What are you carrying? …
Is it heavy? Is it in your arms, or on
your back, or is a friend holding it for you right now? What are you carrying? I’m not asking you to answer out loud,
because I want you to think of something you wouldn’t want to tell this whole
group. Because most of us have something
that weighs us down. A memory, a fear,
an injustice suffered or inflicted, an incompetence or a deception.
Part of
living in a fallen world, is that things fall on us and we fall down and once
picked up, we find ourselves still covered with the dust. Often, we clear the dust from our hands, from
our face, we box it up and forget about it most of the time. Maybe we seal it up in a coffin and store it
away, but it weighs down on our back or slows our steps as it drags behind us,
or a friend holds it and suffers for us, as that friendship dies and is
replaced by a helping relationship.
To live
life weighed down is not truly to live, but to tacitly consent to a slow-fade
to death. Jesus commands life. To command is not nice, is not pleasant, is
not polite; and that’s not how Jesus acts in today’s gospel. He’s brusque and demanding with the funeral
party he meets, but what he commands is life.
That command still re-echoes today.
When
Jesus who embodies the triumph of life collides with death, life wins messily,
like the messy intimacy of the God who breathed life into us through our
nostrils. We have our baggage neatly
packaged and precariously balanced on our heads and Life knocks us
off-kilter. When Jesus and his joyful
gang run headlong into a funeral procession, the coffin won’t stay on the
pall-bearers’ shoulders. Let us look at
how that happened, confident that what Jesus did then is what God is doing in
our lives now.
“Do not
weep!” he says. What a ridiculous
instruction! He might as well have asked
the woman what she was carrying. She, or
her neighbors for her, were carrying death, loss, devastation. In the face of this, what can one do but
weep?
“Can I
touch it?” Jesus didn’t bother to ask,
because the response would have been obvious: “Of course not! Who are you, to
want to touch the untouchable, the unclean body we put at the greatest distance
from ourselves that we can?”
They’d
soon find out who he is, when he does touch and healing happens. For the first time in Luke’s gospel, it’s
made explicit: he’s a prophet. He’s a
prophet who commands life and the prophetic word is triumphant. Life beats death.
Barriers
don’t last when the prophetic word comes up against them. The Jew or Gentile boundary was broken in the
story right before this in Luke’s gospel; first the male-female boundary and
then the living or dead boundary is smashed in this story. When God is faced today with a boundary
between things we’re OK remembering and things we’re not: the Life command
smashes any attempt to fence it in.
I saw this lived out inside prison
walls. Working in San Quentin, I got to
know
Tran who was living with the pain that he had not breathed free air since two
months before his daughter was born. He
had failed her as a father; he was as good as a dead father. God couldn’t take
that away. He did command life. He inspired Tran to take the meager wage he
earned working in the metal shop and use it to sponsor two children in Haiti.
Tran’s
Haitian children died in the earthquake. Like so
many in Nain that day whose dead were not raised, I don’t know what to do
with that. But Jesus does.
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