For Sunday, June 5, 2016 – Luke 7:11-17
In the “in between” of life’s loneliest spaces, utterly disillusioned and lost, wiped out, erased, we do not expect to find great meaning. More often we search for meaning in busy, happy activities, where God’s grand purposes seem to pulse through us and we move easily on currents of joy. Reflect back upon a life and we do not often call the empty heartbreaking phases the best. Who rejoices in the memory of the stark silence following a loved one’s death, the choking desert days in between callings or relationships or faith communities, the blunt hollowness of life’s random losses? We prefer the glad and good times, the evidence of ourselves as blessed and heroic and strong, not the numbness of stumbling dumbly alongside the coffin of our dreams.
But even the fallow ground in between can fulfill. Here Jesus is, entering one of life’s lowest moments, coming alongside great loss, revealing that this soil, too, holds promise. Jesus approaches the gate of a town—that turning place between “once was” and “will be”—at the very moment that a young man who had died is being carried out. The only son of a widowed mother. What else needs to be said? The cultural and financial structures of the day tell us she has been utterly left behind—more than sad, more than mournful, she is totally bereft, without sustenance, as good as dead. And yet, also, she is here, walking faithfully alongside her loss.
To come alongside our loss is to open the gates of the walled city, to leave the familiar and, together with others, walk out into the unknown. It is to resist the temptation to hide out, to protect and defend against further harm. It is not to retell the story in more glorious tones or to deny it entirely. It is to receive whatever is being given, and to give whatever is being received. It is to listen to the echo of the void, the quiet hum of fallow ground becoming hallowed ground. It is to wait and watch for the next and the new, for whatever God might decide now to do.
