An audio recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.
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Today’s gospel (Luke 7: 11-17) sees Jesus arriving in the
town of Nain where He encounters a funeral procession for a young man. The deceased’s
widowed mother and a large crowd are accompanying the bier when Jesus, without
any bidding, approaches them and simply commands the dead man to rise. The
townspeople are stunned at what happens next, as stunned no doubt as the
grieving mother whose broken heart must hardly have been able to comprehend the
turn of events. Jesus says nothing further in this extract, but the news
spreads throughout the region that God has visited His people.
What an example the widow of Nain is to us. There is none of
the weeping and wailing here that would normally accompany grief in the Palestine
of Jesus’ day. We know little of her, except that she had lost her husband, and
nothing of her son whose attempts to speak after his resurrection were no
doubt hindered by the ritual clothes that were tied around his face.
And, yet, what more do we need to know other than that, with
the greatest dignity and soberest poise, she bore her son away from the town to
bury him, perhaps beside his late father? There is no protest; she is silent
throughout the episode. She was well known to her neighbours since her son’s
funeral attracted a considerable crowd. And there she stood for all to see,
this grieving widow, now a grieving mother, voiceless save for the inner voice
that must have spoken to the heart of Jesus and attracted His compassion.
What can we conclude but that the widow of Nain had already
said in her broken heart the fiat in sorrow, the so be it of loss,
that the Lord God Almighty called from her? What must every step behind her son’s
bier have cost her? What weight must the sight of his shrouded corpse have placed
upon her heart and mind? As the great J.R.R. Tolkien says through one of his
characters, Nobody should have to bury their child.
Many spiritual writers have seen in the widow a figure of
the Church grieving over her children dead in sin, awaiting the healing word of
the Lord to call them back to life. Yet, we might reverse this metaphor, and
wonder whether she does not in fact stand for the grief of heaven, weeping with
the tears of Good Friday over the loss of the Son of God, who will be suddenly and
miraculously restored through resurrection.
I triumphed and I saddened with all weather,
Heaven and I wept together,
And its sweet tears were salt with mortal mine
wrote Francis Thompson in The Hound of Heaven. But
Thompson’s sinner, fleeing the Hound, was looking for consolation; not this
widow. What we know of her inner state comes from the command of Jesus: do
not weep.
There is a model of what is now called accompaniment in
Jesus’ attitudes in this gospel. On the one hand, He had compassion on her,
says the extract, but on the other hand, He commands her not to weep. Only the
victimhood of Jesus provides an ultimate rule of conduct. All other victimhood is,
as it were, relative to His. He grieves with us, but there is a bigger picture,
a picture that can only be fathomed through looking deeply into the well of His
own sufferings.
Perhaps this then is the lesson of the widow of Nain. Not
every mother who loses a son finds herself overtaken by his resurrection;
indeed, there are only a tiny number of cases we could cite. Nevertheless, the
scene in Nain is a sign that every fiat pronounced in sorrow will only
ever be temporary; that every broken heart, as shattered as it is, can be
mended in the time of grace; that every tear upon red-raw cheek will be wiped
away; and that the momentous evils – the physical ones but especially the
spiritual ones - that threaten to overwhelm our very being, will ultimately be crushed
by the victory of the Lamb who intercedes for us.
Fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum, says the Virgin
of Nazareth, who will soon be the widow of Nazareth; let it be done to me
likewise, says the widow of Nain. What right have we not to have to travel
by the same passage?
