New Life for the Dead...and Almost Dead (5th Sunday after Epiphany; Luke 7:1-17; February 5, 2017)

New Life for the Dead...and Almost Dead

5th Sunday after Epiphany

Luke 7:1-17

February 5, 2017

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD

First United Methodist Church

Decorah, Iowa

There are fourteen healing stories in Luke's gospel by my count, not including the episodes that involve casting out demons. Healing was such an important part of Jesus' ministry, that we really can't do justice to his life's work without recognizing that people came to him because he offered the possibility of healing. Healing was hard to come by.

But the point of all these stories can hardly be the simple fact of the healings themselves. Otherwise we have thirteen cases of, "Look! There's another one!" We have to go past the fact of the two healings in our reading for today. We can ask how the two stories are related. We can do what is called close reading.

We'll take them one at a time. We'll start with the second.

In this story, Jesus and his followers happen on a funeral procession. A widow's son had died. His body was being carried out of the town of Nain to the local cemetery. Burials did not wait for the out-of-town relatives to arrive. The body needed to be buried quickly. Jesus stopped as the procession was coming out of the town gate, told the grieving mother to stop crying, and touching the stretcher on which her son's body was being carried told him to rise. Immediately, the young man sat up and started talking. The woman had her son back and the crowd was astounded. We would be, too.

The story is clear that it was not simply any woman whose son had died, but a widow who had only one son. Those are important details. A woman whose husband had died was not only grieving but was also in a precarious position in her community, especially if she had no grown sons. In any legal dispute she was likely to have to stand alone. Her own family would have no interest in defending her: they had nothing to gain by it. Her husband's family actually had an interest in challenging her right to inherit his property, lest it be permanently lost to them. She would have no one to defend her.

But, of course, this woman was not alone. She and her late husband had a son, a grown son, his father's heir. This son was their 401K, their retirement plan. When they were too old to support themselves, he would care for them. Perhaps they would have preferred to have had more than one son, but at least they had him. When her husband died, her son stepped into the role of head of the family. He was part of his father's family, so they would not be angling for their land and property. But then the disaster fell and the young man died too.

Jesus came on the scene just as the funeral procession was passing through the town gates. I thought at first that the "large crowd from the city" meant that she was well-regarded. On further reflection I wonder if the crowd may have been made up at least partly of the human vultures who--now that the widow was undefended--gathered around to pick bare the bones of her estate.

If so, they were frustrated in their designs by Jesus who restored the young man to life and rescued his mother. He acted that day in obedience to the demand of the Torah to protect the widow and other vulnerable people. What better way to protect her than to raise her son from the dead?

We now know what Jesus is up to in his healing ministry. It was not just a matter of hanging out his shingle and healing whoever showed up. In this story we see a special case of Jesus' commitment to liberate the downtrodden from oppression and to secure the well-being of people who had little power in his culture. Jesus, in a favorite phrase of liberation theology, has a preferential option for the poor and the marginalized.

That's the second story. Now for the first that concerns a Roman centurion who lived in (or near) Capernaum. As you might imagine, a centurion was a commander of a unit called a century composed, surprisingly, of 80 soldiers. Centurions were usually appointed from the ranks of soldiers and it was possible for that advancement to continue. The top centurion was called the "first spear" and was well-paid.

A centurion who managed to advance and who was careful with his pay could muster out after ten or twenty years of military service with quite a little nest egg, enough to buy land. Land was always the goal for the upwardly mobile. With land a man (and I do mean a man) could be rich in the sense that he would no longer have to work. The centurion of our story had apparently reached this lofty and elusive goal even before retiring.

To be rich was to also to attract a circle of people looking for a patron. They were people who were placed lower on the social scale who looked to a rich person to provide money or influence to get things done for them. A patron got prestige and honor according to the number and quality of his clients. Our centurion had not only gathered the money needed, but had also gathered clients from the leadership of the Jewish community.

So Jesus and his disciples were met going into Capernaum by some lay leaders from the synagogue. Think the Board of Trustees, rather than rabbis. These clients of our about-to-retire centurion came as messengers with a request that Jesus come and heal a valued servant. They praised their patron as a lover of the Jewish people who had even built their synagogue for them. Consider that the centurion was a officer in the occupation force, and this was high praise indeed. Even so, this was just the sort of thing that a patron would expect from his clients.

Jesus went with the centurion's client-emissaries. But before he had arrived at the centurion's house, friends--presumably gentile friends--of the centurion met the parade to say that it wasn't necessary to come all the way to the house. The centurion understood that entering a gentile house would complicate Jesus' life. And besides it wasn't necessary. The centurion understood a chain of command. All that was needed was for Jesus to give the order and his servant would be well. According to Jesus, the centurion understood something about living into God's dream that no one else even in Judah understood. So Jesus granted the request of this rich and powerful foreigner.

These two healing stories, placed together, pose an urgent and difficult question: What happened to Jesus' preferential option for the poor?

Some may say, "Jesus has no interest in class relations or in political economy. Jesus is only interested in people as individuals. He doesn't care whether you're rich or poor, powerful or weak, an insider or an outsider." I think that conclusion will run aground on the New Testament as a whole and certainly on the prophets, but a good case could be made. And you may, of course, choose to make that case.

I suspect something else, though. I think that these are stories about two people who are both outsiders, each in their own way. The widow who is about to bury her son is an outsider despite the fact that she is well-known and, presumably, well-respected in her community. She is an outsider because her son's death has stripped her of her ability to defend herself and to hang on to the property she will need to support herself in her remaining years. People will say, "Isn't that a shame about poor Mrs. Rosenberg," but what they say will not prevent her from being crushed by the political economy. Only having her son alive will do that.

The centurion is also an outsider, although a rich and powerful one. Part of the occupation force in Roman Palestine he is not a part of the people of God and he wants to be. He has come as close as he can without being circumcised: he has built a synagogue and in other ways acted the part of the good patron. His Jewish clients praise him, but he is still not one of them. Now, Jesus has brought him within the circle where the Jewish God acts by healing the centurion's servant. The centurion has been witness to one of God's saving acts in history.

The centurion and the widow are both parts of a system that distributes power and wealth. The centurion is rich; the widow is poor. But they are both stuck in the system. The stakes are different for them, of course: the centurion is rich. The rich always have choices and options not available to the poor. But there is a cost to those choices, a cost to being the beneficiary to an unjust system.

God's dream is for all of us, without exception, to have enough to eat, to live in well-built houses that are warm in the winter, to be free of curable or preventable diseases, and above all to enjoy the wealth of human community. Any system that yields haves and have-nots is a system that deprives some of what they need in order to live and the others of the possibility of living in genuine human communities. The widow is threatened with impoverishment. The centurion is wealthy. But they are both trapped in a system that strips them of their humanity and forecloses on God's dream. So of course the one who came to embody God's dream among us offers healing to both of them.

God has a preferential option for the poor. That's good news. But that good news does not mean that the rich are outside of God's love or Jesus' healing ministry. That's good news, too. And the bottom line is, as always, God loves you and there is nothing you can do about it.

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