This is a mosaic from the Cathedral of Monreale in Italy. It depicts today’s Gospel narrative—the raising of the son of the widow of Nain. Jesus is touching the boy with one hand. With the other hand, he is reaching out in blessing to the widow. In the background are all the people who witnessed the miracle—people you would have heard gasp when the boy sat up, much like in the reading we just heard.It is not insignificant that Jesus’ focus is on the widow. Being a widow was a precarious position to be in. With her only son gone, she had no heir. With no one to inherit from her, all of her property would go back to her husband’s family. When Jesus came along, this woman had truly lost everything.
This passage is a healing narrative. God as a healer is a powerful image for many, myself included. But what do we think is meant by healing? Where is the healing taking place in this story? The focus is on the widow, not on her dead son. The boy’s life is restored, which is an obvious act of physical healing, but the woman gets back her son, her livelihood, and her hope. This story shows that healing is not simply about curing illness or raising the dead; it is about redeeming the entirety of human life in relationship with God.
I've heard people say that we shouldn't pray for healing, only for God's will to be done. They have a point. When Jesus himself taught his disciples to pray, he spoke the Lord’s Prayer for the first time, which clearly says to God, “Thy will be done.” But the act of surrender is still accompanied with requests. The Lord’s Prayer asks for everything from forgiveness to daily bread. God knows what we want, and hiding that behind a servile “Your will be done” denies the depth of humanity expressed in our desires. It can also imply that it is God’s will for us to suffer, but God does not will a child to die of cancer. He has anointed doctors and specialists with skills and a calling to help preserve the lives of his precious children. That’s why we can pray for healing, we can pray for wisdom on the part of the doctors, we can pray for successful treatments for illnesses. Of course, far more than perpetuating our earthly existence, it is in God that we must place our trust. He alone has the power to save our bodies and our souls. And healing does not always take the form we would like it to take.
We read part of Psalm 146 as the Opening Prayer this morning. Here’s part of it that we left out: “Don’t put your life in the hands of experts who know nothing of life, of salvation life. Mere humans don’t have what it takes; when they die, their projects die with them.” It says something about our culture that we pay our doctors—the experts—so much more than our pastors. Ultimately, these bodies we inhabit are broken and mortal, and the power of humans to save life is limited.
One of my favorite TV shows is the medical drama House. In the most recent episode, a young woman had to have her leg amputated in order to be rescued from a collapsed building. Just when things seemed to be going right, a fatal embolism formed as a result of the amputation. Dr. House could only sit by helplessly as Hannah died. Later, one of the other doctors tried to comfort House—“Fat embolisms are impossible to prevent,” he said. “You didn’t do anything wrong. It’s not your fault.” House turned to him and shouted angrily, “I did everything right and she still died. Why would that make me feel any better?” When our trust is in our ability to keep ourselves healthy or to heal other people, we can only respond with confusion and anger when we are faced with the reality that ultimately we are not in control.
Henri Nouwen is one of my spiritual heroes. He was a theologian who left a distinguished professorship to live in L’Arche Daybreak, a community where people with developmental disabilities and people without live together and care for each other. I recently learned that soon after coming to L’Arche, Nouwen plunged into a deep depression that required him to be hospitalized for 6 months. This was both surprising and comforting to learn. It helped me to know that such a theological and spiritual giant went through many of the same struggles I did. During his hospitalization, Nouwen wrote a series of spiritual imperatives—reminders to himself of how to orient himself toward God, toward others and toward himself. One I read just the other day says, “Allow your pain to become the pain.” All suffering is unique, Nouwen says, because pain is always tied to specific circumstances. But if we become obsessed with the concrete details of our pain, we end up descending into a swirl of “if onlys”—if only this one circumstance had been different, if only she had gone to the doctor sooner, if only I hadn’t let him drive. “If onlys” do not produce healing—they just isolate us further. Nouwen says that in order to heal, we must find the places where our specific suffering touches the universal human experience of suffering.
This does not mean dissolving our own suffering into a greater ocean of generalized pain. It means finding and showing compassion. As Pastor Val said last week, the word “compassion” means “to suffer with.” Perhaps the most difficult part of depression is the sense of profound isolation. Being shown compassion and having compassion for other people shows us that we are not alone. We are never alone. And this doesn’t just mean we aren’t alone among other people, though that in and of itself is important. In this story in Luke 7, Jesus has compassion for the widow. Jesus suffers with her. The Message version of this passage reads, “When Jesus saw her, his heart broke.” Jesus was fully divine, but he was also fully human, which meant he participated in the human condition of suffering—never more so than on the cross, where he took all of our sin and sorrow upon himself.
When Jesus was taken down from the cross, he was given to his mother. Michelangelo’s beautiful sculpture, the Pieta, shows Mary holding her son
with one arm, but the other hand is lifted heavenward. She holds her child and mourns for him, but simultaneously offers him back to his Father above. In Luke chapter 7, when the boy is raised to life, the text says, “He gave him to his mother.” This is the same phrase used in the Greek translation of a very similar healing story in 1 Kings, where Elijah brings another widow’s son back from the dead. Just as in the gospel of Luke, the focus is on the mother. Where is the healing, really?We all have stories of healing, whether in our own lives or in the lives of people we know. We also have stories of times when we prayed for healing and it didn’t come. Some of us are living a story right now where we still desperately need healing. In the end, our stories are really all we have. In the Bible, when Jesus is asked a question, he does not respond with a systematic theological answer; instead, he tells parables—stories. So I’ll close one more.
Clay Wayman was a member of the church in Davidson where I grew up. He was a brilliant young doctor and became good friends with my dad. One time, Clay took my dad and my younger brother Noah out for a boat ride on Lake Norman and managed to beach the boat on a sandbar. Noah was really little at the time, and for most of the hour they spent stuck on the sandbar, he lectured Clay: “Clay, you shouldn’t have driven that close to the sandbar. You should have seen the signs.”
One day, Clay called my dad and told him to come over to his house right away. Dad rushed over, thinking something must be wrong. When he got there, Clay led him into the spare bedroom, where Dad saw, of all things, a baby in a crib. Clay had decided that it just wasn’t in the stars for him to get married, but he wanted a child, so he had adopted a little girl named Lauren. Clay turned out to be an outstanding father. The way my dad describes it is that it was like walking through a museum of beautiful art, then turning a corner to discover the real treasure room. Fatherhood was Clay’s treasure room.
When Lauren was a few months old, Clay had her baptized at our church. Afterward, Mary, one of our lovely but more eccentric members, came up to my dad—“During the baptism, I had a vision,” she said. “The roof of the church lifted off, a light shone down on Lauren and a host of angels descended and gathered around her.” My dad said something like, “Oh, how nice,” and promptly forgot about it.
Five years later, my family had moved to Charlotte and Clay and Lauren had moved to Texas. One day, my dad received a phone call. It was Clay. He had been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. Lauren, then in kindergarten, was going to lose her only parent.
The next day, my dad received a card in the mail from Mary, whom he hadn’t talked to in quite a
while. The card had this picture on the front. Something had prompted Mary to remember her vision of 5 years before. She had had an artist do a rendering of it, and put it on notecards. She had dropped the card in the mail to my dad the day Clay was diagnosed with cancer—5 years after she had the vision.Some people said it was a sign that Clay would be cured. He wasn’t. But it was a sign of something. When the widow’s son is raised in Luke 7, The Message says this of the onlookers: “They all realized they were in a place of holy mystery, that God was at work among them.” This picture was and is a sign that we are not alone, that God is here. And this is our response to healing, to suffering, to mystery: the collective gasp we heard in the background of the Scripture reading earlier. We may never understand any of these things, but maybe understanding is not the most important thing. Maybe love is the most important thing. When experts die, their projects die with them. When we die, we die with the promise of resurrection by God’s power and love. The singer-songwriter Beth Nielsen Chapman put it beautifully: “All that matters when we’re gone / All that mattered all along / All we have that carries on / Is how we love.” Oh, how he loves us. “God is God for good! Hallelujah!”
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