good practice. He understands that Jesus is a person of agency, too. He understands that people of agency have a certain level of authority and that it’s not the doing of the thing that matters so much as the command to make it so.
If Jesus has the authority of God, the author of life, then it’s simply a matter of permission for the servant to be healed. Jesus hears these words and is amazed. Finally, someone gets it! It’s worth noting here that Jesus is only “amazed” twice in the gospels. Once by the faith of this centurion, and later by his disciples and their lack of faith.
Karl Jacobson points this out on the Working Preacher blog and reminds us of the connection between the amazement of others in the Gospels and the spoken word of, or about, Jesus. When people hear or talk about the good news of Jesus as the Anointed One of God – whether it’s about his birth or teachings or healings – they are amazed and even terrified.
Such is the case when Jesus looked at the son of a woman with no agency, a widow who was burying her son and said to him, “Young man, rise up!” Our text does not say anything else about this woman or her son. We don’t know how he died. We don’t know how he lived. We only know that Jesus saw her and had compassion for her and demonstrated it in the most public way possible – right in the middle of a funeral procession.
Scripture paints this as a tender and beautiful moment, but it’s hard not to think of it with some sense of comedy when I start thinking about the reality of the situation. Had he been dead for three days as was the custom? How did his mom react? “You’re alive! Praise God! Ugh. Let’s get you cleaned up.”
Come to think of it, funerals seem to be a pretty common vehicle for comedy in our culture. That’s not because we are terribly sick and twisted, it’s because funerals are a time when we are at our most vulnerable and human together. As a preacher, one of my favorites was when Cuba Gooding Jr. answered his cell phone at a funeral in the movie, The Fighting Temptations. Everything stopped in that little country church, and the preacher leaned over and said, “Son, if that ain’t Jesus. Hang up.”
I think that gets to the heart of both of these stories, in that there is power in the name and voice of Jesus. Even the Centurion’s amazement of Jesus is grounded in the fact that he was humbled before God by his own lack of ability. Likewise, the widow was not expecting or even asking for help. She was simply defined by her need.
In both cases, Jesus, as the embodied presence of God, demonstrated mercy. In both cases, we see that ultimate power and authority are not defined by the ability to change things so much as they are by grace and mercy. Faith is not so much about belief in a set of doctrines as it is in understanding that God is the author of life and the source of grace and mercy.
Grace is when you get something that you don’t deserve and can’t get on your own. Mercy is when you don’t get some kind of punishment or natural consequence that you might deserve.
Jesus stands in the middle of both, and that’s why it matters that we have faith in him as the Christ of God. You see, here’s the good news in all of this: even though we are all ultimately powerless in the face of death, God’s love is not.
In the time of Jesus’s life and teaching, these miracles were the way to show others that God’s love is more powerful than even death itself. That has not changed. That’s why we can say that “Even at the grave we shout our Alleluiah!” That’s why we can feel good about teaching our children to pray to a God who spins planets but has time to listen to each of us as though we were the ones who just stood up and embraced a new life in response to the compassion of God.
Horrible things are still happening – and they're still going to happen – but we can still have faith in the One who looks upon us with compassion. We can still have faith that loved ones entrusted to God’s embrace in this life and the next are never truly lost to us, that healing and wholeness can happen – and that it frequently does.
That’s why we come to the Table of Christ, again and again, whether we struggle with our own futility or whether we just need to be reminded that God’s love is stronger than death. In the end, as in the beginning, we are defined by love more than loss, by hope more than fear, and by the invitation to proclaim grace and mercy in all we say and do. At least, I pray it may be so with me, and that it may be so with you, and to God be the glory – now and always. Amen!
Today we have received two stories of miraculous healing, and this time it wasn’t just a “withered hand.” Both of the people Jesus healed were near death or at least perceived as already dead. For those of us raised with these stories of faith, sometimes these stories become all too easy to read and to hear without question, but I have to say that they are hard for me to hear today.
I don’t know about you, but I find the healing stories of the Bible some of the most difficult to reconcile with our ever-expanding understanding of the complexity of the created order, and that is particularly true when it comes to death.
Before going any further, I’d like to say to those who may have lost a loved one due to COVID–19 that this passage is not intended to trivialize your loss. Death is, unfortunately, a part of life, and when the scale of loss is as high as it is today we need to be clear in stating that every loss is still significant – not just to you and to me, but also to God.
I say all of these things having experienced loss recently in my own family to an event that was relatively natural, but absolutely unwanted. I also have friends and colleagues, particularly in the African American community who have experienced multiple losses due to COVID-19, and many of our children are reeling from the news that we have now lost more lives to this disease than we did in World War II.
Having said that, I also want to be clear that we have to be careful with those comparisons, too. There’s a big difference between those who have fallen because of a disease that we can’t seem to manage and the casualties of war. In war, there are always those who willingly put their bodies in the line of fire for others. Some may have been drafted into service, and some die as casualties of the fallout of war from battlefields in their minds, crumbled infrastructures in war-torn regions, or just being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Even so, the language of war is what we use when we talk about front-line workers and supply chains as we battle this “unseen enemy” together. In fact, I’m often reminded of the phrase, “there are no atheists in foxholes” every time I hear someone say that they believe that this pandemic is bringing us closer to God, and I have to say that I hope they are right!
I’d like to say that this passage is about turning to God in times of crisis, and to some extent it is. I certainly believe that God hears us when we cry out in our times and places of need – and I can testify that I’ve seen the results of prayer to restore and to heal – but that’s not actually what this passage is about either. If it was, then there would be no difference between Jesus and “Miracle Max” in The Princess Bride who said the “Man in Black” was mostly dead and made a pill to bring him back to life.
Jesus restores life, to be sure, but there’s more to it than that. One thing that is clear as we read the various stories of healing and restoration, and that is that Jesus doesn’t heal and restore everyone. Mostly that’s because he was limited by his own physical state. He just could not physically get to them all, yet here we have two stories that demonstrate the importance of faith and the reality of our common need before God.
It would be too easy to say that faith is summed up by the Roman Centurion’s actions, but we also cannot deny how clearly they define what it means to believe. At the same time, we have the story of a widow, whose faith is not the issue but whose loss is even greater.
Luke likes to tell stories in pairs like this to balance one another out, so we need to hold these two in tension with one another – whether we like it or not. In the first story, we never actually see the Centurion or the slave who is near death. Admittedly, it’s hard to hear the word “slave” without some bit of cultural baggage, and the fact that Jesus doesn’t challenge slavery here doesn’t mean that he blesses it. In fact, slavery at that time was a means to an end for some that did not mean that they would never be free. Even slaves had some level of agency – the ability to make choices that have beneficial results.
What matters here is that the Centurion is someone that you would think has absolute agency, yet in the face of death he is powerless. We’re also told that whatever else he does or does not do that is in service of Rome, he’s a person of character – perhaps he’s even one of the goyim (non-Jews) known as “God-fearers.” He clearly supports the local customs, even going so far as to contribute to the establishment of a synagogue. He would at least be known today as a “mensch,” a person who is a good person and an example to follow.
His example, for us, is one of deep understanding and good practice. He understands that Jesus is a person of agency, too. He understands that people of agency have a certain level of authority and that it’s not the doing of the thing that matters so much as the command to make it so.
If Jesus has the authority of God, the author of life, then it’s simply a matter of permission for the servant to be healed. Jesus hears these words and is amazed. Finally, someone gets it! It’s worth noting here that Jesus is only “amazed” twice in the gospels. Once by the faith of this centurion, and later by his disciples and their lack of faith.
Karl Jacobson points this out on the Working Preacher blog and reminds us of the connection between the amazement of others in the Gospels and the spoken word of, or about, Jesus. When people hear or talk about the good news of Jesus as the Anointed One of God – whether it’s about his birth or teachings or healings – they are amazed and even terrified.
Such is the case when Jesus looked at the son of a woman with no agency, a widow who was burying her son and said to him, “Young man, rise up!” Our text does not say anything else about this woman or her son. We don’t know how he died. We don’t know how he lived. We only know that Jesus saw her and had compassion for her and demonstrated it in the most public way possible – right in the middle of a funeral procession.
Scripture paints this as a tender and beautiful moment, but it’s hard not to think of it with some sense of comedy when I start thinking about the reality of the situation. Had he been dead for three days as was the custom? How did his mom react? “You’re alive! Praise God! Ugh. Let’s get you cleaned up.”
Come to think of it, funerals seem to be a pretty common vehicle for comedy in our culture. That’s not because we are terribly sick and twisted, it’s because funerals are a time when we are at our most vulnerable and human together. As a preacher, one of my favorites was when Cuba Gooding Jr. answered his cell phone at a funeral in the movie, The Fighting Temptations. Everything stopped in that little country church, and the preacher leaned over and said, “Son, if that ain’t Jesus. Hang up.”
I think that gets to the heart of both of these stories, in that there is power in the name and voice of Jesus. Even the Centurion’s amazement of Jesus is grounded in the fact that he was humbled before God by his own lack of ability. Likewise, the widow was not expecting or even asking for help. She was simply defined by her need.
In both cases, Jesus, as the embodied presence of God, demonstrated mercy. In both cases, we see that ultimate power and authority are not defined by the ability to change things so much as they are by grace and mercy. Faith is not so much about belief in a set of doctrines as it is in understanding that God is the author of life and the source of grace and mercy.
Grace is when you get something that you don’t deserve and can’t get on your own. Mercy is when you don’t get some kind of punishment or natural consequence that you might deserve.
Jesus stands in the middle of both, and that’s why it matters that we have faith in him as the Christ of God. You see, here’s the good news in all of this: even though we are all ultimately powerless in the face of death, God’s love is not.
In the time of Jesus’s life and teaching, these miracles were the way to show others that God’s love is more powerful than even death itself. That has not changed. That’s why we can say that “Even at the grave we shout our Alleluiah!” That’s why we can feel good about teaching our children to pray to a God who spins planets but has time to listen to each of us as though we were the ones who just stood up and embraced a new life in response to the compassion of God.
Horrible things are still happening – and they're still going to happen – but we can still have faith in the One who looks upon us with compassion. We can still have faith that loved ones entrusted to God’s embrace in this life and the next are never truly lost to us, that healing and wholeness can happen – and that it frequently does.
That’s why we come to the Table of Christ, again and again, whether we struggle with our own futility or whether we just need to be reminded that God’s love is stronger than death. In the end, as in the beginning, we are defined by love more than loss, by hope more than fear, and by the invitation to proclaim grace and mercy in all we say and do. At least, I pray it may be so with me, and that it may be so with you, and to God be the glory – now and always. Amen!
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