Luke 7: 11-17

At the end of the summer I’m doing a wedding for a couple who have had it provisionally booked with me for a long time. They phoned during the week to confirm and I was delighted and relieved to hear from them. You see, they didn’t want to make too many definite plans too early because this young man has spent the last six months on a tour of duty in Afghanistan. But for now he is home safe and sound and we can go ahead. And I hope we will have a great celebration of this couple’s love and all the good things that lay before them. Whenever I am with them, I always feel incredibly humbled to be in the presence of such strength of character; of someone, less than half my age, who has seen so much and risked so much.

I don’t know about you, but my heart crumples and I feel devastatingly sad when I watch the news and yet another member of the armed forces has been killed, more often than not by a roadside bomb: 119 deaths in the last year. There is a tragedy to it that a young life, full of promise, has been taken away. And often the television pictures take us to the repatriation and the drive through Wotton Bassett, where people have turned up in their hundreds to pay their respects as the cortege passes through the main street. Young death is particularly poignant.

I spoke on Thursday to one of the members of one of the local Methodist Churches here is Beeston, Lois Stubbs. You will not know Lois, but she hails from Seascale, Cumbria. On Wednesday of last week a woman that Lois knew very well, Jane Robinson, who used to do Lois’s garden for her, was gunned down by Derrick Bird on his rampage through the countryside. Jane was delivering Betterware catalogues. She is described by her twin sister as a caring, considerate and generous person in the local community who always had time to help people. Deaths that are unexpected and shocking and so apparently senseless are equally sad and distressing. And of course for that part of this country there is already grief following young deaths in a recent coach crash.

And then of course there was the horrific story this week of the nine activists killed when Israeli soldiers boarded a flotilla of ships trying to break the blockade of Gaza. Although there are conflicting accounts of what happened, it does seem that innocent people, simply wanting to make a point, simply wanting to do good, have tragically lost their lives.

And although there is sadness in every death, even that of someone who has lived a full and long life, (and today we particularly hold Elsie Towlson’s family, Christine, Mick and all of Elsie’s family, in our prayers following Elsie’s death yesterday) there is nevertheless something particularly difficult about life taken away before what seems its due time. You feel that potential has not been fulfilled.

Does the Christian faith speak at all into tragedy like this? Does it have anything to offer? Well, the story we have read from Luke’s Gospel is the story that is “set” for today. In other words, it is meant to be read in churches today. So in thousands and thousands of places around the world this story is being read and considered. And it happens to be about just such a tragic death. And it speaks to us of life and hope.

Jesus has come to the little town of Nain in Galilee. As he and those with him approach the gate to the town, they meet a procession coming the other way. Leading the procession out would have been a group of professional mourners, playing instruments and weeping and wailing. A man who had died was being carried out on a bier. The bier was like a wicker basket and open so that the body was visible. The dead man had been the only son of a widowed woman. In those few words we hear of a double if not a treble tragedy that is still common in many countries. The woman had lost her husband. That was hard enough but now she had lost her only son. To make matters worse, because the economy was based on men, the woman was likely to face isolation and poverty. She would become one of the marginalised people of the world, and so would her daughters if she had any.

Jesus quickly grasps the situation. Listen to the words here:

** Luke 7:13 **

“His heart went out to her.” Some versions render it, “He had compassion on her.” The word Luke uses here to describe compassion means “being moved to the depths of his heart”. So here is the first response of the Christian faith in the face of such tragedy. We declare that:

1) Our God has compassion

This is not a God without feeling or a Christ beyond our pain. He feels our sorrows.

Throughout the Easter season just gone we will have sung on a few occasions the hymn, “Christ is alive! Let Christians sing”. It is a great hymn. The third verse says this:

Not throned above, remotely high,

Untouched, unmoved by human pains,

But daily, in the midst of life,

Our Saviour with the Father reigns.

God is with us in those moments when life just does not make sense. He is not staring down from some remote vantage point with only vague interest in what is going on. He is right here – with us, beside us, within us, sharing our pain and sorrow, coming to comfort and sustain and strengthen.

And there’s more. Listen to this:

** Luke 7: 14(a) **

We in our bland reading of those words perhaps do not at first understand their force. It was an astonishing thing for Jesus to do! For a Jew to touch a dead body made him “unclean”. If Jesus kept all the Jewish laws properly he would now have to undergo a series of cleansing rituals. But Jesus did not bother about all that. For our God of compassion comes alongside us. He is with us. He shares in the messiness and distress that sometimes hits human life. He is there for every person who cries out to him in grief and sadness. He is there to provide in those times of desperate need.

Our God has compassion.

The second point that leaps from the page of this story is that our God brings life.

2) Our God brings life

In the Bible story Jesus is proclaiming himself the Lord of life. He halts the procession to the grave. The bearers stand still. Now Jesus speaks to the dead man:

** Luke 7: 14(b) **

Can you imagine the awed tension of that moment and then the cries of utter astonishment as:

** Luke 7: 15 **

I tell you one thing, it was a good job it wasn’t a coffin with a lid – he’d have banged his head! Can you imagine him afterwards? “How did you get that bump on your head?” “Well you’d never believe it, it was like this…”

You see the important thing about this story is what it points to. Jesus did not raise people from the dead during his life on earth that often – just two or three times. Whenever he did it, he did it because he wanted to show a truth about himself. The truth he is demonstrating is that he is the Lord of life.

He wants to bring us fullness of life now. At the beginning of John’s Gospel, in a reading we normally hear at Christmas, John says about Jesus, “In him was life and that life was the light of all people.” Later, in John 10: 10, Jesus himself says, “I am come that they may have life and have it to the full.” Those words are about life and how God wants life to be for us now. And life in all its fullness is no less than life lived in the constant awareness of God’s love for you and his good purposes for you today and always.

And there is more to it than that. Jesus shows in this story that he is not only the Lord of life, he is the conqueror of death. Remember the even more famous words of St John:

“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have everlasting life.” (John 3:16)

By his death he destroyed death. By his rising to life he opened the way to life eternal. Not even death itself can separate us from God’s love.

Our God brings life.

Whenever we gather for worship, we remember how Jesus gave his life, died and rose again. We remember how God in Jesus has come close to us. He has shared our life and death. He has demonstrated his compassion – his feeling for us and with us. He is with us to provide for us in even the very darkest moments of pain and loss, when there are no words that can help us understand. And we remember that he offers life to us – life now and in all eternity. Our God who has offered life in Jesus will not fail to give. Thanks be to God.