Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost; Octoechos Tone 3; The Holy and Glorious Great-Martyr Demetrius, from Whose Tomb Myrrh Streams Forth.
All-Night Vigil Feast. Resurrection Gospel 9.
Galatians 1:11-19; 2 Timothy 2:1-10; Luke 7:11-16; John 15:17-16:2.
Read Luke 7:11-16
Our hopes for life in this world collide with the conditions here. It’s not that hope for life, love, and wellbeing is ill-founded; it is God-given. And we have been given faith in Christ that the forces of death in this world will be overcome in eternity. But sometimes we can lower our expectations of the extent to which they can be overcome here.
In today’s gospel we see two parades colliding: Jesus, his disciples, “and a great crowd” going into a city; a dead man being carried, his mother, “and a large crowd” going out. One buoyed by the great hope of God visiting his people; the other weighed down by the grief of loss of life and income.
Jesus sees the now childless widow – really sees her. How we all want that. He shows and speaks his compassion toward her. This is a comfort we all can give. If that was the extent of the encounter between these two processions, it would have little more to offer us than we could offer ourselves. But Jesus speaks life into being, without conjuring or exertion, just as in Genesis – “and God said.” And he does that after he “touched the bier” upon which the dead man was being carried, which would render other people ritually impure. In him the forces of death that keep people from life and God are turned back. The two parades become one, going in the direction Jesus is going, the effects of his life-giving visitation spreading near and far.
In Jesus, eternity has broken into this world. The tide has turned. Now “suffering produces endurance, character, and hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. (Romans 5:3-5)