Trinity 16 (Luke 17:11-17)

“Fear seized them all, and they glorified God, saying, ‘A great prophet has arisen among us!’ and ‘God has visited His people!’” Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and our Savior Jesus Christ, Amen. The text for our sermon this morning is the Gospel lesson read a few moments ago from the seventh chapter of the Gospel according to Saint Luke. Dear friends in Christ, it is the characteristic and nature of our sinful human flesh that we seek help and comfort from other places—any other place!—than God. It is only when we have nowhere else to turn, when we have exhausted every other means that we have available to us, that we actually turn to God. Only when we have tried everything else do we come to God, unless, of course, we simply despair, or worse, curse God and turn away from Him, taking our grief as evidence that God has abandoned us. If we believe that there is no God, or if we believe that God hates us, we then grieve, as Saint Paul says, “without hope.” I have seen people grieve without hope. It is a terrible, alarming thing. I have seen people collapse, screaming before an open grave, I have seen those who cannot leave the coffin, who refuse to leave, who watch their loved one lowered into the ground. They cannot let go, they cannot handle it, they are grieving without hope. That is our nature, to seek help and comfort from any other place than God, but none of those places can comfort, none of those places can help, they only bring despair and never-ending grief.

Two processions met each other outside of the city gates of Nain; one coming out and one coming in. One followed a coffin, one followed Jesus. The first is a funeral procession: “As He drew near to the gate of the town, behold, a man who had died was being carried out, the only son of his mother, and she was a widow, and a considerable crowd from the town was with her.” I’m sure that all of you have seen a funeral procession, and many of you have been in one. Just a quick aside: in the city of Lincoln, there are no police escorts, no blocking of traffic; the funeral procession is on its own. I know you have places to be, but I beg you, please be courteous, yield to these grieving people, and take a moment to pray for them. For every funeral procession is a reminder, a reminder that you and I are part of one right now, indeed, every day of our lives. We are all following the coffin.

Our life in this world is a constant, daily walk toward death until the Last Day. One after another is always dying off, and we are busy with our life of suffering, as some carry others to the grave, and we, day after day, follow along. We bring death with us from the womb; we all have in common that we will one day die. We all walk this road, except we are at different stages, someone is always getting ahead of us, and we all follow him or her, until it comes down to the last one. We pretend that it isn’t so, we try our hardest to avoid death, expending money and time and energy to defeat it, we try everything that our human ingenuity can devise, but the wages of sin is death, and death therefore reigns over all, for all have sinned. Death always wins, and one day you will be at the head of your own procession, but for now, you follow.

Immediately behind the coffin is a woman, a woman, Luke tells us, who has lost her only son, and she was already a widow. Even though God’s holy Law calls for the provision of the poor, she is looking toward a life of abject poverty, without aid or comfort, a life that would often lead women with less moral fiber to prostitution. To all appearances, the wrath and hatred of God rests upon her. We have a knack for understanding our world simply by what we see, judging by appearances. We look at this widow and her son, we look at any who lie in a coffin or follow, weeping, behind one, as if they are under God’s curse. But that is not how a Christian judges. A Christian speaks about what is invisible, a Christian knows that appearances are deceiving. God sometimes sends suffering equally on both the wicked and the righteous; indeed, He even lets the wicked prosper and have success while it seems that He is angry with the righteous and hates them. No doubt it seems that He is siding with the wicked and persecuting the righteous, but appearances are deceiving: help is coming.

When suffering comes, we feel hemmed in, it seems that all is lost; God wants us to see that there is no way out on our own. No matter what we think or do, no matter what efforts we expend, we can find no way out, we are encircled. Someone who is starving or poor and knows that they have food or money hidden away somewhere still can trust in themselves. But when someone is completely helpless and powerless, when every prop has been kicked away, then we have nowhere else to turn, then all of our own devices have failed, and we cannot find the solution in ourselves. Then we must look outside of ourselves, and behold, help comes!

“Soon afterward Jesus went to a town called Nain, and His disciples and a great crowd went with Him.” Jesus doesn’t come out of the city following death, a sinner subject to death like any one of us. No, He comes into this world as the only human being who ever lived who had no fear of death, for He had no sin; therefore, He comes leading a procession of victory, not defeat, joy, not grief. He is not under death’s power, but He steps into death’s view and takes His stand against it as one who has power over it. First, He gives comfort, He proclaims His coming victory. “And when the Lord saw her, He had compassion on her and said to her, ‘Do not weep.’” His words, His actions, were motivated by compassion, the same compassion that led Him to take flesh in the first place, the same compassion that always moves Him to action. Weeping is not evil; indeed, Jesus Himself wept at the grave of Lazarus, but with this command He is pointing this woman and us all to an age to come when weeping will be no more, and He is declaring that He is about to take her grief away.

“Then He came up and touched the bier, and the bearers stood still.” He does the unthinkable, stopping the procession, making Himself unclean. But He has come into this world precisely to take away uncleanness, to stop the procession of death forever. “And He said, ‘Young man, I say to you, arise.’ And the dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother.” With one word, one command, Jesus changes this procession of death into a wonderful, beautiful, rejoicing procession of life. The grave, the coffin, the grief are forgotten and left behind. All that remains is joy and gladness, and they go to transform a town in mourning to a place of joy.

The people understand, at least in part, what has happened; they rejoice and praise God with the language of salvation from the Old Testament. “Fear seized them all, and they glorified God, saying, ‘A great prophet has arisen among us!’ and ‘God has visited His people!’ And the report about Him spread throughout the whole of Judea and all the surrounding country.” A great prophet has indeed arisen among them, one who walks in the footsteps of Elijah in our Old Testament lesson, the prophet promised by Moses. But He is more than simply another of God’s prophets. In Him, in this Jesus, God truly has visited His people, He has come to them in a way that He never had before, this time bearing their flesh and blood. And while Elijah raised the dead through the power of God, He had not ability to defeat it. Jesus comes to defeat death.

Whenever death challenged Jesus, whenever it took Him on, He did not shrink away, but He met death and accepted its challenge. He even willingly gave Himself into death’s ugly jaws. Elijah never died, but Jesus did. He suffered more than this widow, or any of us, could imagine, for He suffered not for His own sins, but for yours and mine, for the sin of the world. He died, as you will one day, and He was placed into the ground, your destination. But the raising of the widow’s son was a preview, a prediction of His greatest miracle, for He who raised the dead outside of Nain was Himself raised never to die again, and He was raised to give comfort and hope to all who mourn, to give comfort and hope to you. For because He died bearing your sin, those sins, past, present, and future, have no hold on you, and if your sins no longer count against you, then death cannot hold you. As the boy was raised, as Jesus was raised, so you too will be raised.

The grave cannot hold any who belong to Christ. He is the Lord of both life and death, He comes to us as we follow in the dreary procession of death and proclaims Himself as the One who has come to blot out death and bring life and immortality to light. An hour is coming when He will bring to completion the work previewed by Elijah in our Old Testament lesson, previewed by Christ Himself in our Gospel lesson, the work that He began with His own resurrection, as the firstfruit of life. On that Day, this work will begin, and it won’t only be on one person, but once and for all, and all who believe in Him will rise to live eternally in the new heavens and the new earth. On that Day, there will be a beautiful, glorious procession; all the saints will be called with a word from the dust of the earth, and led into the city, the New Jerusalem, with Jesus at their head. The procession of death will be no more, it will be forgotten in the joy of life. He will transfer you out of death into life and wipe away every tear from your eyes. The commands He gave in our text will be directed at you: “Do not weep.” “I say to you, arise!”

So even if we are stuck in the jaws of death, mourning the death of a loved one, or facing our own journey to the grave, we know that in Christ we have victory over death, and therefore only life. Faith grasps and clings to what it cannot be seen, even when we see only the opposite. We do not grieve as others do, who have no hope. We do not put our trust in the things of this world, the methods of men, to save us from death. Our trust, our faith, our hope, yes, even our grief, is in Jesus, who conquered death by giving Himself into its belly, by forcing it to swallow a poison pill that it cannot endure. Christ is risen, and death is overcome. Christ is risen, and the victory is yours. Christ is risen, and you will rise too. In His Name, Amen.