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When God Pays A Visit
Luke 7: 11 – 17 |
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Summary
When God Comes to Visit If you go see a doctor or go to the hospital there is a question that you are going to hear. It is not a question that doctors used to ask. Not very often anyway. The question is, “On scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being no pain and 10 being the worst pain you could imagine, how would you rate your pain at this moment? Most doctors and patients too, just sort of figured a certain amount of pain just went with the territory. The patient was expected to just bear it and go on with life. If you cried out and had a very compassionate doctor you might get a pain pill. But things are a little different nowadays. There is a new field of medicine that focuses on pain management. Doctors and nurses are treating pain as a disease in and of itself. Chronic pain is now an acceptable medical diagnosis. Back in the good old days a couple centuries ago — pain was just a part of life. There wasn’t much anyone could do about it, so no one wasted time trying. There were no real anesthetics. If you were a soldier in the Civil War with a bullet wound through your thigh, and you saw the army surgeon coming your way, with his amputation saw at the ready, the first thing you did was drink a pint of whiskey. Then, you’d bite down on a chunk of wood, or maybe a lead bullet (that’s where the expression, “bite the bullet,” came from). There wasn’t anything else you could do. As Jesus walked the roads of Judea and the surrounding areas, he witnessed a whole lot of human pain. Every marketplace had its beggars. Most of them suffered from physical deformities no surgeon of the time could fix— club feet, broken bones that never healed properly. There were bands of lepers, wrapped in filthy cloth with their fingers and toes and noses slowly eaten away by their awful disease. There were people with mental illnesses who had lost touch with reality, with no psychotropic drugs to help them stay in touch with reality. Most people simply figured they were demon possessed, and gave them a wide berth. Jesus knew pain well before he ever went to the cross. It was all around him, everywhere he looked. The widow of Nain As he and his disciples enter the little village of Nain, they come upon an especially gut-wrenching display of pain. They hear it before the funeral procession even gets close: the woefully sharp cry of a bereaved woman. The woman is trudging along behind a sort of stretcher. Laid out upon it is the body of her only son. This woman is already a widow. Now, she’s doubly cursed because she has lost her son as well. Now when we read this story, we think, “What an unlucky woman, having to bear the pain of grief not once, but twice!” But that’s only the half of it. This poor woman is weeping over her son, just as she wept over her departed husband, but her losses go far deeper than that. With the loss of these two males — her husband (a man); and her son (still a boy, but able to inherit) — this woman has lost her livelihood, and her position in society as well. It’s hard for us to imagine, but back then, women were dependent on their husbands for everything. When a girl was married — as young as age 13 or 14 — she left the home of her parents forever, and went off to live with her husband’s family. Legally, she became part of that household. If she bore her husband sons, her position became secure — because now, if her husband died before she did, her sons would take care of her. This was one of the most serious obligations in that culture: the bond between a mother and her sons. All of this, besides the genuine grief of losing a loved one, is why the widow of Nain is so devastated. First, her husband dies, and her financial security is pulled out from under her. Then, she loses her son as well, which threatens her with utter ruin. If she’s lucky, some male relative of her husband will take her in, as a sort of household servant: room and board, in exchange for manual labor. If she’s unlucky, and there is no male relative, well let’s just say it wasn’t very pretty. God visits As Jesus comes up to this woman, who’s so utterly distraught, he says to her, “Do not weep.” What an surprising thing to say! A seminary pastoral counseling professor would have scrawled a big, red “F” on the top of that case study. Nowadays, counselors are taught to listen carefully to clients’ feelings and validate them. To walk into a situation of terrible pain and say, “There, there, don’t cry” seems to turn your back on the whole counseling approach. Yet that’s exactly what Jesus says. Amazing! Even more amazing is what he does next. Luke tells us “he came forward and touched the open casket”. “Those who carried him stood still.” Sure, they stood still, looking on in a mixture of horror and astonishment. Jesus is a rabbi, and he’s actually touching the stretcher on which a dead body is laid out. This makes him ritually unclean. Because of that innocent little touch, Jesus has to go out, now, and wash his entire body in a ritual fashion, all the while chanting special prayers for purity. Only after he’s completed these actions can he take up his religious duties again. Jesus knows full well what he’s doing, in touching the boy’s stretcher. And he does it anyway. What happens next is even more astounding. Jesus commands the young man to rise, which he does. “Then fear came upon all” — and no wonder. “They glorified God, saying, ‘A great prophet has risen among us!’” The people can only have one biblical prophet in mind: the mighty prophet Elijah, who worked wonders and raised the dead. In a parallel story in 1 Kings, Elijah raises the son of the widow of Zarephath, who has likewise died. That prophet saves that boy’s mother from exactly the same risk of destitution. Luke follows the details of the 1 Kings story almost exactly. His message is crystal-clear: Jesus, the great prophet who has risen among them, is every bit the equal — even the superior — of Elijah himself! The other thing the people of Nain say, after witnessing this miracle, goes even further. “God has visited his people!” It could also read God cared for His people. Both widows — the widow of Zarephath and the widow of Nain — are afflicted with the worst tragedy imaginable, the loss of their male relatives. Though society may shun them, the Lord visits them in the person of a mighty prophet. These women are not forgotten, after all. They are remembered. They are loved. The help of God One of the worst things about being in pain — whether physical or emotional — is the thought that you may have to face it alone. Holding out that pain-assessment chart with the 10 smiley-face icons on it — the one by the zero actually smiling, and the one by the number 10 twisted up in agony — the nurse is doing more than simply asking a question. “I know you may be in pain,” the nurse is saying, “and I want you to know I haven’t forgotten you.” In such a tender time, the understanding presence of another human being is a great comfort. We’re in a very different place, these days, when it comes to treating pain. But this doesn’t mean pain has been banished from our world. At times we may pretend that’s true — believing, against all evidence, it’s possible to have a pain-free life — but if we do, we’ll be disappointed sooner or later. There will come a time for all of us when we find ourselves up against some kind of pain — mental or physical. Modern medicine may blunt it, but is powerless to eliminate it completely. In such a time, there’s nothing to do but to seek spiritual resources for dealing with it. Such help comes not from within us, but only from the One who, by grace, inhabits our hearts: the Holy Spirit of God. Pain can be a powerful teacher. No one seeks it out, but when we do experience it, it’s possible, with God’s help, to turn it to the good. That’s what cycling champion Lance Armstrong discovered in his struggle against cancer. These are remarkable words he writes in his autobiography: “The truth is that cancer was the best thing that ever happened to me. I don’t know why I got the illness, but it did wonders for me, and I wouldn’t want to walk away from it. Why would I want to change, even for a day, the most important and shaping event of my life?” Jesus doesn’t promise us a life that’s pain-free or trouble-free. What he does offer is inner healing, and the strength to persevere. This side of heaven, what more do we need? |
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