Ep. 28: The Widow of Nain
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LUKE 7:11-17
It was early Springtime in Galilee. Yesterday, it was the sorrow of the pagan Centurion which touched the heart of the Supreme Commander of life and death. Soon afterwards it is the same sorrow of a Jewish mother which touches the heart of the Son of Mary. In that Presence, grief and death cannot continue and the touch of death could not make him unclean. It was a journey of over twenty-five miles from Capernaum to Nain, where he met the funeral procession.
We have a widow and her dead son. We have Jewish thoughts of death and after death, with so little consolation that even the most pious Rabbi would be uncertain of his future. And then we have the wretched thoughts of a mother losing a child. In passionate grief the mother has rent her upper garment, the last sad prayers have been offered for the dead, the body has been laid on the ground, hair and nails have been cut and the body washed, anointed, and wrapped in the best the widow could procure. She would sit on the floor, neither eat meat nor drink wine. She would eat little food and be unable to pray. She would be in the house of a neighbour, or in another room, or at least with her back to the dead.
Along the road from Endor streamed the great multitude who were following Jesus. Here they met, life and death. The connecting link between them was the deep sorrow of the widowed mother. Jesus touched the bier, perhaps the very wicker basket in which the dead youth lay. He dreaded not the greatest of all defilements, that of contact with the dead, which Rabbinism, in its elaboration of the letter of the Law, had surrounded with endless terrors. One word of sovereign command ‘and he that was dead sat up and began to speak.’
It wasn’t just Jesus’ sympathy with intense suffering and bereavement, there was more, what Edersheim calls a moral motive, a manifestation of his Kingdom. The mother had not called out to him. The simplicity and absence of details, the calmness and majesty on the part of Jesus, all so different from how legend would have coloured the scene. Once more, the miracle is described as having taken place, not in the seclusion of a chamber, nor before a few interested witnesses, but in sight of the great multitude which had followed Jesus.
This meeting of the two processions outside the gate of Nain was accidental, yet not in the conventional sense. The arrival of Jesus at that place and time, coinciding with that of the funeral procession from Nain was either accidental or designed. Both happened in the natural course of natural events, but both were Divinely planned. The fear of the Divine Presence fell on those who saw this miracle at Nain and over their souls swept the hymn of Divine praise.
This is an extract from the book, Jesus : Life and Times, available for £10 here (Finalist for Academic Book of the year at 2023 CRT awards)