For Sunday, June 9, 2013 – Luke 7:11-17
“As Jesus approached the gate of the town, a man who had died was being carried out.”
In such moments of ordinary, life-altering serendipity, Jesus approaches. Real Life, the Life beyond life, walks in, just as the life we thought we knew is on its way out.
Whether or not we see him, he sees us. Into the gritty particulars of our days, he comes. This was the particular death of a particular young man, the only son of a particular widowed mother. It was the loss of promise, all that his life could have been, and very likely the end of all the grieving mother had depended on for her own future. We know people right now who are suffering this kind of consummate loss–the loss of loved ones, sometimes children, sometimes violently, deaths of livelihood, deaths of identity. We ourselves know what it is to be watching what we have known and loved pass through the gates of the familiar into the unknown.
The life we’ve expected and planned, abruptly ends. Even surrounded by a crowd, we feel bereft, robbed, decimated. We might still be standing but we have come through a storm and no longer know who and what and where…to be, to do, to go. It is there, at the outer edges of ordinary–there, at the gate of not sure–that we are most vulnerable to resurrection.
Have you noticed that most momentous happenings are also quite ordinary? A touch, a word, and the man rises and is returned to his mother. Some have wondered, did Jesus see in this man himself, his own dying and rising? Did he feel compassion for his own mother’s coming grief? Or did he simply see us, in all our naked need? Maybe he wanted to remind us–between every ‘was’ and ‘is’–to stay open. You never know who might be nearby, or what is even yet possible.
