[Jesus] came forward and touched the bier, and the bearers stood still. And he said, “Young man, I say to you, rise!” The dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother. Luke 7, 14-15.
One resource of the trade for preachers is the Bible commentary. When you are faced with an unfamiliar or difficult passage it’s useful to take a look at a commentary, to see what the more learned have to say about it. For this morning’s gospel I did just that: turned up a couple of commentaries and learnt a good deal. I was told of the likely poverty of widows in first century Palestine when their main support, a son, died. I was reminded that touching a corpse or even the bier made you ritually unclean, and wasn’t something an observant Jew would readily do. I was told that it showed Jesus’s feeling for this woman that he didn’t hesitate to incur that uncleanness.
All that was useful. But as I read I became aware of a very large elephant in the room. Here was a dead man being brought back to life. Didn’t that deserve comment? Was I expected to take that as given, as the kind of thing that happens in the Bible, if nowhere else? Why was nobody talking about that?
Well, you could say that commentaries don’t deal with that kind of issue; the big questions are for theologians or philosophers. Commentaries operate on the level of detail; they give you context and background, not ultimate answers. But I still felt that there was an assumption here, that we were all on a level as far as this event was concerned; that as a presumed Christian I was over the hurdle of the obvious difficulty and could move on to talk of other things.
But of course I’m not over that difficulty, nor, I imagine, are many of us here this morning. The gospel writers tell us that Jesus brought three people back from the dead: the daughter of Jairus, his friend Lazarus, and this man, the son of the widow of Nain. Every gospel has at least one of these stories. The first century writers are quite clear that Jesus did these things. Yet our assumption is that the dead stay dead. Whatever happens to them after death, they don’t come back to us. (Think, for a moment, of preachers in Cumbria this morning, who have to deal with this same text). Rarely are the gospels so out of line with our sense of the world.
Well, what can we say? Let’s start by eliminating two unhelpful approaches.
The first tells us to suppress all doubts and simply believe, because these are the gospels. Of course, the gospels have authority. But apart from the difficulty of doing that—can we really force ourselves to believe something?—we know how dangerous it is to switch off critical faculties when faced with a religious text. Thought, reflection, criticism, are part of what makes us human; and faith should make us more human, not less.
The other unhelpful approach might, at first glance, seem more rational. It starts from a law of nature: the dead do not come back. Therefore this story must be false. But this also offends against reason. Our knowledge of the world starts from observation; it is only from observation that we derive general laws. To use the general laws to decide what might or might not have been observed puts things the wrong way round and is deeply unscientific.
OK; but that still leaves us with the problem of the dead man who came back to life. Did this happen or didn’t it? Since we weren’t there at the time, we can’t be sure. All we have is the certainty of others, of the gospel writers, and we might have questions there, too. What if Luke wanted to set up a comparison between Jesus and Elijah? Certainly his account of Jesus’s miracle echoes that of Elijah in the Old Testament reading. Has the Elijah story somehow transferred itself to Jesus?
Even if we trust the evangelists, we may not trust the mind of the first century. We tend to think that in those days people believed such things, as a matter of course, because they didn’t know any better. Magic and miracles were part of their world. So whatever happened they would read it in that way. Perhaps these people weren’t dead at all: collapsed, or in a coma. If we’d been there, we could have told them what was really going on.
Notice how patronising that is. We are saying to people who lived in a very different world that our understanding of it is better than theirs. We are implying that they did not know death when they saw it. In fact, the average person in the first century would have been much more familiar with death than we are. We can take it that they knew when a person was dead.
Notice, too, that there is nothing magical in these stories. In none of them does Jesus lay on any performance of ritual or gesture or even special holy words. In this morning’s story, he doesn’t even pray. He gives simple instructions. To Jairus’s daughter he says the most touching words he ever spoke, ‘little girl, get up.’ To the widow’s son, he says, ‘young man, rise!’ To Lazarus he says, ‘Lazarus, come out!’ No magic, no invocations, no laying-on of hands. Just the most ordinary words.
This might be the key to our problem. The ordinariness of the language stands out against the extraordinariness of the event. And that is true, not just of these stories, but of the whole image of Christ in the gospels.
If you wanted to summarise the impact that Jesus had on the people who knew him, it would revolve around those words, ‘ordinary’ and ‘extraordinary’. On the one hand there was this ‘ordinary’ man—the carpenter’s son, the son of Mary. On the other, it seemed that in him, with him, and through him, extraordinariness was coming close to the world, that the surface of the ordinary was breaking up to allow the extraordinary to show through. This was as true of what he said as of what he did. And it remained true right up to the end. This sense of the extraordinary come close, of the unexpected at every turn, was so powerful that his followers never quite figured out what was going on. Mark’s gospel conveys the strong impression that Jesus’s disciples were in a constant state of bewilderment.
The abiding impression that all the evangelists give of Jesus’s life and death was that the normality of the world had been shaken, that something unexpected but profoundly gracious had been brought to bear on their lives. What it was, you couldn’t explain; you simply had to take notice because it had become part of common reality. And that is how it is with these stories of the raising of the dead. They are the most extraordinary stories, to the point of being incredible. But they happen in the most ordinary way, with their feet—as it were—firmly planted in the plain ground of our world. A touch, a few words, and the miracle happens. The problem we have with these stories turns out to be the problem we have with Jesus altogether: can something so extraordinary, so unexpected, so impossible, be this close, this human, this familiar? But that, after all, is the point of the Incarnation.
No comments:
Post a Comment