I want to start today's sharing with a quote. I know this is a big surprise as I love
quoting theologians and storytellers alike.
So here it is;
Anointed
with the Spirit at his baptism, Jesus begins his prophetic ministry, declaring
the prophetic verse Isaiah 61.1 has been fulfilled today. For Luke, God has appointed him as a
charismatic prophet to preach the good news to the poor, proclaim release to
the captives, bring recovery of sight to the blind, free the oppressed, and
proclaim a year of God’s favour. He breaks social and physical boundaries to
heal and mend lives. Luke highlights
God’s compassion in Jesus’ ministry. In the ‘Sermon on the Plain’, Jesus
announces ‘be compassionate as your God is compassionate’ (6.36) Marcus Borg
notes that ‘…Compassionate bore the connotations of “wombiness,” nourishing,
giving life, embracing; perhaps it also suggested feelings of tenderness’ (Borg
1984 (1998): 102).
Jesus
speaks and lives the compassion of God by addressing the poor and the rich
alike, healing the suffering, and creating an inclusive community. Healings and exorcisms are prominent in
Jesus’ ministry. Luke’s Gospel appears
to stress the suffering of those people seeking healing. Traditionally, Luke was understood to be a
physician, and that impression emerges from the portrayal of Jesus
compassionately healing the ill and exorcising the possessed. For Luke, Jesus makes whole those who are ill
and restores them to a new society: God’s reign. Since the sick are not part of the realm of
the healthy they must be kept apart or excluded. Jesus expresses God’s compassion for those
physically suffering, even defying the Sabbath laws to heal the sick (4:31-7;
6.6-11; 13.10-17; 14.1-6). Jesus argues
that the Sabbath is a day of restoration and wholeness, and what a better day
to heal and make people whole. The
Sabbath is about God’s compassion.[1]
Today’s
Gospel is a wonderful example of Jesus’ compassion, God’s compassion, playing
out in real life. Fred Craddock says;
“The Object of his compassion is the mother.
His total attention is on this woman who is a widow and whose only son,
her sole means of support as well as being her whole family, is dead.”[2] The compassion of Christ demonstrating Gods
compassion for the world turns the world of the day inside out and upside
down. The story itself sort of shows the
old ways going out and the new way stepping in.
When
the story opens Jesus is walking into the town of Nain with his disciples and a
crowd following him. They literally run into a man who had died, his widowed
mother and a large crowd from the town.
So here is a group, following Jesus, whose ministry was all about how to
be compassionate in the world and bring in a new kindom a new way of being in
the world. He is followed by a crowed of people excited about Christ’s
teachings and ministry, probably a slightly revelatory crowd, running smack dab
in to their exact opposite.
They
meet the woman who has no hope of a future for she has lost all her family and
without a son she loses all her inheritance and support. Her future is grim. She is followed by a crowd from the town some
probably professional mourners and those who are morning the loss of a
friend. A rather depressing group to say
the least. Which represents the old way of being in this world.
To
further the point Christ is so moved he has compassion for her. His heart goes
out to her. “For Luke emphasizes that, when Jesus sees her situation, “his
heart went out to her” (7:13, niv). Three times Luke inserts the feminine
pronoun into this single verse. Jesus’ compassion is fueled by the widow’s
plight. In the ancient world much more than in contemporary Western settings,
it was the case that people’s children were their retirement. Jesus’
compassionate restoration of this widow’s son may have meant the difference
between survival and destitution.”[3] He
is not really concerned with the dead man here.
So
what we have is Jesus’ modern, joyous, compassionate, lively society meeting
the old society of exclusion, grief and death head on. At the first he is moved by compassion. The words used here convey more than just a
feeling but literally a physical internal reaction. One researcher points out
that: “‘Having seen her’: This is interesting. After the ‘behold!’ draws
attention to the man who had died (which is in the nominative case in v.12),
Jesus beholds the mother. In fact, the feminine pronoun ‘her’ is used three
times in this verse. The lord saw her; he was moved with compassion toward her;
he said to her. 2. In case we missed it, this is about her.”[4] This
is all about changing the woman’s’ world and the way the world treats widows
and women.
Then
Jesus reaches out and touches the bier, the cot, which holds the dead man. This alone could be viewed as making himself
unclean. Yet, here we have no objection
and if there is any we do not hear about it.
In this narrative it is almost as if all the crowds disappear for a
moment and it is just Jesus, the widow and the dead man. Even those carrying the cot have stopped
moving and are frozen in this moment of Christ’s compassion. It is so strong that everything stops.
Jesus
commands the man to rise. Get up. Immediately the man arises and starts
speaking. Of course, at first the crowd is afraid and then they glorified God.
The
widow who had no future, who was about to be an outcast, her life is turned
around by one act of compassion. The
crowd who believed the world has to be one way and only operated in one way,
had their lives turned around. What was
two groups of people in two very different places became one group glorifying
God.
We
live in a different world and yet this message is as needed today as it was
then. In a Place where we think of ourselves as so advanced and yet “The raw
wage gap data shows that a woman would earn roughly 73.7% to 77% of what a man
would earn over their lifetime.”[5] Women are still subject to pay inequality,
regulated to certain expected professions, and are deemed too strong or Bitchy
should they be in a position of Power.
We
have men in power who publicly use horrible language when addressing their
female counterparts. Saying things like “she is ugly inside and out”, or saying
a woman is “Disgusting” because she needs to break to pump milk for her child
and if a woman should stand up they are called an “animal” or a “child.[6] These are quotes form just one person you can
imagine quotes from others that are not being reported on.
Here
in America, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, sexism is very much
on the wane, but misogyny is not. Sexism—the conviction that women don’t
deserve equal pay, political rights, or access to education—can be combated by
argument, by anti-discrimination laws, and by giving women the opportunity to
prove their ability. Misogyny is not amenable to such advances; they can in
some circumstances exacerbate it, though they may drive it underground. An
example of misogyny is when someone online threatens to rape and mutilate a
woman whose opinions that person does not like. Another is when a Presidential
candidate says of a female journalist whose questions he finds impertinent,
“There was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her—wherever.”[7]
Women
are regularly raped on college campuses and no criminal charges are filed. Women are harassed at work and expected to
toughen up if they want to make it in this world. Women are kidnapped and raped as political
prisoners around the world. Women are
still sold into slavery even here in the United States. One place where slavery is still rampant is in
what we would call house workers or maid service.
according
to that state department “the involuntary servitude of domestic workers, whose
workplace is informal, connected to their off-duty living quarters, and not
often shared with other workers. Such an environment, which often socially
isolates domestic workers, is conducive to non-consensual exploitation since
authorities cannot inspect private property as easily as formal workplaces.
Investigators and service providers report many cases of untreated illnesses
and, tragically, widespread sexual abuse, which in some cases may be symptoms
of a situation of involuntary servitude.”[8] In
this day and age there is no excuse for any of this!
The
same attitudes toward women translates into the fear of the transgender people
and fear of gay people. We need to be a voice for all people.
When
I think of the widow in our Gospel I need to point out something no one thinks
about. The widow was a member of
contemporary society and about to become the unseen marginalized. You see she looks like everyone else. Her plight would go on unnoticed not like a
person who is lame, or has leprosy, or is mad shouting in the street. Society sees those people and chooses to turn
away maybe feeling guilty maybe not.
But
the widow would be unseen. She would
quietly go back to her life and quietly it would fall apart and she would
slowly disappear into society unseen uncared for. This is much the same as our modern day
marginalization of women. Unless someone
makes noise about it, it goes on unseen, unchallenged and there is no guilt or
shame around it. Yet Christ call in this
Gospel is one of equality and justice for the unseen. First to the widow, then to all women and
then I would say to the rest of society.
Why do I say this?
For
it is easy for us to turn our eyes to those who are obviously in need such as
the homeless, the injured, the mentally ill on our streets. But those who suffer from misogynistic
attitudes, wage theft and inequality of pay.
We must seek out, we must be moved with compassion so that this world we
can bring about God’s Kindom for all.
[1] Deryn Guest et
al., eds., The Queer Bible Commentary (London: SCM Press, 2006).
[2] Fred B.
Craddock, Luke, Interpretation, a Bible commentary for teaching and
preaching (Louisville, Ky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), Digital eBook.
[3] Jeannine Brown,
Commentary on Luke 7:11-17, Medium, accessed May 26, 2016,
http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=1679.
[4] D. Mark Davis,
Jesus Raises a prophet?, Medium, accessed May 26, 2016,
http://leftbehindandlovingit.blogspot.com/2013/06/jesus-raises-prophet.html.
[5] wikipedia,
Gender pay gap United states, May 31, 2016, accessed May 31, 2016,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_pay_gap#United_States.
[6] Nina Easton,
The history of donald trumps's insults to women, August 9, 2015, accessed May
31, 2016, http://fortune.com/2015/08/09/trump-insult-women-history/.
[7] Margaret
Talbot, The G.O.P.’s Misogyny Primary, August 12, 2015, accessed May 31, 2016,
http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-g-o-p-s-misogyny-primary.
[8] United states
govermnet state department, What is modern salvery, accessed May 31, 2016,
http://www.state.gov/j/tip/what/.
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